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This week's magazine

12 December 2015

Issue 3051

New Scientist issue 3051 cover
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Editor's picks

Critical thinking is needed throughout life, not just in science

Life

Critical thinking is needed throughout life, not just in science

Opinion
Racks of servers

Technology

How your private emails can spread all over the world

Features
How to outsmart your irrational brain

Life

How to outsmart your irrational brain

Features
How you can make the greenest life choices

Earth

How you can make the greenest life choices

Features
How to change your genes by changing your lifestyle

Life

How to change your genes by changing your lifestyle

Features
How not to get duped by coincidences

Humans

How not to get duped by coincidences

Features
How to get rich with maths

Humans

How to get rich with maths

Features
How to win at game theory

Humans

How to win at game theory

Features
How you can harness the placebo effect

Health

How you can harness the placebo effect

Features
Why you shouldn't believe many of the numbers you read

Humans

Why you shouldn't believe many of the numbers you read

Features
Frozen kingdom: The lost world under Antarctica's ice

Earth

Frozen kingdom: The lost world under Antarctica's ice

Features

Table of contents

Leaders

Critical thinking is needed throughout life, not just in science

Life

Critical thinking is needed throughout life, not just in science

We define scientific literacy too narrowly: the tools of science are applicable to everything from economics to terrorism

Opinion

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.

Life

Pairs of habitable worlds could throw microbes at each other

Aside from a handful of astronauts, the only living beings to have seen an inhabited planet looming large in the sky come from science fiction. But in other solar systems, a pair of planets could share a habitable zone – a region around a star with the right temperatures for liquid water. That proximity might …

News

Space

Pathfinder blasts off to look for Einstein's gravitational waves

News

Life

Obese men found to make sperm with thousands of modified genes

News

Life

Orcas seen in unique group ambush-and-kill attack on dolphins

News

Earth

Northern Lights now appear in central Europe and much of US

News

Earth

Birds prefer to eat at outdoor cafes with slow plate-clearing

News

Life

Drug combo halves the time needed to cure resistant TB

News

Earth

Is climate change behind the storm that flooded parts of the UK?

News

Technology

Laser camera can track hidden moving objects around corners

News

Space

Tiny dark matter stars would harbour particles that act as one

News

Earth

2015 to see the first drop in fossil fuel emissions as GDP grows

News

Life

Resistance to last-resort antibiotic has now spread across globe

News

Life

Why one lake contains more than 1000 species of the same fish

News

Health

Suicide is one of the biggest preventable killers of new mums

News

Technology

IBM to develop hardware to wipe out errors in quantum computing

News

Space

Japanese Akatsuki probe enters Venus orbit after inspired hack

News

Space

Dwarf planet Ceres looks like an asteroid but acts like a comet

News

Earth

Hunt is on for world’s deepest caves more than 2km underground

News

Space

Mars moisture-farming mission gets approval for 2018 launch

News

Life

Super-literate software reads and comprehends better than humans

News

Space

Black holes have a size limit – of 50 billion suns

News

Technology

One Per Cent

News

60 Seconds

News

Life

On-demand workers unite online to fight Uber and the gig economy

News

Health

One man's race to edit muscular dystrophy gene for friend's son

News

Opinion

I'm going to make Facebook's AI predict what happens in videos

Technology

I'm going to make Facebook's AI predict what happens in videos

This week, Facebook unveiled several artificial intelligence projects. Yann Lecun, the company's director of AI, reveals what this technology can do

Opinion

Health

Sisters of people with autism may help us understand condition

Opinion

Health

For safer sex work we should drop the ban on prostitution

Opinion

Technology

Act now to rebuild trust in the code controlling everyday stuff

Opinion

Analysis

Optimism grows for a climate deal at UN's Paris summit

Earth

Optimism grows for a climate deal at UN's Paris summit

Optimism can be disorientating. But though little is yet agreed in Paris as the UN climate talks enter their final days, nobody seems to doubt a deal will be struck. As UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said, the agreement in Paris would “send a clear signal that the low emissions future is inevitable”. By itself …

News

Aperture

Soviet-era bootleg music recorded on discarded X-ray plates

Technology

Soviet-era bootleg music recorded on discarded X-ray plates

YOU could say Soviet-era hipsters had music in their bones. Ghostly bootleg records made from repurposed X-ray plates offer a glimpse into the counterculture movement whose members were prepared to risk imprisonment for rock 'n' roll. Music was strictly censored in the USSR. Only classical or patriotic tunes were deemed ideologically acceptable – you could …

Regulars

Features

How to outsmart your irrational brain

Life

How to outsmart your irrational brain

Evolution has built bias into our brains – here are the best ways to overrule your instincts and make better decisions about everything

Features

Humans

Why you shouldn't believe many of the numbers you read

Features

Health

How you can harness the placebo effect

Features

Humans

How to get rich with maths

Features

Humans

How not to get duped by coincidences

Features

Humans

How to win at game theory

Features

Earth

How you can make the greenest life choices

Features

Technology

How your private emails can spread all over the world

Features

Life

How to change your genes by changing your lifestyle

Features

Earth

Frozen kingdom: The lost world under Antarctica's ice

Features

Culturelab

Time to rethink what makes humans special

Life

Time to rethink what makes humans special

How does language add meaning? Has culture shaped our genes? Two books, The Secret of Our Success and The Crucible of Language, show old ideas fading away

CultureLab

Earth

Geoengineering our way out of the climate mess

CultureLab

Physics

Painting by numbers with the design book Mathematics and Art

CultureLab

Regulars

Feedback: Scatty minds lift the lid on the science of bullshit

Feedback: Scatty minds lift the lid on the science of bullshit

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Pearls of wisdom A DECADE after Harry Frankfurst's celebrated treatise On Bullshit , we are finally rewarded with a scientific investigation of the subject. " On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit" is a paper in which Gordon Pennycook …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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