December 2009 archive

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Video-stitched cellphone streams go widescreen A system called Mobicast enables cellphone users at public events to combine their live streams of video, creating a patchwork feed with a richer view

Ancient clone saw out the last ice age Clones of an ancient bush have been discovered in California by botanists who reckon it first grew at the height of the last ice age, 13,000 years ago

Chatbots add intelligence to Sherlock Holmes game The online movie tie-in enables gamers posing as the great detective to question virtual suspects and witnesses in natural language

Move over, Schrödinger's cat... By talking to his dog, a physicist explains what quantum mechanics is - and what it isn't

2010 preview: Waiting for ET to phone Fifty years ago next April, Frank Drake kick-started the modern search for extraterrestrial life at a radio telescope in West Virginia

The shape of gifts to come The latest revolution in games consoles owes its existence to car airbags - so what hot gadgets of the future will today's technologies spawn?

Ducks fight the battle of the sexes in their genitals Male Muscovy ducks have evolved super-long penises - with "explosive erection" ability - while females retaliate with antagonistic vaginas

Are we looking in the wrong places for water on the moon? Conventional theory says water ice should be concentrated in permanently shadowed craters near the poles, but that's not where it seems to be turning up

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This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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2009 review: Top videos of the year The best of New Scientist's video coverage, including a tiny hovering robot, bionic penguins and plasma ejections from the sun

The Royal Institution's festive feasts for the mind From Michael Faraday to David Attenborough, many eminent figures have given Christmas lectures at the UK's Royal Institution - see the hall of fame

Dams linked to more extreme weather The statistics of rainfall around more than 600 dams reveal many have triggered more extreme storms

Innovation: The sinister powers of crowdsourcing Governments are turning to web users to help identify criminals and protestors - could they enlist people's help without revealing their true goals?

2010 preview: Genome sequencing for all Gene hunters will start routinely working with complete human genome sequences, releasing a new wave of discovery in human health

Microbes survive 30,000 years inside a salt crystal Microbes entombed in a salt crystal have survived for 30,000 years by feeding off the remains of algae that were trapped along with them

New Scientist 2009 trivia quiz Cheating soccer robots, new ways into space and smelling out the sexes - how much do you know about the less groundbreaking advances of the past year?

Pong-ology: Sniffing out a cure for iffy whiffs Most of us steer well clear of halitosis, body odour, farts and smelly feet - but these researchers have a keen nose for their biological mysteries

Nerdstock 2009: Christmas for rationalists An atheist comedy variety show extravaganza celebrates Christmas - minus the whole religion bit

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This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Single light wave flashes out from fibre laser A long-elusive goal of physics has been reached - producing a pulse of light so short that it contains just a single cycle of a light wave

Generosity is natural for kind-hearted people Generous people aren't fighting the urge to screw others over. Instead, the desire for fairness is automatic and arises from activation in a brain area that controls intuition and emotion

Life in the inner galaxy would be bombarded by comets Comets may be bombarding planets closer to the centre of the galaxy more heavily than Earth, making things tough for life

Total recall: The milestones of 2009 Our review of the year ranges from solar storm Armageddon to a vegetarian spider

2010 preview: Is this the year that we create life? 'Synthia' - a living bacterial cell carrying a genome made from scratch in the lab - could be born

Australian government plans internet censorship Anyone accessing the web in Australia could soon find their data passing through government filters first

The vast left-brain conspiracy In The Master and his Emissary, Iain McGilchrist argues that struggle between brain hemispheres has shaped history - Owen Flanagan is not convinced

Engage the x drive: Ten ways to traverse deep space So far humans have only made it to the moon. We look at some technologies and wild ideas that could take us much farther

Let's face it, science is boring Mouse urine, puréed goldfish brains and human computers. Sound interesting? Well, it's not. Honest

2010 preview: Automotive X Prize contestants power up From May, more than 40 teams will compete for a share of a $10 million prize for the most efficient car that could be mass-produced

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Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

Update: Since we posted this blog, DeCode has apparently removed the assessment of Alzheimer's risk from its analysis for 23andMe customers

Nothing seems to be going right for DeCode Genetics, the Icelandic personal genomics firm that declared bankruptcy last month. In an attempt to win customers from its Californian rival, 23andMe, DeCode has offered free analyses for anyone who uploads their 23andMe data onto its website - only to produce mangled interpretations for genetic ancestry.

More alarming, from my point of view, the company also suggested that I have a 40 per cent lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer's disease - which if didn't know better thanks to previous scrutiny of my own DNA, would have been a devastating thing to learn.

Offering a free version of your main rival's service might seem like a strange business move. But as the Genetics Future blog pointed out, DeCode's gambit made some sense as a pitch for future sales. Within the next few years, the personal genomics business will move from offering limited scans of the genome to full readouts of the 3 billion or so letters in our DNA code. So if DeCode can convince 23andMe's customers that its analysis is more informative, then it may win their business when it's time to upgrade to complete genome sequences.

Jim Giles, consultant

Australians will soon find their internet access routed through a government-run filter designed to block access to a secret blacklist of sites, including those that disseminate child pornography.

Google slammed the move as "heavy-handed" and one Australian politician called it a "move towards censorship".

Catherine Brahic, environment news editor, Copenhagen

It's 2.30 am and dejection is palpable in the halls of Copenhagen's Bella Centre, home to the last two week's climate talks. Obama has left; there's another draft deal being passed around; Gordon Brown says he's happy; the G77 block of poor nations is crying bloody murder; delegates are leaving in droves, looking tired and depressed. The sense, generally, is that the last two years have been a waste of time.

Outside, meanwhile, hundreds have gathered carrying big yellow signs that scream "climate shame".

The draft text is the most vague we've seen so far, with all specific targets for cutting emissions stripped out, replaced by a list of the commitments that various nations have already made. Speaking to the US press before jetting back to Washington DC, Obama himself suggested it was "a case where instead of taking one step forward we may have taken two steps back". A week ago, given the number of world leaders involved, this degree of failure seemed impossible. Now, it seems inevitable.

