November 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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3D mash-up maps let you 'edit' the world Accurate, large-scale 3D maps could soon change the way we design, manage and relate to our urban environments

On the origin of gods: The evolution of religion In The Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade argues that in early human societies religion evolved as the best solution to lawlessness and warfare

LHC becomes most powerful accelerator of all time Last night the rebooted Large Hadron Collider gave a beam of protons the most energy of any particle accelerator ever

The world's fastest computers The twice-yearly Top500 list has just been released - here are the five fastest machines on the planet

Drowned cities: Myths and secrets of the deep Atlantis was just a story, but other ancient civilisations really have sunk beneath the waves - complete with their temples, megaliths and pirate headquarters

The world looks different if you're depressed People with the condition find it easy to interpret large images or scenes, but struggle to "spot the difference" in fine detail

Hypocritical or apolitical? Von Braun deconstructed The reputation of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi-to-NASA rocket genius, is revisited in Dark Side of the Moon by Wayne Biddle

Science, according to Ricky Gervais Ricky Gervais's new stand-up act Science doesn't exactly live up to its name - but who would really want it to?

Is British nuclear physics doomed? Recent funding reductions have damaged the British nuclear physics community - now it faces a new round of cuts

Great and good share hopes and fears for Copenhagen New Scientist asked leading scientists, politicians and business people to tell us if the imminent climate change talks can deliver

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This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm 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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New Scientist TV - November 2009 Find out how videoconferences could go 3D, how we interact with animals and how an ultra-realistic 3D map was made, in this month's New Scientist vodcast

Proper use of English could get a virus past security Malicious computer code can be hidden in plain English text to fool antivirus programs

Fresh claim for fossil life in Mars rock The 1996 claim that a meteorite contains microbe fossils from Mars has been boosted by the rejection of a non-biological explanation for the minerals

Why the hammerhead shark got its hammer Its widely separated eyes give it super-vision that can judge distance and so track prey better than other sharks

Philip Glass's hypnotic astronomy Philip Glass's new opera Kepler explores the astronomer's tumultous intellectual path and he struggled with the cosmos and with theology.

Pop star prof worried about UK's support for LHC Brian Cox, pop star turned professor, used a lecture at the Royal Institution in London last night to question the British government's commitment to the Large Hadron Collider.

Rare star smash may explain mystery outburst A star that brightened dramatically in 2002 may have been sent into a spin by another star, X-ray observations suggest

Dinosaurs in the web of life Palaeontologist Scott Sampson's Dinosaur Odyssey brings dinosaurs back to life as living, breathing parts of their long-vanished ecosystems

Steven Laureys: How I know 'coma man' is conscious The physician who diagnosed Rom Houben as conscious after 20 years as a coma patient has no time for those who doubt Houben's abilities

Networked surveillance minicopters can't be kept down Each weighs only 30 grams but carries motion sensors, can change course and warn fellow craft of obstacles, and could even carry a small camera

Welcome to the high-carbon future From coal, soot and pencils to electronics, nanoribbons and atom-thick semiconductors - carbon is turning out to be even more talented than we thought

'Simple' bacterium shows surprising complexity First "blueprint" of a minimalist bacterium show it is not so simple after all - challenging textbook accounts of the way genes work together

Energetic gamma rays spotted from 'microquasar' After decades of searching, astronomers using two different telescopes have found high-energy gamma rays emanating from a disc around a dense stellar remnant

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Richard Fisher, deputy news editor

It's arguably the most scrutinised piece of rock ever. Now an even closer look at a meteorite from Mars suggests it may show signs of life after all.

In 1996, David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texax, and colleagues proposed that that a chunk of Mars rock found in Antarctica, called ALH 84001, contained possible signs of past life on the Red Planet, such as complex carbon-based molecules and microscopic objects shaped like bacteria

Many researchers doubt the claim, however, and various suggestions have been made for how the structures could have been created without life.

One area of disagreement centred around nanocrystal magnetites in the rock, some of which appear to have chemical and physical features identical to those produced by contemporary bacteria. Sceptics of the biological explanation suggested that the magnetites were created when carbonate decomposed under high pressures and temperatures, perhaps in the heat of the impact that ejected the meteorite 15 million years ago or deep beneath the Martian surface.

Now a fresh analysis by McKay and colleagues rules out the carbonate decomposition explanation.

