NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

We no longer fully understand the web

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Scientist - By Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Marks - Jun. 05 (Interview) - World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked him what he hopes to achieve.

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How to survive the coming century

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Scientist - By Gaia Vince - Feb. 25 (Special Report) - ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C. Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.

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First vertebrate eye to use mirror instead of lens

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New Scientist - By Jessica Griggs - Dec. 25 (News Report) - The deep sea is full of surprises, and the four-eyed spookfish is up there with the best of them. It is the first vertebrate found with eyes that use mirrors, rather than a lens, to focus light. In clear water, sunlight can penetrate to a depth of 1000 metres, so some deep-sea fish have developed tubular, upward-looking eyes. "It is like having a telescope on your head that points towards the surface," says Ron Douglas from City University London.

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Ten ways to save the world

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New Scientist - By Tamsin Osborne - Dec. 02 (Special Report) - Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, a new book by businessman and climate-change commentator Chris Goodall, says climate change can be overcome if we adopt the following energy sources and technologies:

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Greenland ice lakes drain at speed of Niagara Falls

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New Scientist - By Mason Inman - Apr. 18 (News Report) - The worry has been that with further global warming such meltwater would increase and have a catastrophic effect on the ice sheet, lubricating its base and making it slide quickly into the ocean. But a new study suggests that the meltwater's effect is not as strong as feared.

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Nerve-tapping neckband allows 'telepathic' chat

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New Scientist - By Tom Simonite - Mar. 13 (News Report) - With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

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Zooplankton move to the moon's tune

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 08:17:18 -0700

New Scientist - Jul. 08 (News Report) - How do ocean animals that live below the depth to which moonlight penetrates migrate in phase with the moon? Hans van Haren of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research in Den Burg used sonar to track zooplankton movement over 18 months. They migrate up and down the water column on daily and seasonal cycles, and van Haren also identified a strong monthly movement that coincided with lunar cycles.

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Climate change sceptics criticise polar bear science

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 09:31:51 -0700

New Scientist - Jul. 01 (Review) - Soon, who receives funding for this and other work from Exxon-Mobil, has been attacking climate change science for several years. Three of the six other authors also have links to the oil industry. A reply to Soon's paper accuses him of ignoring data that does not fit his argument and of misinterpreting the predictions made by climate models.

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Astronomers look to quark stars for a fifth dimension

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 08:28:50 -0700

New Scientist - Jun. 24 (News Report) - If the universe has weird extra-spatial dimensions in parallel to the 3D world we see around us, then billion-dollar particle accelerators may not be the only place to find them. So say Gergely Gabor Barnaföldi and colleagues at the Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, who propose that extra dimensions may show their face in areas of extreme gravity around dense stars.

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Ice ages dried up African monsoons

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 09:39:21 -0700

New Scientist - Jun. 10 (News Report) - It has long been suspected that there is a connection between the west African monsoon and climate at higher latitudes - especially over geological timescales, says David Lea at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "But until now, there hasn't been enough supporting evidence." Now Lea, with team leader Syee Weldeab and colleagues, has reconstructed the most detailed history of the monsoon yet, spanning 155,000 years and two ice ages.

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Smarter people are no better off

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:46:00 -0700

New Scientist - By Roxanne Khamsi - Apr. 25 (News Report) - Contrary to common expectation, intelligence does not always predict financial wellbeing. Even though smart people earn more, on average, it does not protect them from financial difficulty. New research has found that people who score higher on intelligence tests end up with the same net worth as others when lifestyle factors are taken into account. And the study confirms that you don't have to be smart to be wealthy.

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Special Report on Climate Change

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:17:32 -0700

New Scientist - By Fred Pearce - Mar. 13 (Special Report) - Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canada's Inuit see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost. The shantytown dwellers of Latin America and Southern Asia see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal heat waves. Scientists see it in tree rings, ancient coral and bubbles trapped in ice cores. These reveal that the world has not been as warm as it is now for a millennium or more. The three warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998; 19 of the warmest 20 since 1980. And Earth has probably never warmed as fast as in the past 30 years - a period when natural influences on global temperatures, such as solar cycles and volcanoes should have cooled us down. Studies of the thermal inertia of the oceans suggest that there is more warming in the pipeline.

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Leaky pipe? call in the clots

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:42:40 -0800

New Scientist - Dec. 20 (News Report) - Squishy blobs introduced upstream of a leak are carried along to the leak and clog it up as a temporary fix. The "scab" also shows where the leak is.

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Foreign medics sentenced to death in Libya trial

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 10:47:48 -0800

New Scientist - Dec. 19 (News Report) - The medics have been held since 1999, during which time 52 of the 426 infected children have died of AIDS. The nurses and doctor were previously sentenced to face a firing squad in May 2004, but Libya's Supreme Court ordered a retrial following an appeal in December 2005.

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Paperless office? Still over the horizon

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:21:06 -0800

New Scientist - Dec. 18 (News Report) - The software, developed by GreenPrint Technologies of Portland, Oregon, deletes blank pages, or those containing only an advert, web address or legal blurb.

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At play in the multiverse

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 23:16:05 -0800

New Scientist - By David Deutsch, Amanda Gefter - Dec. 09 (Interview) - In 1985, David Deutsch turned physics upside down by describing a universal quantum computer, pioneering the field of quantum information science. He explains to Amanda Gefter how this relates to notions of truth and reality in our universe - and even outside it

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Black hole seen devouring star in best detail yet

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 09:17:24 -0800

New Scientist - By Maggie McKey - Dec. 07 (News Report) - A black hole has been seen devouring a star in the best detail yet, thanks to observations made over the course of two years by NASA's GALEX spacecraft. Such observations will help astronomers weigh black holes that are too far away to study in any other way.

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Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 18:50:32 -0700

New Scientist - By Paul Marks - Jun. 09 (News Report) - New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals. Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action. Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

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