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This week's magazine

4 December 2010

Issue 2789

New Scientist issue 2789 cover
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Editor's picks

Are you really smarter than a Neanderthal?

Life

Are you really smarter than a Neanderthal?

Features
Climate shock: One heatwave from oblivion

Earth

Climate shock: One heatwave from oblivion

Features
Saturn's strange propellers show how planets are born

Space

Saturn's strange propellers show how planets are born

Features
How language evolved: Hearing lost words

How language evolved: Hearing lost words

Features
How language evolved: Our speaking machine

How language evolved: Our speaking machine

Features
How language evolved: Laying the foundations

How language evolved: Laying the foundations

Features
How language evolved: Putting it to the test

How language evolved: Putting it to the test

Features

Table of contents

News

Inside the race to hack the Kinect

Technology

Inside the race to hack the Kinect

brightcove.createExperiences(); Video: Watch our pick of the best Kinect hacks Combining Kinect with a computer program can distort a user's own 3D image in real time A Star Wars fan has built a simulated Jedi lightsaber Over a million people bought one of Microsoft's Kinect game controllers in the 10 days after its US launch …

News

Space

Politics should not dictate design of NASA rockets

News

Space

Experiment casts doubt on origins of lunar water

News

Space

Early universe recreated in LHC was superhot liquid

News

Life

DNA trick throws ageing into reverse

News

Earth

Haiti's cholera outbreak will go from bad to worse

News

Earth

Vatican scientists urge support for engineered crops

News

Space

Space debris may cause mysterious ball lightning

News

Technology

Tongue clicks to control wheelchairs

News

Earth

Climate talks prepare to nibble at world-saving plans

News

Health

North Americans needn't worry about vitamin D

News

60 Seconds

News

Health

The danger of unreliable paternity tests

News

Life

Beak-nosed mice a clue to human cleft palate

News

Earth

Goodbye grey skies, hello extra warming

News

Physics

How to create temperatures below absolute zero

News

Earth

Why incest among animals cuts male sexual aggression

News

Health

Taking the lottery out of gene therapy

News

Life

How the giant panda lost its taste for flesh

News

Health

How cannabis dampens the immune system

News

Technology

Criminals find the key to car immobilisers

News

Technology

The phoney chips that could cripple military tech

News

Health

Untreated diabetes reduces vital brain cholesterol

News

Earth

Losing species makes ecosystems sick

News

Opinion

Genome pioneer: Make your genes public

Life

Genome pioneer: Make your genes public

Genes on public display George Church helped develop the technology that made sequencing human genomes affordable. Now he wants volunteers to open up their medical records. He tells Peter Aldhous why privacy is an outdated concept in medical research and how Ozzy Osbourne is a science educator You head the Personal Genome Project . How …

Opinion

No room for genetic errors

Opinion

The Kinect revolution

Opinion

The pope's genetically modified crop dilemma

Opinion

Health

Haiti: Epidemics of denial must end

Opinion

Earth

Hedge-fund philanthropist: Physics can save the planet

Opinion

Features

Are you really smarter than a Neanderthal?

Life

Are you really smarter than a Neanderthal?

One of the family Sleeping with the brute They were technologically savvy, creative and cultured. So maybe it's time we accepted that Neanderthals were people just like us EVER since the first fossils of a brawny, low-browed, chimp-chested hominin were unearthed in Germany in 1856, Neanderthals have stirred both fascination and disdain. German pathologist Rudolf …

Features

Earth

Climate shock: One heatwave from oblivion

Features

Space

Saturn's strange propellers show how planets are born

Features

How language evolved: Hearing lost words

Features

How language evolved: Our speaking machine

Features

How language evolved: Laying the foundations

Features

How language evolved: Putting it to the test

Features

Culturelab

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

How an architect took music back to mathematical roots

A Los Angeles exhibition shows how Iannis Xenakis used everything from geometry to set theory in his modernist buildings and music Iannis Xenakis: Composer, architect, visionary Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Design Center, until 4 February 2011 WHILE auditing a musical composition class in 1940s Paris, Iannis Xenakis showed his work to his …

CultureLab

Digital poets and programs free verse from the page

CultureLab

Epic fail: No winners in climate change game

CultureLab

Hard lessons of the Gulf oil spill

CultureLab

The fossil our ancient ancestors loved

CultureLab

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.

Enigma Number 1624

French magic numbers In a magic square the sums of each row, column and major diagonal are equal. There is a remarkable relationship between the two magic squares shown here. Each integer in the one on the left when written as a word in English contains the number of letters indicated by the corresponding integer …

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.

Feedback: Spirit communication with the UK government

Spirit communication with the UK government THE aged mother of one of Feedback's colleagues is, purely in case of future need, setting up what in the UK is called a "power of attorney" so that he can, for example, handle her bank account if she forgets where it is. Very thoroughly, the UK government's Office …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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