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Rainbow trapped for the first time An ingeniously simple device, made with just a magnifying lens and a plate of glass, has been used to trap a rainbow of visible light

Superconductors can come in from the cold Calculations suggest that a wire can be an electrical superconductor even if some sections are at room temperature

First osmosis power plant goes on stream in Norway Sited on the banks of the Oslo fjord, it generates electricity using the natural process that keeps plants standing upright and our body cells rigid

How to wind snail shells up the wrong way Prodding embryos with a glass rod made snails reverse their "handedness", giving insight into when the symmetry of bodies begins

Brain scanner can tell a Dali from a Picasso The brain seems to have a code for different artistic styles, which could one day be used to classify art

China ups the ante on climate True to its word, China has announced emissions cuts as soon as the US did, says Catherine Brahic

New space telescope to hunt for stealth asteroids NASA's WISE infrared telescope will be able to find hundreds of near-Earth objects and maybe even a faint Jupiter-sized object lurking in deep space

HIV infections on the decline Fewer people are becoming infected with HIV, according to a new report

The eye-catching best of fluid dynamics Beautiful images from experiments in fluid dynamics, as exhibited by physicists at a meeting in Minnesota this week

Sleep success: How to make ZZZs = memory From playing sounds to sniffing roses to dreaming of computer games, we are learning how to optimise sleep for better learning and memory

'Holographic' videoconferencing moves nearer to market A new twist on a Victorian theatrical trick could see 2D 'holographic' projections used in business meetings

Obama offers fixed targets for US emissions cuts The US president has given a major boost to next month's Copenhagen talks by offering firm targets for cuts in US greenhouse gas emissions

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Catherine Brahic, environment news editor

You can't fault them for not being true to their word. China has always maintained it would not set emissions targets until the big emitters of the west - in other words, the US - did their bit. So it was: hard on the heels of the US offer of firm emissions reductions, China announced last night that by 2020 it will cut its emissions per unit of GDP by between 40 and 45 per cent relative to 2005 levels.

This is what's known as carbon efficiency, and the announcement follows on president Hu Jintao's promise in September that the country would improve carbon efficiency "by a notable margin by 2020 from the 2005 level". China's climate ambassador,Yu Qingtai, yesterday said China will not adopt fixed emissions targets at the December UN climate negotiations, reports China Daily.

China's State Council seems to have gone to pains to point out that not only will the target contribute to global efforts to curb global warming, it will also serve the nation's own development. The move was "a voluntary action" taken by the Chinese government "based on our own national conditions", says the State Council, and "is a major contribution to the global effort in tackling climate change", according to the Chinese online news agency, Xinhua.

"Appropriate handling of the climate change issue," the council's statement went on, "is of vital interest to China's social and economic development and people's benefits, as well as the interests of all the people in the world and the world's long-term development."

The UN climate negotiations kick off in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 10 days, on 7 December, and are scheduled to conclude on 18 December. Recent reports have suggested that the conference might come to very little. But it now seems there may well be firm targets on the table. All eyes are now on India, another major emitter in the developing world. 

Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

The rate of new infections of HIV is finally on the decline, according to a new report published by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The 2009 AIDS Epidemic Update (PDF) reports that, globally, new cases of HIV are down by 17 per cent from 2001. While figures are levelling off in eastern Europe, there are 25 per cent fewer new infections in east Asia.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm 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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Their breath on your skin helps you hear The feeling of someone's breath on your neck may help you understand what they're saying - so future hearing aids may puff

Milky Way's building blocks still sparkle in the sky Globular clusters may be the leftovers of small galaxies that merged to form the Milky Way

P. Z. Myers: Mild-mannered scourge of creationists His tirades against religion have provoked millions of readers, but the force behind the science blog Pharyngula turns out to be a rather genial firebrand

Nuclear fuel: are we heading for a uranium crunch? Fears of the warming effect of fossil fuels have pushed governments to reconsider nuclear power - but could a uranium shortage scupper their plans?

Race is on to use embryonic stem cells in humans After years of wrangling, several therapies using human embryonic stem cells are nearly ready to be tried in people. Which will be first?

