13 more things that don't make sense from the New Scientist. The original 13. Previously.
posted by shothotbot on Sep 7, 2009 - 57 comments

Scientists image single molecule with atomic force microscopy. See the original abstract in Science. CNET reproduces a representation of the experiment.
posted by grouse on Aug 28, 2009 - 43 comments

Email patterns can predict impending doom. [more inside]
posted by WPW on Jun 25, 2009 - 18 comments

New Scientist kicks off it's science fiction special by asking "Is science fiction dying?", with answers by Margaret Atwood, William Gibson and Ursula K Le Guin amongst others. Meanwhile on the Nebula Awards site Geoff Ryman talks about Mundane SF, and how it was a reaction to a phenomenon he noticed in new SF coming through the Clarion workshop: A lot of it doesn't have much science fiction in it.
posted by Artw on Nov 14, 2008 - 70 comments

16% of US science teachers believe human beings have been created by God within the last 10,000 years. 25% of science teachers spend some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. 12.5% teach it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species". 2% say they do not cover evolution at all. Teachers who have taken more science courses themselves devote more time to evolution - "This may be because better-prepared teachers are more confident in dealing with students' questions about a sensitive subject."
posted by Artw on May 19, 2008 - 205 comments

Walking on liquids, corn starch rocking out to the beat of a subwoofer and materials that expand as they stretch are just some of the cool videos mentioned in The Stuff of Dreams (plenty more links in the last link).
posted by furtive on Jan 3, 2007 - 13 comments

Imagine Earth Without People A great, non-hysterical article about what Earth would be like if we all, one day, vanished.
posted by BuddhaInABucket on Oct 12, 2006 - 71 comments

A plea to save New Scientist magazine from SF author and programmer Greg Egan (whose home page crashes my browser at the moment).
posted by thatwhichfalls on Oct 7, 2006 - 33 comments

Scary Sci-fi inspired riot control being discussed in the New Scientist. I did check to see if this had been posted before...
posted by lerrup on Jul 21, 2005 - 29 comments

Pentagon's bizarre sex bomb. Cue the Pat Benatar.
posted by theonetruebix on Jan 13, 2005 - 56 comments

If rats can distinguish between Japanese and Dutch , why would Elvis have looked like this at age 70?
posted by mcgraw on Jan 9, 2005 - 21 comments

Micro-penis sufferers, rejoice!
posted by digaman on Dec 7, 2004 - 50 comments

Brain implants 'read' monkey minds. (No, not that monkey mind.) A group of CalTech neuroscientists have been able to predict the actions of monkeys by observing neural activity in the parietal and premotor cortices related to planning and motivation (PDF.) Other research previously allowed monkeys to control a robotic arm with their minds; this observed the higher-level goal and value signals, and could lead to more natural thought-activated prosthetic devices for people with paralysis. [Via MonkeyFilter.]
posted by homunculus on Jul 10, 2004 - 29 comments

How many different species live on or in the average human body? New Scientist’s Last Word is often an interesting place to go...
posted by Termite on Jul 2, 2004 - 13 comments

Advanced methods of bomb detection and investigation. New equipment developed to scan cars and people, such as a parking lot device which quickly bathes the car's trunk in invisible neutrons, a procedure that makes materials inside the trunk emit gamma-rays that would indicate the presence of explosives. Also, a bomb disposal robot which take[s] fingerprints before blowing [a] package up.
posted by mcgraw on May 3, 2004 - 17 comments

DREAM WORLD Given that green tea provides a more effective and environmentally-friendly method of preparing computer hard disks, pulsars are used to study gravitational waves with great precision, solar cells made from nanocrystals are found to be much more efficient, and scientists have discovered evidence for the earliest known wildfire in Earth's history, 443 to 417 million years ago, it would be hard to make the case that what we are living in is not, in fact, a Dreamworld.
posted by mcgraw on Apr 27, 2004 - 29 comments

New Scientist reports that a virus has been built up from mail order components. Other reports on this are in USA Today and Nature. This isn't time life has been created in the lab, as previously linked.
What's interesting is that this study was funded by the Department of Energy to produce a completely man made lifeform that can create hydrogen or consume greenhouse gasses. The present virus is an artificially created copy of a naturally occurring virus.
posted by substrate on Nov 14, 2003 - 7 comments

Today the British government released a major report on the safety of genetically modified foods. According to New Scientist, "existing genetically modified crops and foods pose a 'very low' risk to human health and are 'very unlikely' to rampage through the British countryside", but others disagree.
posted by turbodog on Jul 21, 2003 - 58 comments

Enslaved by free trade. The founding myth of the dominant nations is that they achieved their industrial and technological superiority through free trade. Nations that are poor today are told that if they want to follow our path to riches they must open their economies to foreign competition. They are being conned.
posted by badstone on Jun 24, 2003 - 31 comments

Grub: The seti@home of search engines?
According to the New Scientist: "A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week."
Grub has thus launched before HyperBee, a similar distributed search project.
This link was previously posted on MeFi when it was still in the conceptual stage.
The project is being run by LookSmart (along with its own open directory project called zeal) but as the New Scientist article notes: "Website information collected by Grub is already being fed into one of LookSmart's search services, called WiseNut. But the collected data are also freely accessible to the public, so they can be incorporated into any web site or desktop application."
Possible Google competition or doomed from the start?
posted by talos on Apr 21, 2003 - 10 comments

This 'news'... it vibrates? Yes, more than six months after it appeared here on MeFi, New Scientist has just found out about the vibrating broom. I can feel my confidence in them dripping away...
posted by twine42 on Apr 3, 2003 - 6 comments