Read more: New Scientist's full coverage of the latest Copenhagen and climate change news

Fred Pearce, environment correspondent, Copenhagen

The Copenhagen talks are now in extra time. Gloom and a strange silence has descended on the meeting rooms and corridors. A technical discussion goes on in the main conference hall, but the real business is happening elsewhere: Barack Obama is reported to be meeting Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, Brazilian president Lula da Silva and India's prime minister Manmoghan Singh in the hope of brokering a deal.

The draft text which we revealed here earlier today has been altered in small but significant ways. For instance small island states have got their way with the inclusion of a reference to a possible temperature limit of 1.5 ºC warming. The new text says that progress towards limiting global warming to 2 ºC should be reviewed by 2016, and that this review should consider limiting warming to 1.5 ºC in the long term.

Meanwhile, text about how the world might "request clarification" of the developing nations' progress towards meeting their national emissions targets has been removed, presumably at the insistence of China. It has been replaced by square bracket indicating that new text is to be "inserted [by] US and China".

That is what Obama and Wen are almost certainly discussing.

Rumours are now turning to when the talks will be forced to close. Some say 3 am tomorrow morning has been set as a deadline, others that the negotiation will go to Sunday, long after the leaders have left the building.

Read more: New Scientist's full coverage of the latest Copenhagen and climate change news

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Sceptical climate researcher won't divulge key program A physicist whose work is often highlighted by climate-change sceptics is refusing to provide the software he used to other climate researchers

Where is Happyville, USA? The first ever league table of happiness in US states combines surveys of Americans and objective indicators of quality of life

Set the S Word agenda Roger Highfield is chairing the next encounter between the science spokesmen of the three main UK parties - help him set the sparks flying

Anthrax in heroin leads to deaths in Scotland Two heroin injectors have died of anthrax, says Debora MacKenzie, who reported similar cases in Scotland in 2000

Quiz: Ten curiosities to identify These are the weirdest objects in the Wellcome Library in London - can you guess what they are?

Copenhagen diaries: Capitalist gods and socialist tantrums Get 115 heads of state and government into one conference centre, give them 5 minutes of airtime each and there's bound to be fireworks

The US air force's holiday wish list: 2500 PlayStations Rather than planning a really geeky party, the plan is to build a new kind of supercomputer that provides massive computing power at low cost

2010 preview: The space shuttle's last ride Each of the three surviving orbiters will make their final flights, ending a dream that space exploration could become mundane

Clearest sign yet of dark matter detected An experiment in a Minnesota mine has seen a tantalising glimpse of dark matter, the stuff thought to make up most of the universe's mass

Naming a mind disease Who was Alzheimer or Parkinson or Asperger? Douwe Draaisma's Disturbances of the Mind tells the stories of these conditions and their namesakes

Leaked Copenhagen draft suggests a win for China New Scientist has seen a leaked draft of what the 115 heads of state who have come to the climate talks are expected to sign before they leave

Foot-in-mouth syndrome: Pitfalls of the party season The more you try not to think of something, the more it comes to mind - now psychologists are starting to understand why

China turns down Clinton's ultimatum - but hope remains China says it will not incorporate its emissions pledge into a Copenhagen agreement, laying a diplomatic minefield, says Fred Pearce

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Andy Coghlan, reporter

It might not seem obvious, but apparently the happiest state in the US is Louisiana. That's despite New Orleans being drowned in 2005 by hurricane Katrina. More predictably, Hawaii came second and Florida third in the first ever league table of US happiness.

Bottom of the list came New York, with Connecticut the second most unhappy state.

"They're very expensive, with lots of congestion, long commuting times, pollution and noise," comments a co-author of the happiness-measuring study, Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in the UK.

He and co-author Stephen Wu of Hamilton College, New York, are less sure about how hurricane-struck Louisiana came out on top, but point out that demographics have changed since the disaster, perhaps with an influx of people who didn't experience it.

Debora MacKenzie, consultant

It's déjà vu all over again. From Scotland comes the sad news that two heroin injectors have died - of anthrax. Another is being tested for it. Injecting drug users in the region are warned to watch out for inflammation or odd, black sores where they have injected heroin into muscle.

Why déjà vu? Back in 2000, there was another spate of deaths among Scottish heroin injectors. This was before the anthrax attacks of 2001, but I had learned about the bacillus at bioweapons conferences and the Scots' symptoms sounded familiar. Plus, an addict in Norway had just died of very definite anthrax, thought to have been in his heroin. I called public health in Glasgow, and told the doctor investigating the cases, Syed Ahmed, about the Norwegian case.

Fred Pearce, Copenhagen

China replied swiftly and firmly to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's ultimatum that it must back up its promise on carbon emissions by incorporating it into the Copenhagen agreement.  "No", it said. 

Though there was just enough of a "no, but" to suggest that disaster may yet be averted.

China promised last month to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40-45 per cent by 2020.  The promise came within a day of the Obama administration in the US making its own promise to cut emissions by 17 per cent by 2020.  It looked like the G2 had struck a deal. 

But if so, the deal has since come unstuck.

Read more: New Scientist's full coverage on the latest Copenhagen and climate change news

Fred Pearce, Copenhagen

As many predicted, the Copenhagen talks are being reduced to two critical issues: money and the relationships between the planet's two masters, the US and China.

That is how Hillary Clinton, US  secretary of state, told it this morning, a few hours after her arrival to help lead the end game.

She offered to join other developed countries, including the European Union, in creating a climate fund worth $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries adapt to climate change, curtail deforestation and develop their economies in a low-carbon way. But there is a string attached.

Read more: New Scientist's full coverage on the latest Copenhagen and climate change news

Catherine Brahic, environment news editor, Copenhagen

Money usually helps. So amid the fractious chaos here, a few extra billions of dollars put on the table on Wednesday evening could encourage a more conciliatory atmosphere. Japan promised to stump up $15 billion, most of it from public funds, to help developing countries cope with climate change - provided there is a deal here. Meanwhile, Britain, Australia, France, Japan, Norway, and the United States announced that they will put up $3.5 billion to compensate developing countries that can show they are reducing emissions from deforestation.

This "fast-track finance" is intended to be paid out if there is an agreement here, but before the laborious process of getting the deal ratified in parliaments across the world is played out - a good thing too, since it took seven years to get Kyoto Protocol ratified by enough countries to bring it into formal force.