Dark power: Grand designs for interstellar travel We could reach the stars if we built a black hole starship or a dark matter rocket - we've got the physics to do it

UK's National Science Learning Centre launched The editor of New Scientist magazine was invited to speak at a reception for the UK's National Science Learning Centre - here is his speech

Eating less meat helps the planet - and your heart Cutting back on the amount of animal produce we consume would help us meet our emissions reduction targets, and make us healthier into the bargain

How to 'unlock' the brains of coma patients Rom Houben, a conscious man presumed brain dead for 20 years, won't be the last person found to be imprisoned in their bodies, says Celeste Biever

Climate 'diagnosis' is stark message for politicians The Copenhagen Diagnosis argues that the environment is in a worse state than predicted as recently as 2007 and calls for drastic action

The sweeter side of volcanoes There is much more to volcanoes than just fireballs and noxious gas - see a different side of them in our gallery

Paul Matts: The secrets of looking young Procter & Gamble's skincare scientist knows all the signs of youth and beauty - and how to keep them

Swine flu mutation fears may be premature A mutation found in three cases of pandemic swine flu has raised fears that the virus is becoming nastier, but the evidence doesn't show anything of the kind

Decode's demise sparks privacy fears A personal genomics firm has gone bust, prompting fears about what will become of customers' genetic and medical data

US mammogram battles are the start of fights to come Unnecessary tests and treatments need to be eliminated, but convincing the public that this can mean better outcomes will be tough

Hacked archive provides fodder for climate sceptics Climate scientists are reeling from the discovery that someone has hacked into the email archive of one of their most prestigious research centres

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Celeste Biever, biomedical news editor

There will be few who didn't shiver when they heard the story of Rom Houben, a 46-year old Belgian man believed to be in a coma for over 20 years, who it has now emerged was conscious the whole time.

How many other people are out there, imprisoned by their own bodies? How might we discover more of them?

Apart from avoiding a repeat of Houben's nightmare, being able to detect full, and residual, consciousness in patients who are apparently comatose is important for other reasons.

It can change how someone who is paralysed is treated, whether their relatives continue to try and communicate with them, what medication they are given, and even the biggest decision of all; whether or not to keep them alive.

Debora MacKenzie, correspondent

A mutation found in three cases of pandemic swine flu in Norway, one fatal and two severe, has raised fears that the virus is becoming nastier - but these may be premature.

The autumn wave of the pandemic may be peaking (PDF) in parts of Europe, the US and Japan, and virologists now fear that the virus might evolve to keep itself spreading - and perhaps get more deadly in the process.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm 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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UK science policy thrashed out - gently The first debate on science policy between the current spokesmen of the three mainstream British political parties took place last night, but it was surprisingly good-natured

Last bastion of stable ice bows to Antarctic warming The East Antarctica ice sheet, which was thought to be stable, is losing billions of tonnes of ice a year - climate change may be the culprit

'Fat fingers' can become dainty for touch screens Touch-screen devices could be smaller if they could read how you use your fingers

Can you be blamed for sleepwalking crimes? Research on the causes of sleepwalking may make it easier to identify whether those who commit crimes in their sleep should bear the responsibility

Birthplace of cosmic guitar pinpointed A pulsar that is forming a massive guitar-shaped wake in interstellar gas has been tracked back to its origin

Katrina court win paves way for billion-dollar payouts A judge has ruled that the US federal government was to blame for much of the flooding caused by hurricane Katrina in 2005

Competition! Sampling Darwin Enter our competition to incorporate Darwin's famous concluding sentence into a new work of art, and win a special edition Origin of Species featuring a cover by artist Damien Hirst.

Robot arm opens doors for wheelchair users The arm can grip all sorts of handles and knobs while pushing or pulling to open a door

Odd couples of the animal world With Marty Crump's precise yet jolly prose, Sexy Orchids Make Lousy Lovers puts soap operas to shame

LHC smashes protons together for first time The particle accelerator is now officially a collider - it will attempt to break the world record for collision energies before the end of the year

African conflicts spurred by warming Africa is set to experience a surge in civil wars, causing nearly 400,000 additional battle deaths by 2030 - all as a direct result of rising temperatures, a study suggests

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This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm Friday until 6pm 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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US bets $150m on high-risk renewable energy Bags of cash are being thrown at high-risk, high-reward research by the Department of Energy. New Scientist takes a look at the lucky recipients

Melting Arctic: Forget polar bears, worry about humans Climate change is transforming the Arctic so fast that many species could be gone within our lifetimes. But the important thing is to put human self-interest first, says Alun Anderson

Friendly bacteria keep your skin's defences in check Being caked in germs sounds unpleasant, but bacteria living on our skin may play a vital role in keeping inflammation from running amok

Vaccine quest boosted by HIV that infects monkeys An HIV virus modified to infect monkeys could be a big step forward for HIV research

Orion's dark secret: Violence shaped the night sky A ring of bright stars surrounds us, giving us some of our most familiar constellations. But where did it come from?