Real cash in a virtual world - a little piece from New Scientist about a new type of massive multiplayer game where you convert real cash in to virtual, and then actually buy things you need to survive in that world.
posted by paladin on Dec 13, 2002 - 12 comments

"Bird of Prey" unveiled. Boeing revealed the formerly supersecret stealth prototype last Friday in St. Louis. More information at: a New Scientist story, a Popular Science report, Jane's Defense Weekly (subscription required), Boeing's press release and a couple of movies (13 Mb mov or 50 Mb mpg). More...
posted by Irontom on Oct 23, 2002 - 22 comments

We like the cars, the cars that go "Vroom" All that quiet too much for you to take when you're tooling around town? These inventors have reverse engineered the noise reduction technology to make a product that can reproduce "the endearing and unique audible sound signatures of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s classic cars and motorbikes." Hot Wheels will probably want a piece of the action to help save wear and tear on kids' vocal chords as they play Fast And the Furious. Would anyone pay for this hi-fi feature? Or is this a non-starter only good for a few cheap laffs and links?
posted by chandy72 on Oct 21, 2002 - 18 comments

Spectacular atmospheric optics.
Beautiful pictures of atmospheric phenomena, common and rare. You can also run your own halo simulations if you like... (Found in New Scientist's Weblinks, an extensive, annotated collection of all kinds of science links from all over the web.)
posted by talos on Sep 12, 2002 - 13 comments

Giant asteroid hurtling toward your planet? Don't know what to do? Don't call Bruce Willis. Just build a giant airbag and nudge the sucker away.
posted by gottabefunky on Aug 30, 2002 - 15 comments

There is no more excuse not to know at least where to look for it, --with graphic topography and description of the top entertainment spot, the famed G. Do you know how to find it?
posted by semmi on Jul 5, 2002 - 12 comments

Stranger is as stranger does Lets see, the older I get, the more eccentric I become. Boy, am I in trouble.
posted by thekorruptor on Jun 28, 2002 - 12 comments

Rejection reduces IQ "To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in an IQ test, for example - and instead, you behave impulsively"
posted by zeoslap on Mar 17, 2002 - 21 comments

China hopes to make a great leap forward in Stem Cell Research Does anyone else find this a little troubling? Are all the clones going to look like Jiang Zemin?
posted by AsiaInsider on Mar 6, 2002 - 18 comments

Huge ice field found on Mars The Mars Odyssey orbiter has found a vast field of water ice stretching from the Martian south pole to 60 degrees south.
posted by Zool on Mar 4, 2002 - 29 comments

In Canada, the creation of new stem cell lines from discarded embryos is now eligible for federal funding. And in the UK the first licenses to create new stem cell lines have been granted, as has governement approval to pursue therapeutic cloning. The chief executive of the UK's Medical Research Council predicts a "reverse brain drain" of stem cell scientists to the UK. If the US Senate votes to ban all human cloning this spring, even for research purposes, I suspect that America will lose a lot of great minds.
posted by homunculus on Mar 4, 2002 - 11 comments

New Scientist article about the Anthrax attacks. "After months of bungled investigation, it now looks certain that America's anthrax attacks came from within. The implications are terrifying".
posted by talos on Feb 21, 2002 - 8 comments

New Scientist release a copyleft article on......wait for it......copyleft. In it, they discuss what's going on in the world of Open Source and how the meme is spreading from software into other areas, like encyclopedias and law. It concludes saying that open source is currently good for things that don't need to be confidential and do need to be consistently upgraded/changed. Does open source have a chance, or is it just a passing fad? via slashdot
posted by taumeson on Jan 31, 2002 - 2 comments

The Science of Getting Schnockered The "New Scientist" directory of articles relating to drunkenness. Some of my favorites: why drunk people tend to stagger more to one side than another, drunks can control their behavior if they really want to, and girls can match boys drink for drink, so long as they stick to beer.
posted by Shadowkeeper on Jan 15, 2002 - 7 comments

Hitch a ride on a meteorite. New evidence that bacteria could survive a trip between planets.
posted by homunculus on Jan 11, 2002 - 3 comments

Anger plays a key role in human cooperation. And not only that, anger is altruistic! The link covers a behavioral experiment probing individual versus group benefits, freeloading, punishment and altruism.
posted by NortonDC on Jan 9, 2002 - 9 comments

Plot to undermine global pollution controls revealed
"A secret group of developed nations conspired to limit the effectiveness of the UN's first conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. "
posted by Irontom on Jan 3, 2002 - 14 comments

Next generation emoticons or another step in tearing down cultural (and man-machine?) walls?
posted by rushmc on Sep 8, 2001 - 15 comments

Article on New Scientist about "software that turns everyday language into computer code".
posted by paladin on Apr 5, 2001 - 19 comments

Mathematician Bums Out Entire Scientific Community His "Omega" number--infinite and incalculable--guts hopes for pure mathematics, physicists' hopes for a Theory of Everything, and is just in general kind of bafflingly cool. Builds on the whole Godel/Turing foundation of hopelessness!
posted by Skot on Mar 15, 2001 - 35 comments

The ethical problems of biotech patents have been noted here before. Now the New Scientist reports that those patent applications are on the brink of crippling the world wide patent system to the detriment of real inventions and to the disadvantage of poorer countries (and what is the PC term for those now that 'third world' and even 'less developed countries' have fallen out of favor?)
posted by norm on Dec 12, 2000 - 6 comments

Neural net pilots - just thought this was cool...
posted by sonofsamiam on Oct 18, 2000 - 4 comments

Love, robots and ghosts are each the topic of fascinating snippets at newscientist.com.
posted by grumblebee on Jul 18, 2000 - 2 comments