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Feedback: Airflow test shows the force is not with X Wing pilots

4 July 2018

Size matters not - unless you're talking about drag coefficients. Plus: space is filled with grease, Chinese whispers silenced by censors, and more


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Wine Breathing

4 July 2018

Sometimes I open a room-temperature bottle of red wine and put in a valved spout. On opening the valve the next day, at the same temperature, the noise I hear suggests that the air in the bottle was at a lower pressure than that outside. Why would this...


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First name basis

4 July 2018

My wife and I often mix up the names of our children and our grandchildren, calling our grandson by his father's name and so on. Sometimes we even switch the names of the grandchildren with those of our cats. But we never seem to mix up the sexes. Why...


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Thorny problem

4 July 2018

I am puzzled by brambles, raspberries and blackberries. They have sweet, juicy fruit, presumably so they will be eaten by animals who will spread their seeds. But they also have prickles. What's the good of that?


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Old Scientist: Glancing at ads from the past

4 July 2018

We look back at recruitment advertising in New Scientist from 1966, 1987 and 2006, and notice some odd discrepancies between salaries


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The tiny oasis spared wrath of Hawaii's volcano

4 July 2018

A tiny stretch of road has escaped the lava flows from the latest eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, which is still menacing a corner of Big Island two months after it began


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