But some think the pledges on fast-track finance are a way of avoiding talking about the really big price tag involved in providing long-term finance to climate-proof vulnerable countries and help the poor world develop in a low-carbon way. Most agree that by 2020 that will require more than $200 billion each year. Not something ministers want to talk about when their people back home are hurting as a result of the fallout from the world financial crisis.

Read more: New Scientist's full coverage on the latest Copenhagen and climate change news

Fred Pearce, environment correspondent, Copenhagen

Stories from the barricades outside occasionally break into the sealed rooms of the Copenhagen conference centre. Hairy journalists thrown out of the queue for not looking sufficiently journalistic. Pensioner hacks punched in the nose by exasperated police, a leading climate scientist scheduled to address delegates who came all the way from Australia, queued for two days without success to get into the building and then flew home.

The TV images of minor riots do not portray the scale of anger among people excluded from the conference this week. The UN gave approval for 27,000 members of non-governmental organisations, such as green campaigners, scientists and industrialists, to attend Copenhagen. On Tuesday they imposed strict quotas on NGOs, and today numbers are down to just 300.

Even that was a concession. According to environmentalists involved in talks late last night, the authorities had to be persuaded not to expel all NGOs from today on the grounds that they present a security threat to the heads of state now arriving.

Of those 300 still allowed in today, just 154 are from the main environment NGOs like WWF and Greenpeace. WWF brought 150 people here, and Greenpeace about 250. You can see they might be upset. There are a lot of angry people on the snow-covered streets of Copenhagen who made hotel and flight bookings on the basis of a false promise that they could come to the conference.

To harness this spare man-power WWF planned a "bike-in" through the city centre. But the local police confiscated the bikes.

Now it is of course right that the leaders should be able to do their jobs unmolested. But why accredit 27,000 NGOs (and 19,000 others) when the capacity of the conference centre is only 15,000? "Who's to blame? Me", says UN climate chief Yvo de Boer. Candid enough, but does he know the misery and anger his decision has caused? Maybe the UN would like to offer a refund on that ticket from Sydney?

Read more: New Scientist's full coverage on the latest Copenhagen and climate change news

Fred Pearce, Copenhagen

It is late. The sun has set over the Bella Centre on Wednesday, and still there is no sign of a draft agreement for politicians to discuss. With just 48 hours to go, that is cutting things fine. 

Ministerial talks ground to a halt. And the Danish prime minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, who today abruptly snatched control of proceedings from his environment minister Connie Hedegaard, is trying to create a subgroup of leaders to broker a deal.

Don't worry, said European Union president Jose Manuel Barroso this evening. "It is inconceivable that 125 heads of state will go home empty-handed".

But more and more delegates can conceive of it.

Read more: New Scientist's full coverage on the latest Copenhagen and climate change news

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Earth-mass alien planet could be ultimate water world The discovery of a planet that seems to made almost entirely of water suggests "super-Earths" are a more diverse bunch than we thought

Bill Bryson: Everything that happens is amazing The award-winning writer on why his fascination with our place in the universe led him to revisit his least favourite subject at school

Battle for climate data approaches tipping point Behind the "climategate" headlines, there are real struggles over access to climate records

Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved The absurdities of Lewis Carroll's classic disguise an attack on new-fangled mathematics, says literary scholar Melanie Bayley

Nuclear physics hit hardest by STFC cuts Today's announcement of funding cuts by the Science and Technology funding council has enraged scientists, especially nuclear physicists

Plastic plane takes to the skies A revolutionary new airliner with a plastic body and many other novel features took off for the first time yesterday

Loopholes in climate deal could render it useless The devil is in the detail, and a deal to slash emissions by 20 per cent could in fact increase them by 10 per cent

David Nutt questions new government principles Draft principles on scientific advice to government have had a critical reception.

Masterworks in Petri dishes Dangerous, yes; useful, sometimes; works of art - no. But this gallery of the best microbial artworks might change your mind

Martin Rees: Getting to the right desks in government As the Royal Society enters its 350th year, its president says its mission is to speak up for science to public and politicians alike

How complexity rules our lives In his latest book, The Perfect Swarm, Len Fisher ranges far and wide to discover what tips the science of complexity has for us - with mixed results

Copenhagen diaries: Royalty and Hollywood spice it up Who cares about the environment minister of a small island state when His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales is at hand?

Copenhagen talks shift gears As world leaders prepare to descend on the climate negotiations in Denmark, the key issues remain unresolved

Small fingers give women a sensitive touch Women have a more sensitive touch than men, but only because their fingers are usually smaller

Locked-in man controls speech synthesiser with thought If the repertoire of signals the brain implant can translate is widened, it could revolutionise communication for people with complete paralysis

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Paul Marks, technology correspondent

After many years and many setbacks as its scientists and engineers struggled to build the world's first plastic aircraft, Boeing of Seattle finally coaxed its 787 airliner into the air yesterday.

Boeing says the successful three-hour test flight (shown in the video below) from Everett, Washington, heralds the start of a programme in which six 787 aircraft will soon begin flying round the clock test flights.

The plane brings new thinking to many aspects of airplane design.

Catherine Brahic, environment news editor, Copenhagen

Never mind the ministers who are flying in to Copenhagen to give the climate talks a well-needed kick in the rear-end. There are far more interesting personalities at hand. Let's be honest: who cares about the environment minister of a small island state whose fate will be sealed by rising sea levels when His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales is at hand?

Charles painted a picture of a a hypothetical holistic world where man and nature live in harmony. "Mankind can be assured only if we rediscover ways in which to live as a part of Nature, not apart from her," he said, "surely now is the time to recognize that we cannot have capitalism without Nature's capital?"

And who cares about royalty when you can have Hollywood glamour?

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Smart CCTV learns to spot suspicious types Video-analysis software can follow people from camera to camera in busy public places and identify those who are behaving suspiciously

50 reasons why global warming isn't natural A British newspaper today published "100 reasons why global warming is natural". We take a quick look at the first 50 of its claims, and debunk each one

Copenhagen: how to get less gas for your buck China came to Copenhagen offering to cut its economy's "carbon intensity". So what if everyone did it this way rather than cutting emissions?

