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This week's magazine

23 June 2012

Issue 2870

New Scientist issue 2870 cover
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Editor's picks

Curled-up young fern frond

Life

Life: is it inevitable or just a fluke?

Features
Charisma class: How to win fans and influence people

Humans

Charisma class: How to win fans and influence people

Features
Cruel cuts: Is all breast cancer surgery necessary?

Health

Cruel cuts: Is all breast cancer surgery necessary?

Features
Silicon sirens: The naughty bots out to seduce you

Technology

Silicon sirens: The naughty bots out to seduce you

Features

Table of contents

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Breast milk seems to kill HIV

Health

Breast milk seems to kill HIV

A woman with HIV feeds her baby formula provided by the Botswana government Breast milk is starting to look like a potent HIV-fighter. An unknown component of breast milk appears to kill HIV particles and virus-infected cells, as well as blocking HIV transmission in mice with a human immune system. Even if babies born to …

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Technology

Baby robot learns first words from human teacher

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Life

Sex born from hard rock and heavy metal

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Life

Special goggles reveal when babies see in 3D

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Life

What a way to go: prehistoric turtles died during sex

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Rio+20 conference suffers lack of leadership

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Higgsteria as trouble brews for standard model

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Greece needs technological help to reboot economy

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Japan prepares to switch nuclear reactors back on

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Health

Kids' antibiotic prescriptions fall in the US

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Secret US spaceplane shows China the future

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60 Seconds

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Health

Stealthy virus that robs years of life could be beaten

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Physics

Sorry Einstein, the universe needs quantum uncertainty

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How to convince climate sceptics to be pro-environment

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Oldest confirmed cave art is a single red dot

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Physics

Brand new bonding skills make boron more like carbon

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Girl receives pioneering vein transplant

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Zoologger: Angry lizard starts fights for no reason

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Life

Dairy farming in the Sahara – 7000 years ago

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Astrophile: Runaway is star of cosmic whodunnit

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Technology

Ultrasound pill helps the medicine go down

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Technology

Virtually whack it with a responsive tennis racket

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Technology

Future-predicting system cuts app loading time

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Technology

Praying mantis bot has extra-nimble legs

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Technology

Lawyerbot takes the drudgery out of law

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Physics

Plasmonic graphene controls rippling electrons

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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.

Life

Cave art appreciation opens ancient human minds to us

THE world's oldest known cave art is millennia older than we thought. A single red dot on a Spanish cave wall is now known to date back at least 40,800 years, meaning it was made around the time that modern humans arrived in Europe – or even earlier. This unassuming bit of wall painting could …

Opinion

Health

Stealthy virus presents unique public health challenge

Opinion

Technology

Two faces of chatbot technology speaks volumes about us

Opinion

Set science free from publishers' paywalls

Opinion

10-year-old solves science riddle and co-authors paper

Opinion

Earth

Don't fence us in: Modern-day land grabs

Opinion

Analysis

Deadly flu recipe to be published – but work halted

Health

Deadly flu recipe to be published – but work halted

Biosafety fears are preventing research on dangerous pathogens After six months of dispute, research in the Netherlands that made a deadly H5N1 flu airborne will be published this week. The scientists behind it now want to get on with their work – but they can't. In December 2011, a US biosecurity committee advised against publishing …

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Aperture

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.

Psychedelic nano-art in oils and ferrofluids

THIS psychedelic landscape ain't your daddy's watercolours. For one thing, the black lines you see are a ferrofluid, a mixture of oil and nanoscale iron particles that responds to a magnetic field. These fluids are normally used to seal computer hard drives or as a contrast medium in medical imaging, but their weird ways mean …

Regulars

Features

Curled-up young fern frond

Life

Life: is it inevitable or just a fluke?

If life arises wherever conditions are right, why haven't we heard from aliens?

Features

Humans

Charisma class: How to win fans and influence people

Features

Health

Cruel cuts: Is all breast cancer surgery necessary?

Features

Technology

Silicon sirens: The naughty bots out to seduce you

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.

Is there an explanation for existence?

In Why Does the World Exist? Jim Holt spans physics, philosophy and literature to examine the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing NOVELIST Martin Amis once said we are about five Einsteins away from explaining the universe's existence. "His estimate seemed about right to me," says Jim Holt at the beginning of …

CultureLab

Advice for Earthlings

CultureLab

The science of sleight-of-hand magic tricks

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 1703

G&Ts all round I was staying at my sister's house when my niece Amy came home from school feeling special. The class had been shown how to split a whole number, T, into whole number parts in such a way that the product of the parts was the greatest, G, that could be obtained for …

Regulars

Regulars

Feedback: Uncertain in Llanfair PG

Feedback: Uncertain in Llanfair PG

Uncertain in Llanfair PG READER Andy Evans's local medical centre happens to be in the Welsh village often given the famously long name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychw-erndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch – and we're delighted to be able to print this. Like many such centres in the UK, this one has a touch screen to help lighten reception staff's workload. Patients …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

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