MetaFilter posts tagged with NewScientist

13 more things that dont make sense

shothotbot — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:32:02 -0800

13 more things that don't make sense from the New Scientist. The original 13. Previously.

Pepsi Big Blue

grouse — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:42:51 -0800

Scientists image single molecule with atomic force microscopy. See the original abstract in Science. CNET reproduces a representation of the experiment.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Where is the paddle? We need the paddle!

WPW — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:25:05 -0800

Email patterns can predict impending doom. "Email logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees. "After US energy giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company's final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times." From the New Scientist.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out

Artw — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:43:38 -0800

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.

3 to 10 classroom hours

Artw — Mon, 19 May 2008 21:09:59 -0800

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."

New Scientist Short List of Fun Materials

furtive — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:59:41 -0800

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).

Earth will forget us remarkably quickly

BuddhaInABucket — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:50:16 -0800

Imagine Earth Without People A great, non-hysterical article about what Earth would be like if we all, one day, vanished.

Save New Scientist!

thatwhichfalls — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 15:50:48 -0800

A plea to save New Scientist magazine from SF author and programmer Greg Egan (whose home page crashes my browser at the moment).

Protestors Finished in Under a Minute

lerrup — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 23:22:35 -0800

Scary Sci-fi inspired riot control being discussed in the New Scientist. I did check to see if this had been posted before...

Pentagon's bizarre sex bomb

theonetruebix — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 20:46:36 -0800

Pentagon's bizarre sex bomb. Cue the Pat Benatar.

Rats Perception Elvis

mcgraw — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 19:26:58 -0800

If rats can distinguish between Japanese and Dutch , why would Elvis have looked like this at age 70?

Size -- and 'Erogenous Sensation' -- Matter

digaman — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 10:46:27 -0800

Micro-penis sufferers, rejoice!

Simian Cybernetics

homunculus — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:23:11 -0800

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.]

You are not alone

Termite — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 21:49:46 -0800

How many different species live on or in the average human body? New Scientist’s Last Word is often an interesting place to go...

Comments on Bomb Crap

mcgraw — Mon, 03 May 2004 06:56:17 -0800

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.

Look around you...

mcgraw — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 13:11:51 -0800

DREAM W OR LD 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.

It's a hard knock life

substrate — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 08:14:33 -0800

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.

The HRE was neither holy nor roman, talk amongst yourselves (about GMOs)

turbodog — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 14:10:26 -0800

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.

Enslaved by free trade

badstone — Tue, 24 Jun 2003 12:59:46 -0800

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.

grub - distibuted search engine

talos — Mon, 21 Apr 2003 05:44:06 -0800

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?

Nude Scientist

twine42 — Thu, 03 Apr 2003 14:55:26 -0800

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...

Real Cash in a Virtual World

paladin — Fri, 13 Dec 2002 17:19:08 -0800

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.

Irontom — Wed, 23 Oct 2002 08:50:28 -0800

"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...

chandy72 — Mon, 21 Oct 2002 09:54:50 -0800

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?

talos — Thu, 12 Sep 2002 05:23:49 -0800

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.)