How our brains learned to read Humans haven't been reading long enough for our brains to evolve the ability - in Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene explains how we managed it

Charles Darwin: Writing Origin 'like confessing a murder' Death is no barrier to New Scientist. 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, we have obtained an interview with its author*

Icy moon's lakes brim with hearty soup for life Lakes on Saturn's moon Titan are loaded with acetylene, a chemical some scientists say could serve as food for cold-resistant organisms, a new study suggests

Dark galaxy crashing into the Milky Way A cloud of hydrogen crashing into our galaxy now appears be a galaxy itself, packed with dark matter - many more may be out there

Low-carbon road map for China Report claims that the country can get all its new energy from renewable and nuclear power by 2050 while boosting economic growth

Greenland ice loss behind a sixth of sea-level rise The ice cap lost 1500 cubic kilometres of ice between 2000 and 2008, and the loss is speeding up

US could ban caffeine-alcohol drinks within months The US Food and Drug Administration has asked manufacturers of drinks that combine alcohol and caffeine to provide scientific evidence they are safe

'Frankenstein' fix lets asteroid mission cheat death The beleaguered Hayabusa asteroid probe is back on track to return to Earth after ground controllers cobbled together a working engine from two dead ones

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This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm 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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Belle de Jour: On science and prostitution The professional scientist and former prostitute Brooke Magnanti told her agent, "If New Scientist asks for an interview, I'll do it." We did ask

Pickled evidence for evolution Animal specimens preserved in jars look Victorian, but the images in Evidence of Evolution show there's still nothing better for studying new species

Guapa, it's your genetic ancestry I love In Latino populations, love unites people with similar mix of ancestries

Is this the end for human space flight? Have our dreams of sailing through space run out of history? Michael Hanlon thinks they have; Ivan Semeniuk can't see them being allowed to die

Dumb code could stop computer viruses in their tracks Machine code inserted into all email attachments could prevent even the newest viruses from delivering their payloads

Grigori Perelman: The genius in hiding The reclusive Russian turned down the "mathematics Nobel" and then abandoned the field altogether. Marsha Gessen's Perfect Rigor tells his story

Future colliders: Beyond the LHC Physicists are already plotting how the discoveries of the Large Hadron Collider will shape the next generation of particle smashers

Medibots: The world's smallest surgeons No more scalpels - tomorrow's lifesaving operations will use robots that crawl over your heart, scuttle into your ear and swim into your eye

Everything you wanted to know about sex (and death) In Death and Sex, biologist Tyler Volk and writer Dorion Sagan give delightful insights into two of the most important things for all of us

Water found in lunar impact probably came from comets The discovery of volatiles in lunar material ejected by NASA's LCROSS mission suggests comets delivered much of the water at the impact site

Was there a Stone Age apocalypse or not? A comet blasted North America 13,000 years ago, wiping out its megafauna and early settlers, one group insists. Not a bit of it, the sceptics cry

Better-looking sportsmen more likely to win New research, along with a Twitter-facilitated study conducted by New Scientist, reveals an important trait of the best jocks: a handsome face

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Shanta Barley, reporter

An anonymous hacker has broken into the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and posted over 1000 confidential emails from key climate change scientists online.

The emails could prove to be extremely damaging to the reputation of the scientists and the robustness of their research if they are revealed to be authentic.

A UEA spokesman said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine."

The authors of the emails include Philip Jones, the Director of the CRU, Keith Briffa, also at the CRU, and Michael Mann at the University of Virginia.

