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This week's magazine

24 July 2004

Issue 2457

New Scientist issue 2457 cover
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Editor's picks

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

The sheep that launched 1000 ships

Features
New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Harbingers of doom?

Features
New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Plumbing the depths

Features
New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

The Parkinson's fix

Features
New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Quantum rebel

Features

Table of contents

News

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Technology

Software to identify your mother tongue

PEOPLE who learn English as a second language tend to write with a "foreign accent". Now software can examine a piece of written English and make a pretty good guess at the writer's mother tongue. The system works by looking for grammatical quirks that are characteristic of different languages. For example, people who speak Czech …

News

Technology

No playing away from home

News

Technology

Coloured with tinny music

News

Technology

Sour grapes clean up

News

Technology

A cellphone full of dollars

News

Technology

Cutting edge

News

Technology

Hungry? Then just add filthy water…or worse

News

Technology

ET first contact 'within 20 years'

News

Technology

Twinkling eyes animate movies

News

Oz origins for perching birds

News

Lethal gene

News

Forest fires set up record raindrops

News

Nanotubes offer solution to one of life's mysteries

News

Warning of bigger burn for sunbathers

News

Did doctors do for Boney?

News

Signalling right from the womb

News

Creative spark can come from schizophrenia

News

We've given oceans acid indigestion

News

Small, hot and very far away

News

Mind

Music studies instrumental in raising children's IQ

News

Mothers' blow to hygiene theory

News

Family words came first for early humans

News

Inherited virus blamed for koalas' poor health

News

Europe tamed the aurochs too

News

Portrait of a Neanderthal

News

The concepts are there even if the words aren't

News

Soundbites

News

Telltale signs of a broken heart

News

Space

Mars had water long enough to develop life

News

'If the dogs were children, they'd be wearing specs'

News

Is a new era dawning for embryo screening?

News

Mountains face meltdown

News

60 Seconds

News

Raising angels

News

Olympic impact

News

Flush with success

News

Tug-of-war over gulf illness

News

Nuclear lab in further disarray

News

Prize dummies?

News

Rare parrot beats killer bug

News

Opinion

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Humans

Westminster diary

MY FISHERIES contacts in Scotland are ruing the fact that little is being done to protect the rich reef systems that surround submarine mountains rising from the deep north Atlantic floor. Spanish and French trawlers continue to dredge these structures, so I asked ministers at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what their …

Opinion

Baltimore blasters

Opinion

Health

Comment: HIV's Attitude problem

Opinion

The certainty principle

Opinion

Babies made to order?

Opinion

Features

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

The sheep that launched 1000 ships

In 1990, two researchers probingthe roof of a 12th-century stone church in northern Norway made a remarkable find: stuffed into a gap between the roof and walls were the tattered remains of a 650-year-old woollen sail. Although maritime archaeologists had long suspected that Vikings plied the oceans in ships with woollen sails, this ragged piece …

Features

Harbingers of doom?

Features

Plumbing the depths

Features

The Parkinson's fix

Features

Quantum rebel

Features

More

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

In his own world

Niko's Nature by Hans Kruuk, Oxford University Press, £20, ISBN 0198515588 THIS is a book that every behavioural biologist will want to read, and will do so with pleasure. I read Niko's Nature from cover to cover and was informed, entertained and instructed the whole way. Who better to write about ethology and about the …

Books & Arts

Environment

Eco soundings

Careers

Bestsellers - Online

Books & Arts

Take notes right now

Books & Arts

Mind-boggling feats

Books & Arts

The real Cannery Row

Books & Arts

The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology edited by G. W. Gibbons and others

Books & Arts

Rocks of ages

Books & Arts

Regulars

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Feedback

FROM the department of signs of the times. Burning books is one of those old American traditions so beloved of fundamentalist churches, who make bonfires of material they believe offends God. These days that can include CDs, videos and provocative clothing as well as books. But when Pastor Scott Breedlove of the Jesus Church in …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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