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This week's magazine

23 March 2013

Issue 2909

New Scientist issue 2909 cover
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Editor's picks

End of darkness: The stuff that really rules the cosmos

Space

End of darkness: The stuff that really rules the cosmos

Features
Volcanoes mark the spot for Africa's buried energy treasure

Earth

Volcanoes mark the spot for Africa's buried energy treasure

Features
Tender turtles: Their mums do care after all

Life

Tender turtles: Their mums do care after all

Features
Norovirus: The perfect human pathogen

Health

Norovirus: The perfect human pathogen

Features

Table of contents

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Four wings bad, two wings better – for early birds

Life

Four wings bad, two wings better – for early birds

A confuciusornithid sporting the fashionable feathers of the time Before birds could fly on two wings, they had to ditch their training wings. This idea, first put forward a decade ago, is gaining credence with the discovery of 11 early bird fossils that seem to suggest that birds – which evolved from feathered dinosaurs – …

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Health

More HIV 'cured': first a baby, now 14 adults

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Earth

Deepest point in the ocean is teeming with life

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Technology

Donor livers kept alive outside the body for 24 hours

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Space

Astrophile: Dizzy dwarf star will spin itself to death

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Life

Zoologger: The fish with a chemical invisibility cloak

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Earth

Gold seams form in an earthquake-powered flash

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Space

Plutonium tests offer hope for dark space missions

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Life

Birds evolve shorter wings to survive on roads

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Physics

Quantum computer could solve prime number mystery

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Life

Farming has deep roots in Chinese ice age

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Health

Battlefield action increases risk of later violence

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Earth

Fracking could cut carbon emissions… in the short term

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Health

Sugary drinks may kill 184,000 people each year

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Life

World's giant squid are one big happy family

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Technology

Electronic violin turns laser signals into music

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Technology

US patent change angers inventors

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14th-century plague bodies unearthed at London station

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Earth

US gets tough on Arctic oil drilling

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Web pioneers share £1m for winning engineering 'Nobel'

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60 Seconds

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Life

Curiosity's discoveries hint at life's cradle on Mars

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Space

Gravity-less toy black hole solves cosmic puzzles

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Technology

World's thinnest endoscope is width of a human hair

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Technology

Making your own phone is easier than you might think

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Technology

How vast advertising displays will grab your attention

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Technology

Pump iron the smart way with a motion-capture coach

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Health

Make three-parent babies, UK government told

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Opinion

Banks gone bad: Our evolved morality has failed us

Life

Banks gone bad: Our evolved morality has failed us

We seem to be unable to punish bankers for their scandalous behaviour. That's because our moral instincts can’t cope, says a professor of biological sciences and anthropology

Opinion

Technology

Does computer code need a new, universal language?

Opinion

Life

Should we aim to live like cavemen?

Opinion

Health

Don't fear babies made with genes from three parents

Opinion

Analysis

Plasma-surfing could forge Higgs bosons on the cheap

Technology

Plasma-surfing could forge Higgs bosons on the cheap

Plasma wakefield accelerators want the green light to scale up It is now officially a Higgs boson , but squeezing any more information out of the particle discovered last year looks tough . At least using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. With major hurdles to building a larger atom smasher, future colliders may be …

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Technology

Flow batteries could back up grid of the future

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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.

Glider of the sea threatened by 'traditional' medicine

See more: To see the image this article refers to, keep checking Picture of the Day on our news blog Short Sharp Science IF YOU ever happen to be swimming in the tropics and see this 2-tonne beast gliding towards you , don't panic. Despite the large mouth it's not interested in eating you for …

Regulars

Features

End of darkness: The stuff that really rules the cosmos

Space

End of darkness: The stuff that really rules the cosmos

Shaken and stirred YOU'D think Carlos Frenk would be pleased that no one calls him a crackpot any more. He wasn't always so lucky. "I would stand up at conferences and have people almost throwing rotten tomatoes at me," he says. His offence was to be an ardent advocate of a then controversial idea – …

Features

Earth

Volcanoes mark the spot for Africa's buried energy treasure

Features

Life

Tender turtles: Their mums do care after all

Features

Health

Norovirus: The perfect human pathogen

Features

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 1741

Four squares I have before me five two-digit numbers, with no leading zeros. All the digits are different and none of the numbers is prime. The sum of the five numbers is a perfect square. If I remove one of the numbers, the sum of the remaining four is also a perfect square. If I …

Regulars

The promise and perils of a datafied world

Books & Arts

Can there be an algorithm for every human desire?

Books & Arts

Extreme weather science: Meet the storm chasers

Careers

A week in the life of a storm chaser

Careers

Regulars

Feedback: Biology book only costs $23 million

Feedback: Biology book only costs $23 million

Biology book only costs $23 million BIOLOGIST Peter Lawrence was thrilled to discover how highly valued his classic book The Making of a Fly seemed to be. We found this out when reader Colin MacLeod alerted us to a blog post by biologist Michael Eisen which forensically deconstructs how Lawrence's thrill came to pass. Fascinated, …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

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