Baby black holes implicated in universe's mightiest rays The merger of two types of dead star to form a black hole may explain the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays

LCD screen can recognise what happens in front of it See users wave their hands in front of the prototype to manipulate objects displayed on the Minority Report-style gadget

Trust firstborns to show their selfish side Firstborn children are more likely to achieve greatness, but when they play a game for money they are mistrustful and uncooperative

Adam Afriyie: Debating science publicly We invited the science spokesmen of the three main UK political parties to set out their views on science. The Conservatives' Adam Afriyie is the first to respond

Rise and fall of a dinosaur hunter Nate Murphy made his name as a talented amateur palaeontologist. Then he found the law was getting in his way

Copenhagen diaries - a staggering inability to do maths Catherine Brahic went to the Copenhagen climate change summit, and discovered that the first problem was getting in

Fake blood cells so agile they can carry drugs Copycat red blood cells can squeeze through the smallest spaces to deliver drugs and imaging agents anywhere in the body

People with autism struggle to view self People with autism have trouble reading the emotions of others. Now brain scans suggest they also find it hard to get in touch with their inner selves

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Fred Pearce, environment correspondent, Copenhagen

Captain America is coming to the rescue. That's how Todd Stern, head of the US delegation to the Copenhagen climate talks, sees it anyhow.

Having brushed away the Bush years, Obama's envoy is now keen to dispel any ideas that the US is not in the vanguard of fighting climate change. Certainly ahead of Europeans who are, as ever, living in the past - literally, in this case.

Stern's big trick, as outlined at a press conference today, is to obliterate the 15 years from 1990 to 2005 during which US carbon emissions soared. If you put those to one side, he said, Uncle Sam looks pretty good.

Michael Le Page, features editor

A British newspaper today published a list of "100 reasons why global warming is natural".

Here we take a quick look at the first 50 of their claims - and debunk each one.

1) There is "no real scientific proof" that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man's activity.

Technically, proof exists only in mathematics, not in science. Whatever terminology you choose to use, however, there is overwhelming evidence that the current warming is caused by the rise in greenhouse gases due to human activities.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 per cent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the Earth during geological history.

Misleading comparison. Since the industrial age began human emissions are far higher than volcanic emissions.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth's history came around 800 years before rises in CO₂ levels.

In the past 3 million years changing levels of sunshine triggered and ended the ice ages. Carbon dioxide was a feedback that increased warming, rather than the initial cause. In the more distant past, several warming episodes were directly triggered by CO₂.

Fred Pearce, environment correspondent, Copenhagen

China came to Copenhagen offering to cut the carbon intensity of its economy - or the amount of carbon dioxide it produces per Yuan of GDP - by more than 40 per cent within a decade. That's a big promise, and other developing nations like India are offering to follow suit.

So what if all nations forgot about emissions cuts and instead opted for some kind of carbon intensity target?

Let's start by saying this is not a likely option, nor a desirable one. Global carbon efficiency targets are not the way to address climate change because they set no absolute caps on emissions. CO₂ emissions can keep rising so long as GDP rises faster.

But there's a point to the exercise: the numbers make it clear that you can be rich without emitting vast amounts of CO₂.

Catherine Brahic, Environment news editor, Copenhagen

Five hours, zero degrees centigrade, no food, no water. Snow flurries. Dozens of large (very large) Danish police manhandling the crowds, arms linked to form human walls and cordon off the hundreds of waiting people, who teetered between hilarity and fury.

The scene was repeated at the various gates to the Copenhagen climate conference, from 7 am this morning to when the doors closed at 6 pm. I waited five hours in the blistering cold to get in, and I was among the lucky ones. My colleague, Fred Pearce, waited nine before the gates were shut before his nose. Above him a digital sign fastidiously counted the growing number of climate refugees around the world. He'll have to do it all again tomorrow.

"It's not the Danish, it's the UN," one staff member muttered under her breath when I finally made it in.

Ewen Callaway, reporter

People with autism, conventional wisdom goes, have trouble reading the emotions of others. However, brain scans suggest they also have difficulties getting in touch with their inner selves.

In a study published yesterday in the journal Brain, Michael Lombardo at the University of Cambridge reports scanning the brains of 66 males - half with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), half developmentally normal - while they thought and made judgements about themselves and, separately, Queen Elizabeth.

For the non-autistic subjects, two brain areas linked to self-reflection proved more active when they thought about themselves, compared with thinking about the queen. 

Not so for those with ASD. One region, the ventralmedial prefrontal cortex, tended to respond similarly to regal and personal judgements, while the second region, the middle cingulate cortex, proved more active when ASD patients thought about the queen.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm Friday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Octopuses use coconut shells as portable shelters Remarkable footage of veined octopuses collecting coconut halves for use when under threat could be the first example of tool use in invertebrates

3D modelling recreates dinosaur running Hadrosaurs moved on four legs at slower speeds and reared up on two when running, according to 3D computer simulation

Learning to love to hate robots Robots have begun to make their way into homes and workplaces, but they aren't always model friends or colleagues

Deniergate: Turning the tables on climate sceptics The "climategate" emails have put climate scientists in the spotlight - in the interest of fairness, New Scientist examines those who disagree with them

Our atmosphere came from outer space Comets may have given birth to Earth's atmosphere, rather than volcanoes spewing gases from deep within the planet

Pregnant women develop emotion-reading superpowers Being pregnant seems to make women better at reading threatening facial expressions - perhaps because it makes mothers-to-be hyper-vigilant

Scientific advisors may be guaranteed independence MPs have demanded that independent scientific advice be enshrined in Whitehall, underlining deficiencies in British government culture

Double blow for 'hot rock' geothermal power Two major geothermal energy projects in California and Switzerland have been shelved over technical issues and safety fears

Flexible solar cell implant could restore vision Some forms of blindness occur because photoreceptors in the retina degrade. The first flexible implant could help

Anti-HIV vaginal gel fails A vaginal gel designed to block HIV infection during sex has failed in a trial of 9385 women

Higgs in space: Orbiting telescope could beat the LHC The FERMI space telescope could beat the Large Hadron Collider to the first evidence of the Higgs boson, the particle thought to give others mass

The best books of 2009 New Scientist editors and contributors give their picks for the best science books of the year

That inexplicable feeling of being 'you' Does changing your hairstyle change who you are? How about losing your memory entirely? A new exhibition explores the slippery notion of identity

Psychiatry's civil war Rewriting the psychiatrists' bible has led to an ugly row between rival factions and claims that tens of millions will end up on unnecessary drugs

Motion-sensing phones that predict your every move Phones that learn their user's patterns of behaviour can use this information to provide a cheaper, more reliable service

Cave 'breathing' regulates growth of stalactites The way caves "breathe" from season to season is the true controller of stalactite growth - so estimates of ancient rainfall may be wrong

Holiday wish list: More books for giving From hangover cures to vintage comics to the one book you shouldn't buy, more perfect presents from our holiday wish list

Wind farms don't affect property prices US government study of thousands of house sales across the country concludes that wind turbines take no toll on property values

NASA to get budget boost for exploration, says analyst The agency is sure to get an injection of cash to rescue its faltering space programme, says a Washington insider - but probably not the $3 billion recommended

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Ewen Callaway, reporter

It's been a difficult week for geothermal power.

