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This week's magazine

7 December 2013

Issue 2946

New Scientist issue 2946 cover
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Editor's picks

Climate slowdown: The world won't stop warming

Earth

Climate slowdown: The world won't stop warming

Features
Magic of mushrooms: Dawning of the Fungus Age

Life

Magic of mushrooms: Dawning of the Fungus Age

Features
Quark stars: How can a supernova explode twice?

Space

Quark stars: How can a supernova explode twice?

Features
The odd couple: Can bioengineering protect nature?

Earth

The odd couple: Can bioengineering protect nature?

Features

Table of contents

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Oxygen drop makes people with spine injury more mobile

Health

Oxygen drop makes people with spine injury more mobile

Lower levels of oxygen, like those found at high altitudes, could help mobility Ask any mountaineer or miner and they'll tell you that time in a low-oxygen environment can be a dangerous business – it can cause altitude sickness and other health problems. But for people with spinal injuries, short periods of hypoxia may be …

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Earth

Whirling dervish skirts are ruled by hurricane physics

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Life

Synthetic primordial cell copies RNA for the first time

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Space

Crazy comet ISON returns bearing solar system secrets

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Earth

Extreme weather could become norm around Indian Ocean

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Life

Fear of a smell can be passed down several generations

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Space

Astrophile: Europa's choppy ocean looks friendly to life

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Space

Boxy CubeSats get a propulsion boost in new space race

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Life

Zoologger: How koalas make their deep seductive grunts

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Life

Snakes outpacing other vertebrates in race to evolve

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Life

Fake brain helps investigate age's intelligence decline

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Life

Mapped: male and female brain connections

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Life

Animal-rights group sues to secure freedom for chimps

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Space

Hints of cold dark matter pop up in 10-year-old circuit

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Health

Hong Kong gets its first case of deadly H7N9 bird flu

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Life

Record ivory seizures point to trafficking rise

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Health

Stop persecution to halt HIV, says United Nations

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Health

60 Seconds

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Life

Oldest human genome dug up in Spain's pit of bones

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To kill a black hole, recruit a cosmic string army

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Technology

Mapping pilgrims' body heat to make a safer hajj

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Technology

Find the ungoogleable with crowdsourced search engine

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Technology

One Per Cent

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Technology

Send wireless power long range with lasers and balloons

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Earth

Human cost of coal in the UK: 1600 lives a year

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Space

Alien-hunting equation revamped for mining asteroids

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Earth

Could China combat smog with artificial rain?

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Earth

Microbe steals neighbour's electricity to make methane

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Opinion

Modern moral responses need a manual mode

Life

Modern moral responses need a manual mode

"When there is a conflict, which group's sense of right and wrong should prevail?" Our instincts don't always serve us well. Moral psychologist Joshua Greene tells Tiffany O'Callaghan why, in the modern world, we need to figure out when to put our sense of right and wrong in manual mode You say morality is more …

Opinion

Earth

Is it time to stop worrying about global warming?

Opinion

Life

Mouse memory inheritance may revitalise Lamarckism

Opinion

Life

Coin-flip judgement of psychopathic prisoners' risk

Opinion

Space

How the US and China can help each other in space

Opinion

Analysis

How heat from trains and sewers can warm our homes

Technology

How heat from trains and sewers can warm our homes

Europe wastes more heat than it uses to keep buildings warm. Now projects across the continent will tap everything from subways to sewers to keep homes cosy

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Aperture

Freak Canadian storm has nothing on Martian weather

Earth

Freak Canadian storm has nothing on Martian weather

(Image: Robert Edmonds) THIS scene could almost be enough to make an atheist think divine punishment was at hand. Check out the horizontal roll vortex in the right of the image. That is a rare sight indeed. If you are an atmospheric scientist, or a storm chaser, you will love those vortex dynamics. For the …

Regulars

Features

Climate slowdown: The world won't stop warming

Earth

Climate slowdown: The world won't stop warming

The rate of global warming has slowed – but why? Does it mean we can stop worrying about global warming? Here's the lowdown on the slowdown

Features

Life

Magic of mushrooms: Dawning of the Fungus Age

Features

Space

Quark stars: How can a supernova explode twice?

Features

Earth

The odd couple: Can bioengineering protect nature?

Features

Culturelab

Top-down or bottom-up? Two visions of smart cities

Technology

Top-down or bottom-up? Two visions of smart cities

City sense (Image: Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos) Two books explore what interactive technology can do for cities of the future – the results range from authoritarian to ideal, open-sourced democracies THERE are currently two equally powerful, but ideologically opposed, visions of what a smart city is and what it should be. In the blue corner …

CultureLab

Technology

Towering imagination of a polymath architect-engineer

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 1778

Around the houses Fewer than 100 houses have been built on the edge of a circular green, equally-spaced around the whole perimeter and numbered 1, 2, ... in order. I have counted the number of pairs of houses with their first and second digits exchanged that are either 90 degrees or 180 degrees apart around …

Regulars

Tough choices for postgrads

Careers

Promising postgrads of the near future

Careers

Space

China's Jade Rabbit blasts off for the moon

Regulars

Rock stars: Geoscientists in the business of risk

Careers

Regulars

Feedback: Dinosaurs against climate change

Feedback: Dinosaurs against climate change

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Dinosaurs vs climate change WARNING: the radio advert to which Barry Cash alerts us is presented at tinyurl.com/dino-ad with an apology – listening to it "probably decreased your IQ by a couple of points". It's by Ken Ham, founder of …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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