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This week's magazine

6 February 2010

Issue 2746

New Scientist issue 2746 cover
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Editor's picks

First breath: Earth's billion-year struggle for oxygen

Earth

First breath: Earth's billion-year struggle for oxygen

Features
Lost leviathans: Hunting the world's missing whales

Earth

Lost leviathans: Hunting the world's missing whales

Features
Unplugged: Goodbye cables, hello energy beams

Technology

Unplugged: Goodbye cables, hello energy beams

Features
The strangest liquid: Why water is so weird

Physics

The strangest liquid: Why water is so weird

Features

Table of contents

News

'Superman' vision penetrates opaque glass

Technology

'Superman' vision penetrates opaque glass

No longer an obstacle It's not quite X-ray vision, but a way has been found to transmit simple images through opaque objects using ordinary light – and physicists have used the method to project an image through glass covered in thick paint. Some things we consider opaque – "not able to be seen through", in …

News

Technology

Giant laser reaches key milestone for fusion

News

Health

Did rice wine lead to flushed faces in Asia?

News

Life

Hippy apes caught cannibalising their young

News

Health

Mass drug overdose – none dead

News

Earth

Water vapour worse climate change villain than thought

News

Technology

Hybrid video could lighten the search and rescue load

News

Life

Draw! The neuroscience behind Hollywood shoot-outs

News

Health

Wanted: elderly human guinea pigs

News

Health

Are stem cell scientists sabotaging rivals' work?

News

Obama abandons moon shot but invests in science

News

Earth

New UN emissions pledges still stack up to 3.5°C

News

Earth

Surf's up as Pacific waves grow

News

Earth

Bill Gates digs deep for geoengineering

News

Oil nay, nuclear yea, but not in Yucca

News

Life

Giving the 'unconscious' a voice

News

Technology

Home test for sperm count could leave men in a mess

News

Imports mean UK emissions are up not down

News

Life

Nature's hot green quantum computers revealed

News

Space

At last we will know how bright the stars really are

News

Earth

Headache pill could save earthquake crush victims

News

Earth

Beware of geoengineering using volcanoes' tricks

News

Earth

White roofs can cool cities

News

Life

Complex smells make food more filling

News

Life

Chikungunya foiled by copycat 'virus'

News

Space

Dying stars eat comets for their last supper

News

Technology

Synthetic cobwebs could boost chemical reactions

News

Technology

A telescope that sets its sights on cyber-crime

News

Technology

Bad photographer? Aesthetic software will fix your photos

News

Space

Smart dust could give early warning of space storms

News

Technology

The location-based future of the web

News

Space

Found: Hawking's initials written into the universe

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.

In conversation with 'vegetative' patients

IT TOOK Jean-Dominique Bauby hundreds of thousands of blinks to dictate his book about how a stroke had left him paralysed yet still aware. Now comes the remarkable news that neuroscientists have communicated with a man presumed to be in a vegetative state, by studying the activity in his brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging, …

Opinion

Life

Holster the harpoons till we have the facts

Opinion

Quantum biology has come in from the cold

Opinion

Health

Neurons for peace: Take the pledge, brain scientists

Opinion

Earth

Rob Hopkins: Getting over oil, one town at a time

Opinion

Life

Survival of the fittest theory: Darwinism's limits

Opinion

Features

First breath: Earth's billion-year struggle for oxygen

Earth

First breath: Earth's billion-year struggle for oxygen

The complex story of oxygen's rise OXYGEN is life. That's true not just for us: all animals and plants need oxygen to unleash the energy they scavenge from their environment. Take away oxygen and organisms cannot produce enough energy to support an active lifestyle, or even make them worth eating. Predation, an essential driver of …

Features

Earth

Lost leviathans: Hunting the world's missing whales

Features

Technology

Unplugged: Goodbye cables, hello energy beams

Features

Physics

The strangest liquid: Why water is so weird

Features

More

Enigma Number 1581

Enigma Number 1581

Daley's Gold In July 2009, 16 months after winning the individual diving gold medal from the 10-metre platform board at the European Championships at the age of 13, Thomas Daley won the gold medal at the World Championships. So it is fitting that I can offer this puzzle: In this subtraction, digits have been consistently …

Regulars

Was democracy born of science?

Books & Arts

How Manhattan's poisoners met their match

Books & Arts

A field guide for microbe watchers

Books & Arts

Steven Weinberg: From physics to terrorism

Books & Arts

What's hot on NewScientist.com

Regulars

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.

Keeping the cats in the loop

Keeping the cats in the loop OUR colleague Jim Giles subscribes to Google Voice, the Google service which, among other things, transcribes incoming telephone messages and sends them to you as an email. Jim forwards on to Feedback a transcript of a call from the owners of the apartment he rents in London. The message …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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