A US firm scuttled its plans to tap heat locked in northern California, The New York Times reports. A day earlier, Associated Press reports, concerns about setting off earthquakes prompted the cancellation of a Swiss geothermal project linked to small tremors in Basel in 2006 and 2007.

Such plants work by pumping water into hot rocks several kilometres down, forcing small cracks in the rock to expand. Steam escapes through the cracks to the surface, where it drives a turbine. Yet some critics say the process increases the risk of earthquakes, New Scientist wrote earlier this year.

Now, says AP, an assessment at Basel has found that the risk of further earthquakes would be too high to continue drilling. Continuing the project is impossible because it would trigger up to 30 earthquakes in the first phase of drilling alone, said Christoph Brutschin of Basel's environmental and economic department.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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How male bedbugs avoid getting shafted Males in danger of stab wounds from the penises of other males have evolved a way of telling their "mates" to back off

Google demonstrates quantum computer image search Trials show that an algorithm running on a superconducting quantum chip can recognise cars in photos "faster than any Google data centre"

BMJ criticisms of Tamiflu questioned The journal's new analysis fails to show drug is ineffective against seasonal flu, and the claims are irrelevant to pandemic flu anyway

DNA's guardian gene found in placozoans Tiny amoeba-like animals have the same key protective gene as humans, shedding light on when it evolved

Plastic bags recycled into nanotubes Waste polyethylene from shopping bags and other sources can easily be converted into carbon nanotubes suitable for use in batteries

The polar bear vanishes The Ice Bear was sculpted this morning from a 9-tonne block of ice in London. Watch it melt via our live feed, or send us your photos of it

Art-Sci, 70s style Ismond Rosen married psychoanalysis, art and technology - and 1970s Freudian attitudes are evident in his work

Biological passport to catch sports cheats The composition of an athlete's blood can now be used as evidence of illegal doping, even if no substance is found

Top science adviser calms budget fears The ring-fenced science funding promised by the UK government may survive intact, according to the chief science adviser

Holiday wish list: Science becomes fiction This partnership between writers and scientists never misses a trick

Holiday wish list: Dinosaurs and flying cars Check out more book recommendations from our holiday wish list

The perfect way to slice a pizza Ever concerned you're not getting your fair share? Mathematicians have finally found the answer

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Tony Flanders, Sky & Telescope magazine

The Geminid meteor shower this weekend will be one of the strongest and most easily viewed of the year.

This year the moon will be nearly new when the Geminids peak during Sunday evening and Monday morning. The shower's "radiant" - the point in the sky from which they all seem to originate - is near the stars Castor and Pollux.

The shower should peak around 5am GMT on the morning of the 14th, corresponding to midnight EST and on the 13th at 9pm PST - excellent timing for North America and Western Europe. Under dark-sky conditions you might see as many as 120 medium-speed meteors per hour. The shower is active to a lesser extent for at least a day or two beforehand and about one day after.

The Geminid meteor shower is extremely unusual in that its parent object isn't a comet.

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Stem cell transplants treat 'incurable' blood disorder For the first time, adults with sickle-cell anaemia seem to have been cured

Brain scan reveals who will keep their promises The finding raises the possibility of using brain scans to determine the true intentions of criminals who are up for early release on parole

Battery lithium could come from geothermal waste water The hot waste water from a geothermal power plant on the San Andreas fault is a rich source of lithium - now the company is planning to extract it

Clever folds in a globe give new perspectives on Earth A new technique for translating the surface of the globe into flat maps provides many different ways to look at the world

Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia

You have the power to make music... evolve Act as the force of natural selection in this experiment in cultural evolution - and make music in the process

The fallout of the £600 million science cuts Who is going to be hit by the cuts to the higher education and research budgets announced this week?

Holiday wish list: Most wanted video games What do this season's hottest video games have in common? Steven Poole finds they hark back to an earlier era

Mass poisoning to keep carp invaders from Great Lakes Tens of thousands of fish have been killed in a drastic attempt to safeguard the lakes' sports and commercial fishery from Asian carp

Holiday wish list: A thirty-year hunch This is ostensibly the tale of Joseph Priestley - but it's also a compelling inquiry into the nature of scientific discovery

Strange 'Norway spiral' was an out-of-control missile A huge, glowing whirlpool that appeared in the skies above Norway on Wednesday was most likely a failed Russian missile launch, says a Harvard astrophysicist

Campaign to reform English libel law launched A coalition of pressure groups launched a campaign today at the Law Society in London to renew calls for the reform of libel law

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Mega-flood filled the Med in months At the flood's peak the sea's level was rising by over 10 metres per day, borehole and seismic data reveal

Stephen Wolfram: 'I'm an information pack rat' The star physicist reckons he can model the entire universe using tiny computer programs - meanwhile he's trying to reinvent the search engine

The research that might save us after Copenhagen Science has its work cut out for the next decade if we are to reach a low-carbon society. New Scientist finds the stepping stones

Dogs vs cats: The great pet showdown Which makes the best furry friend? We set canine against feline in a scientific best in show - the winner is revealed here

Spying begins on UK web users More than a million UK internet subscribers will soon have their traffic spied on by their service provider, in an attempt to gauge the scale of music piracy

Diligent diabetes control increases crash risk Laws requiring diabetic drivers to keep their blood sugar low appear to increase their risk of having an accident

