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This week's magazine

29 January 2011

Issue 2797

New Scientist issue 2797 cover
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Editor's picks

I, algorithm: A new dawn for artificial intelligence

Technology

I, algorithm: A new dawn for artificial intelligence

Features
Making life, but not as we know it

Earth

Making life, but not as we know it

Features
Prophets of doom: The secret of soothsaying

Physics

Prophets of doom: The secret of soothsaying

Features
True blood: The real vampire slayers

Life

True blood: The real vampire slayers

Features

Table of contents

News

Hottest planet is hotter than some stars

Space

Hottest planet is hotter than some stars

A 'year' on WASP-33b lasts just 29 hours Astronomers have found the hottest planet yet, a gas giant with a temperature of nearly 3200 °C, which is hotter than some stars. A collaboration called the Super Wide Angle Search for Planets (SuperWASP) announced hints of the planet's existence in 2006. The group had observed periodic …

News

Earth

Polygamy boosts mouse sperm fitness

News

Health

Swiss recognise 'alternative' medicine – for now

News

Earth

How the seahorse gained its shapely body

News

Health

Drug shortage delays US executions

News

Space

When is a group of stars not a galaxy?

News

Physics

Atom counting helps kilogram watch its weight

News

Health

Kids with low self-control are less successful adults

News

Life

Ma's gene does different things to pa's copy

News

Technology

Plastic artificial retina is a hit with nerve cells

News

Health

Mad cow disease is almost extinct globally

News

Physics

Deep meaning in Ramanujan's 'simple' pattern

News

Climate bad boys join forces to clean up the planet

News

Health

Life expectancy rising slowly in the US

News

Supreme court upholds NASA background checks

News

Earth

City fish take in antidepressants

News

60 Seconds

News

Life

Stretchy DNA shows off its elastic qualities

News

Life

World's first brain scanner made for two

News

Earth

Beetle pest may encourage nesting turtles to move

News

Dragonfish nebula conceals giant star cluster

News

Space

Maser to predict Milky Way's fate

News

Life

Time stretches if you keep busy

News

Life

Bug to spider: I will control your offspring's sex

News

Technology

Self-encrypting discs will lock down your data

News

Technology

Damaged bridges will cry for help before they fail

News

Earth

Dragonfly wings inspire micro wind turbine design

News

Technology

Checkout AI uses camera to tell your apples apart

News

Technology

Smart servers spot and block botnet attacks

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.

The legacy of BSE

We have to remain vigilant so we can act at the first sign of an emerging disease IN October 1987, The Sunday Telegraph revealed that a "mystery brain disease" was killing the UK's dairy cows. As more cases emerged, farmers noted how affected animals were apprehensive and hypersensitive to touch or sound. They were uncoordinated …

Opinion

Health

Small beer: The UK's new booze price rules won't work

Opinion

Health

Hard cases don't mean UK vaccine policy is wrong

Opinion

Earth

Arctic loner: My life as a climate-change drama

Opinion

Earth

The selfish metaphor: Conceits of evolution

Opinion

Features

I, algorithm: A new dawn for artificial intelligence

Technology

I, algorithm: A new dawn for artificial intelligence

Intelligent machines must distinguish bombs from earthquakes Artificial intelligence has finally become trustworthy enough to watch over everything from nuclear bombs to premature babies GIVEN the choice between a flesh-and-blood doctor and an artificial intelligence system for diagnosing diseases, Pedro Domingos is willing to stake his life on AI. "I'd trust the machine more than …

Features

Earth

Making life, but not as we know it

Features

Physics

Prophets of doom: The secret of soothsaying

Features

Life

True blood: The real vampire slayers

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.

Visceral curator: Making art out of living tissue

Read more: Click here to read a longer version of this story Ten years after co-founding the art and science research laboratory SymbioticA , Oron Catts is co-curating Visceral: The Living Art Experiment at the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He tells Amanda Gefter how both the exhibit and his work challenge our perceptions …

CultureLab

Creeping sickness: Our epidemic of diagnosis

CultureLab

The underground world of snake smuggling

CultureLab

How science changed forever, in a century

CultureLab

The real Leonardo was more impressive than the legend

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 1631

Joe's Pyramid This is Joe's pyramid. Every stone is marked with a different one or two digit positive number. Where a stone rests on two others, its number is the sum of the numbers marked on the two stones on which it rests. What number is X? WIN £15 will be awarded to the sender …

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: The dusky nightjar sings jazz

The dusky nightjar sings jazz IN PREPARATION for a trip to the tropics, Tadeusz Kawecki downloaded several dozen recordings of bird calls onto his Nokia cellphone. To his surprise, the phone sorted them into musical genres. The song of the pied puffbird was classified as belonging to "oldies", the laughing falcon to "pop" and the …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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