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This week's magazine

7 January 2006

Issue 2533

New Scientist issue 2533 cover
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Editor's picks

Special feature: The bird flu threat

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Special feature: The bird flu threat

Features
Lost world of the ice age makes a comeback

Earth

Lost world of the ice age makes a comeback

Features
Breathing in oceans full of air

Life

Breathing in oceans full of air

Features
Take a leap into hyperspace

Space

Take a leap into hyperspace

Features

Table of contents

News

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.

Technology

Fake fingers no match for scanner's electronic nose

FINGERPRINT scanners, increasingly used for everything from improving security at airports to preventing cellphone theft, can be fooled by fake fingers made of silicone, gelatine and even Play-Doh. Biometrics experts are working on ways to beat the fraudsters, and one of the latest takes a sensuous approach: an "electronic nose" that can distinguish the unique …

News

Technology

MP3 players swap songs with strangers

News

Technology

New software cleans up illegible scrawl

News

Technology

Buzzing buttons cancel car noise

News

Technology

Gizmo

News

Technology

Camera phone shots used for web searches

News

Technology

The lie detector you'll never know is there

News

Technology

All tangled up on the way to quantum computing

News

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Can tobacco plant stub out terror threat?

News

Life

What a Viking's smile revealed

News

Soundbites

News

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Crops leave surprises in our guts

News

Earth

Born free, shot for sport

News

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Men inherit hidden cost of dad's vices

News

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Could organ transplants use a dose of teen hormones?

News

Life

How cats' eyes keep the world in focus

News

Life

Electric fish jam signals in a fight

News

Life

T. rex would not have heard human screams

News

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Alcohol, not drugs, poses biggest date rape risk

News

Life

Surprises make soccer the best sport

News

Life

Creationists seek a redesign

News

Space

Day of reckoning for comet catcher

News

Technology

This week 47 years ago

News

Life

Killer algae throw neurotoxins into the air

News

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Sunbathing may do more good than harm

News

Earth

Cod plundering continues in the North Sea

News

Earth

Fear over future UK nuclear leaks

News

Life

Back to square one for therapeutic cloning

News

60 Seconds

News

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Poor follow up on human bird-flu fatalities

News

Space

Galileo finds a place in space

News

Opinion

What we learned on Mars

Space

What we learned on Mars

IT WAS supposed to be a 100-day mission to a planet that eats spacecraft for breakfast. But NASA's twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have now spent two years toddling around the frigid wasteland that is Mars. They have survived more than seven times as long and driven 10 times as far as they were designed …

Opinion

Editorial: Celebrating 50 years of New Scientist

Opinion

Life

Interview: Digging through the differences

Opinion

Space

Perspectives: Unifying the universe

Opinion

Features

Special feature: The bird flu threat

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Special feature: The bird flu threat

Flu is no big deal. Why are we suddenly being warned about a deadly pandemic? They won't like this in Kansas, but it's all down to evolution. Flu is such a successful virus that each year almost everyone on Earth is exposed, and about a third of us get sick. It is by no means …

Features

Earth

Lost world of the ice age makes a comeback

Features

Life

Breathing in oceans full of air

Features

Space

Take a leap into hyperspace

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.

Physics

The Number Devil by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Each chapter of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Number Devil (Granta, £6.99) recounts a dream encounter between a 12-year-old who hates mathematics and the number devil. Their slick tricks bring the subject alive, but you may want to keep a calculator to hand. The calculator may also come in useful when analysing the data in Women …

Books & Arts

Life

Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl

Books & Arts

Life

Collapse by Jared Diamond

Books & Arts

Technology

The word: Sock puppets

Regulars

Earth

Greenland's ice velocity linked to lake creation

Books & Arts

Regulars

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.

Feedback

The stranger the battle THE stranger the battle, the better the game, or so hopes Zygote Games of Hadley, Massachusetts, which has just introduced "Bone Wars". Players take on the roles of legendary palaeontologists Edward Cope, O. C. Marsh, Charles Sternberg and Barnum Brown, all competing to find dinosaur bones, name fossils and accumulate scientific …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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