Dirty babies get healthier hearts Affluent, modern babies live in a sanitised world, which might increase their risk of developing diabetes, stroke and heart disease later in life

£600 million cut hits British science The UK government's Pre Budget Report contains a bombshell for scientists

Profit sharing helps crack DARPA's balloon challenge A pyramid incentive scheme enabled an MIT team to solve the military research agency's Network Challenge, finding 10 weather balloons across the US

The great alone: Scott and Shackleton's Antarctic Photographers accompanied Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton on their ill-fated expeditions to Antarctica - here are some of their best pictures

Prelude to the cyborg age A new exhibit of digital art is a beautiful - and sometimes sinister - futuristic playground

Holiday wish list: Coffee table couture The most stunning and informative picture books of the season - something for everyone on your holiday gift list

Frog embryos listen for bad vibrations to avoid snakes The eggs of the Central American red-eyed tree frog decode vibrations to distinguish between hungry snakes and torrential rainfall

Holiday wish list: E-reader round-up Our round-up of the best e-readers for the high-tech bookworms on your list

Holiday wish list: Atheist Christmas spirit A Christmas book for all non-believers out there

Second stalled wheel may doom Mars rover NASA's Spirit rover was already fighting an uphill battle to escape a sand trap; if a second wheel cannot be coaxed back into action, the rover may freeze to death

Death by single lethal injection: is it a human experiment? Convicted murderer Kenneth Biros today became the first person to be executed through a massive single dose of sodium thiopental, provoking criticism that it is a form of human experimentation

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Paul Marks, technology correspondent

We reported last week on plans to enforce copyright law by forcing internet service providers to spy on consumers to detect and report every piece of copied music, movies, e-books, games and software.

Now one UK ISP, Virgin Media, is trialling some of the technology needed to do that on about 1.6 million of its customers.

Provided by Detica, a subsidiary of defence firm BAE Systems, the system is being used to try and gauge the size of the alleged piracy problem. CView, as the system is known, will take a snapshot of the scale of peer-to-peer music transfers over a few months.

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Feline 'pawprint' found in HIV genome American microbiologists reckon they've found the genetic equivalent of a feline pawprint in the modern-day, human form of the AIDS virus

Women on testosterone only think they're macho Women who receive a testosterone boost act more generously than women on a placebo - but only when they don't know what they've been given

Norway could kill hundreds more minke whales next year Upping its quota by 45 per cent in 2010 is unjustified by demand for whale meat and could encourage Japan to kill more too, conservationists say

Want fresh air? Give your house a nose job... A heat-exchange system based on the temperature-regulating trick of the kangaroo rat could keep house air fresh without losing heat

Rumours that first dark matter particle found The physics blogosphere is abuzz with speculation that a dark matter particle has been found by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, an underground mine in Minnesota

Can't find the words? Google with a photo instead A smartphone app lets users snap the object of their web search instead of using words

Burt Rutan: Behind the scenes at SpaceShipTwo roll-out The first private passenger-carrying spacecraft was unveiled last night. New Scientist shadowed its designer through a stormy evening of razzmatazz

Anthrax study on baboons axed by university president Did pressure from animal-rights extremists lead to the last-minute aborting of an approved project to test a vaccine on baboons?

Innovation: Making a map for everyone, by everyone Crowdsourcing a map of the world is a supremely democratic project - now new smartphone and online apps will let anyone join in

Early birds may have dropped teeth to get airborne Fad dieting wasn't an option in the Cretaceous, so the earliest birds went to more extreme measures to address weight issues

Holiday wish list: The intellectual's crystal ball John Brockman's annual question draws a bewildering array of responses from a stellar cast of intellectuals

Royal Society to weigh into UK general election debate A Royal Society initiative, "Fruits of Curiosity", launched to shape discussions of national science policy, will be published before the election

Five ways to revolutionise computer memory You can store all your music on a personal MP3 player - which technology will do the same for your high-definition movie collection?

California gives green light to space solar power The state has approved a deal in which the Pacific Gas and Electric Company will buy power beamed down from satellites beginning in 2016

Dinosaur-killing impact set Earth to broil, not burn An asteroid impact 65 million years ago did not trigger global wildfires after all, new work suggests, leaving open the question of what killed off most of the world's species

Eat protein to heal a damaged brain A diet of chicken, fish and protein shakes might be just the thing for people with brain injuries, suggests a study in mice

You'll buy more from web ads that know how you think "Ad morphing" aims to deliver more relevant adverts to users by discerning their personality type from the way they navigate around sites

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Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

African lions living over a million years ago may have carried an early form of HIV. Now, American microbiologists reckon they've found a feline genetic "pawprint" in the modern-day form of the virus.

Robert Bambara and his team at the University of Rochester in New York found a genetic sequence in the HIV genome that they think descended from an ancient gene.

The group reckon that, because the feline version of HIV - FIV - is an old virus, the newly discovered sequence might have been taken up by FIV from host lions or tigers over a million years ago.

Andy Coghlan, reporter

Convicted murderer Kenneth Biros today became the first person to be executed through a massive single dose of the anaesthetic, sodium thiopental.

His lawyers launched a bid for an emergency stay of execution on the grounds that the procedure would amount to an experiment, and constitute a "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibited by the 8th Amendment of the US Constitution. They were not successful.

The publicity surrounding the execution drew criticism that it is a form of human experimentation.

Update: in an email to the blog Resonaances, Nature's senior physical science editor Leslie Sage has squashed the rumours that a paper is about to appear in the journal

Valerie Jamieson, physics features editor

The physics blogs are abuzz with rumours that a particle of dark matter has finally been found.

If it is true, it is huge news. Dark matter is thought to make up 90 per cent of the universe's mass and what evidence there is for it remains highly controversial. That's why any news of a sighting is seized upon.

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Is Britain's big biomedical institute politician-proof? With a general election coming, will the planned £500-million-plus UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation ever be built?

Climate control for your desk Individual air conditioning in offices could save energy and make workers more productive

Gene absence makes the kid grow rounder "Holes" in the genomes of severely overweight children have revealed a long-sought new type of genetic variant that drives obesity

Watery niche may foster life on Mars Vast banks of snow and ice on Mars could harbour liquid water just centimetres below the surface, making them potential habitats for life

Homosexual selection: The power of same-sex liaisons From penguins to fruit flies to people, nature bustles with same-sex sex. Is it an evolutionary puzzle or a force for change?

Cheap catalyst can make and break hydrogen It could allow surplus energy from wind and solar farms to be stored as hydrogen and released it to the electricity grid when it's needed

Holiday wish list: Pop-up universe The world's first pop-up book about the Large Hadron Collider

Personalised vaccines could protect all children Children whose genetic make-up means they may not be protected by the standard form of a vaccine could be given a personalised shot

French immigrants founded first British farms Ancient Brits might have continued much longer as hunter-gatherers had it not been for innovations introduced by Gallic newcomers

Physicists race to publish first results from LHC Researchers working on ALICE, one of six experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, have pipped their rivals to the post in writing up results from the accelerator's first proton collisions

Now you see it... The Ice Bear is a beautiful piece of sculpture with a powerful environmental message. Watch its creator, Mark Coreth, sculpt it from a 9 tonne block of ice live from Copenhagen on Saturday morning.

Large moon of Uranus may explain odd tilt A massive ancient moon that has since disappeared may be the reason Uranus now lies on its side

Why there's no sign of a climate conspiracy in hacked emails Nothing in the material leaked from key climate research centre undermines the overwhelming case for urgent action to prevent dangerous climate change

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Shanta Barley, reporter

The Russian secret service has been accused of masterminding the theft of the confidential data from one of the world's leading centres of climate change research. The charge comes as news emerges that hacked climate scientists have received death threats.

Since over 1000 emails were hacked from a server at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, it's been hard not to play climate change Cluedo: who committed the crime?

Rumours on the identity of the perpetrator now appear to be firming up, according to the Independent's Shaun Walker.

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Wagering on the 'God particle' Munich-based lecturer Alexander Unzicker is inviting LHC insiders and the rest of the world to place bets on finding the Higgs boson

Avatar's gaze illuminates social brain From inside a brain scanner, an interactive avatar is helping to unravel the brain activity underlying complex social interactions

Holiday wish list: A box full of Einstein This superbly illustrated book on Einstein's life and work, which contains rare facsimile documents, makes a distracting present for Einstein aficionados

The electronic fink that will squeal if you drink Misbehave while under the influence in the US, and you could be forced to wear a device that measures your alcohol level - but can it be trusted?

Bhopal: Design flaws can be repeated Good science reporting helped discover what caused the mass-killing chemical disaster, says Debora MacKenzie - but the design flaws have never been found to be responsible

The Pentagon invites you to play its red balloon game From tomorrow, $40,000 is waiting for the first person to locate 10 weather balloons in the US - the aim is to explore the spread of information online

Climate warning system could be scuppered by pirates A South African research ship will brave pirate-infested waters to observe and predict seasonal risks of monsoon-induced floods and drought

CultureLab's holiday wish list From graphic novels and science poetry to video games and e-readers, it's our wish list for fabulous holiday gifts

How science works isn't working in British schools The new science curriculum has students and teachers alike complain that it is turning science classes over to literary and philosophical debates

Why we shouldn't release all we know about the cosmos The Planck spacecraft promises a feast of data and profound insights into the origin of the universe - but we mustn't be gluttons, says Stuart Clark

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Rachel Courtland, reporter

Now that the Large Hadron Collider is back up and running, we can once again turn our thoughts - and, if we're feeling lucky, wallets - to what it might find.

Much has been made of the possibility that the LHC might uncover the Higgs boson. If it exists, the so-called "God particle" would nicely wrap up the standard model of particle physics and explain how all particles get their mass. But if it is the only new particle that is found, some physicists fear it could be a dead end that would bring us no closer to uniting all the fundamental forces of nature.

Faced with this unpalatable prospect, Stephen Hawking has a long-standing, $100 wager that the Higgs will not be found. Now, physicsworld reports, you can join the fun. Munich-based lecturer Alexander Unzicker is inviting LHC insiders and the rest of the world to place bets of up to $100 on the predictions market Intrade.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Solar-powered piloted plane makes its first 'flea hop' The first ever take-off by a piloted solar-powered plane happened today - it is meant to circumnavigate the globe one day

British bird-feeders may be splitting species During summer reunions in German forests, blackcaps that overwinter in the UK shun cousins who opt for Spain instead

Paper screens could provide depth to computer display A video projector, infrared camera and a special sheet of paper are all that's needed to explore graphical data in three dimensions

James Hansen: Copenhagen climate talks must collapse The outspoken climate scientist says that next week's climate talks must fail if the world is to tackle global warming effectively

Antarctica was climate refuge during great extinction Animals fled to Antarctica to escape global warming, suggests a fossil study - with implications for how animals may adapt to future global warming

Net piracy: The people vs the entertainment industry New laws to counter illegal downloading will be intrusive and ineffective, say internet service providers

Back to the (steam-powered) future Our new favourite sci-fi subgenre is steampunk - high tech devices thrown back into Victorian England - but why is it so popular now?

Reform movement for English libel law gathers momentum Calls for reform of the draconian libel laws in force in England and Wales have finally caught the ears of the government

Do mice with two mothers spell the end for men? If you believe some reports, the future of humanity is a race of genetically engineered women who can reproduce without men. Read this before ditching your boyfriend/husband

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Shanta Barley, reporter

Outspoken US climate scientist James Hansen has announced that climate talks next week in Copenhagen must collapse if the world is to tackle global warming effectively, reports the UK's Guardian newspaper.

A leading climatologist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen's testimony to US Congress in 1988 played a critical role in raising public awareness of global warming.

Now Hansen's back in the spotlight. He has raised eyebrows by saying that any agreement that emerges from Copenhagen will be counter-productive if it plumps for a "cap and trade" system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Debora MacKenzie, correspondent

Early on 3 December 1984, I was in my office in Geneva, Switzerland, when the BBC World Service started reporting a chemical accident in India. I got on the phone to every chemical engineer I knew.

The following week, New Scientist reported that the Bhopal disaster was probably due to a runaway chemical reaction in a tank of methyl isocyanate (MIC) that the plant's safety systems weren't designed to contain - even though their designer, US chemical giant Union Carbide, knew these reactions could happen (New Scientist, 13 December 1984, p 3).

It took a week. A measly week. The technical facts and issues were not difficult, arcane, or secret. Everything I have seen since has confirmed that story.

Yet ever since, Union Carbide and its successor, Dow Chemical, have denied responsibility, by claiming the accident was beyond their power to predict or prevent. They have never convinced me or others.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6 pm yesterday until 6 pm today. We're running it as an experiment. Did you find it useful? Do you have suggestions about how we can make it better? Let us know.

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Computers top poll of modern discoveries The microprocessor has been voted the greatest innovation of the past 50 years. Rightly so, says Federico Faggin

High-energy rays pierce foggy fabric of universe Detection of high-energy gamma rays from distant "blazars" are forcing a rethink of our ideas about the formation and evolution of galaxies

Low-carbon future: We can afford to go green An exclusive study for New Scientist shows that westerners can radically cut carbon emissions and keep their lifestyles

How our brains build social worlds What does a meeting of minds really mean? To understand how people interact, we need to think of their brains as a single system, say Andreas Roepstorff, Chris Frith and Uta Frith

Extreme oil: Scraping the bottom of Earth's barrel The extraordinary lengths we'll have to go to if we want to keep the black stuff flowing

Climate research head steps down over email leak Phil Jones has announced he will stand down while an independent review investigates allegations of professional misconduct

ExtInked: tattoos to save the world 100 volunteers get tattoos of endangered species at this unconventional conservation event

WHO changes advice on HIV therapy The World Health Organization now advises giving antiretroviral therapy to people with HIV earlier on in the infection cycle

Watch it live: dissection of famous brain In the world's first live, webcast brain dissection, scientists will cut up a human brain that revolutionised neuroscience

US and China emissions pledges won't stop 2 °C warming Modelling suggests these cuts will not be enough to head off dangerous climate change - Europe may have to take up the slack

Autism and schizophrenia could be genetic opposites The conditions may be two sides of the same coin, suggests a review of genetic data - the finding could help design complementary treatments

Radiator roads too hot for ice to handle Roads made from concrete with a nanofibre layer that heats up when fed with electricity could stay ice-free without the corrosive effects of salt

Cellphones and cancer: Interphone can't end the debate The long-awaited study is about to come out - it won't convince sceptics, even though cellphones almost certainly can't cause cancer, says Michael Repacholi

Chanee Brulé: Last night a DJ saved a gibbon The Borneo-based DJ is rescuing the apes, playing matchmaker and releasing them to sing in the wild

Split-personality home routers can cut net energy use Home broadband routers could also store web data to be shared with other users, so cutting the energy demand of internet data centres

Both of NASA's Mars orbiters are down for the count The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been offline since August - now, the Odyssey probe is down as well, spelling delays for the twin rovers, which use the orbiters to communicate with Earth

Long-lived Titan lakes are boon to life A new study suggests that lakes on the Saturn moon may not be just a "flash in the pan", giving potential life longer to develop

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Shanta Barley, reporter

Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, has announced he will stand down while an independent review investigates allegations of professional misconduct, according to a UEA press release.

A couple of weeks ago, it emerged that an anonymous hacker had broken into the CRU's system and posted over 1000 confidential emails from Jones and other key climate change scientists online.

Since then, the leaked emails have triggered a maelstrom of allegations that Jones and his colleagues manipulated data, denied critics access to data and blocked research they disagreed with from being included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report.

Ewen Callaway, reporter

In what must certainly be the world's first live, webcast brain dissection, scientists today will cut exceedingly thin sections of a human brain that fundamentally changed our understanding of memory.

Henry Gustav Molaison - known as H. M. - lost much of a brain structure called the hippocampus during an operation in the 1950s.

The procedure was meant to stop his epileptic seizures. However, the hippocampus is critical to memory formation, so the surgery left Molaison unable to form new long-term memories.

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Treating toddlers for autism will pay dividends later The first randomised controlled trial in very young children seems to settle the question of whether early screening and treatment are worthwhile

Calendar competition: the winners How have science and technology affected your world? See the answer here, in the best photos readers entered for the New Scientist 2010 calendar

The loneliness of three degrees of separation A new study suggests that loneliness can spread through society like an infection, but there may be an environmental elephant in the room

Optical pressure sensors give robots the human touch Sensors that work with light rather than mechanical signals could distinguish more subtle variations in pressure

Safety flaws in US next-gen nuclear reactors The next-generation nuclear reactors being planned for the US and China have flaws in their design, according to safety watchdogs

Seas could rise 1.4m, warns Antarctic climate review A review of Antarctic climate change forecasts that by 2100 the world's seas will have risen to levels previously thought too extreme to be realistic

UK science minister in the stocks Paul Drayson faced a hostile audience of scientists in London last night

Lotus leaf solar cells soak up more power Peppering the cells' surface with nanoscale domes could cut reflections and improve efficiency by as much as 25 per cent

Five eco-crimes we commit every day If you really want to save the planet, you should rethink how you clean your clothes - and your bottom

Organising struggle: Structures of religious violence In Radical, Religious and Violent, economist Eli Berman examines the sociology and economics of effective and resilient terrorist groups

Ask a physicist: Sean Carroll answers questions about time Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here, answers your most mind boggling questions about the nature of time.

Cellphones team up to make Wi-Fi where you want it Microsoft software allows cellphones to pool connections and create a mobile wireless hotspot for nearby computers

Knox murder trial evidence 'flawed', say DNA experts As the verdict on their murder charges looms, DNA evidence allegedly implicating Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito is being called into question

The gadget that makes a drama out of the language barrier Visiting the theatre may never be the same again, thanks to a handheld device that allows you to read the script as it is performed by the cast - in eight different languages

Dear God, please confirm what I already believe Experiments on people who believe in God suggest they endow the deity with their own views on controversial issues such as abortion

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Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago and his colleagues reckon that loneliness can spread through society like an infection.

Their study, published in this month's issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, draws on a large group of people living in a town in Massachusetts that had already been assigned as part of a heart health study.

This group of around 5,000 were given questionnaires to assess their loneliness every four years or so, enabling the researcher to track any "spread" in this gloomy emotion.

Cacioppo reckons that if you're around lonely people, you're more likely to "catch" their loneliness. For example, for every day your next door neighbour is lonely, you're likely to experience around 5 hours of loneliness.