An anonymous link to an FTP server where the data was posted by the hacker first appeared on the blog The Air Vent yesterday.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm 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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I sphinx it's time to go on a diet They didn't chow down on pizza, chips and donuts, but the ancient Egyptian elite would still have had to worry about getting heart disease, says Joe Milton

Watch out, roundworms: UV phasers are set to stun With a flash of ultraviolet light, you can stun a roundworm. And a pulse of visible light has them wriggling again

Best of Twitter tunes album released Musical twitterers have found a way to condense entire compositions to fit in single, 140-character tweets - listen to them here

Gene change in cannibals reveals evolution in action Devastating brain disease caused by human cannibalism promoted protective gene mutation to emerge just 200 years ago

Crohn's blamed on lazy immune cells The bowel disease, thought to be caused by an over-exuberant immune system, may paradoxically be triggered by immune cells not doing enough

Scuba diving to the depths of human history Many prehistoric people lived by the sea - but rising sea levels have drowned their settlements. To raise their secrets from the seabed, archaeologists are swapping their boots for flippers

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Joe Milton, contributor

They didn't chow down on pizza, chips and donuts, but the ancient Egyptian elite would still have had to worry about their risk of contracting heart disease.

X-ray computed tomography scans of ancient Egyptian mummies dating back more than 3,500 years have revealed telltale signs of atherosclerosis - blood vessels clogged by the accumulation of fats - suggesting they were susceptible to heart disease just like modern day westerners.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm 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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Ripples in space divide classical and quantum worlds We're made of subatomic particles that can be in two places at once. So why can't we?

Four ways to feed the world By 2025 there will be 9 billion people on Earth, all needing food. We look at the best ways to stave off starvation

The race to build a 1000 mph car You want to be the fastest thing on four wheels. Should you use jets or rockets? Or both?

Killer bees: nasty sting, not so smart A new study has compared the wits of Africanized killer honey bees with those of a more docile European breed, reports Ewen Callaway

Social networking sites: why no abuse report button? Facebook and MySpace are failing to protect children from paedophiles and bullies, says a former senior police officer

The Mandelbulb: first 'true' 3D image of famous fractal A group of fractal image makers claim to have made the best three-dimensional portrayal to date of the Mandelbrot set, the most famous fractal equation

World on track for 6 degrees of extra heat The world will warm by a whopping 6 °C, says a new study - but is it too soon to make such a strong claim?

Breathing new life into 'old' eggs Eggs donated by young women could be used to repair the damaged eggs of older women, upping the chances that they can be fertilised

Curing a pain in the neck Help is at hand for sufferers of that plague of modern office workers: neck and upper back pain. Debora MacKenzie reports

Cellphone app to make maps of noise pollution New software could turn cellphones into environmental sensors, enabling them to gather noise pollution data in unprecedented detail

In search of the human element Photojournalist Gary Braasch's new exhibit portrays the human side of climate change

Balearic goats could grow slow A goat that lived on the Balearic Islands until 3000 years ago had bones like a reptile - which could explain how the species survived so long

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Ewen Callaway, reporter

Killer bees may be among the most feared of all insects - but they ain't too smart.

A new study has compared the wits of Africanised killer honeybees with those of a more docile European breed.

Killer bees - which result from a cross between African honey bees and a Brazilian variety in the 1950s - have spread from Central American into the southern US. Increased intelligence had been suggested as one reason for this expansion.

Apparently not.

Nic Fleming, contributor

Facebook and MySpace are failing to protect children from paedophiles and bullies, a former senior police officer says.

The social networking sites have refused to embed a "report button" that would allow users to report abuse. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has devised the free "abuse button" that would link children and teenagers to advice and put them in contact with counsellors and law enforcement officers.

Shanta Barley, reporter

The world is on track to warm by a whopping 6 °C by the end of this century, unless steps are taken immediately to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to research published yesterday.

The Global Carbon Project, a group of 31 scientists from 7 countries led by Corinne Le Quéré at the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, used satellite and national inventory data to track emissions of carbon dioxide. They also used models to estimate carbon sinks - such as oceans and forests - that absorb the greenhouse gas (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo689).

Debora MacKenzie, correspondent

Have you got a pain in the neck at your office? No, not what you're thinking. Neck and upper back pain are the plague of modern office workers, especially women. This repetitive strain injury is caused by working long periods in bad postures with a computer keyboard and mouse: in some surveys, two-thirds of women office workers have acute neck pain associated with the trapezius muscle, the big triangular one that extends from the back of your head down to your back.

Help is at hand. Lars Andersen and colleagues at the Danish National Research Centre for the Working Environment in Copenhagen have found in the past that when people have this kind of pain, the trapezius muscle stops being able to generate much force, and what it does, it does slowly.

They knew strengthening the muscle could counter this. But they didn't know how this happened.

David Shiga, reporter

NASA officials were ecstatic at the (mostly) successful Ares I-X rocket test flight on 28 October.

It was a major step along the path to developing the Ares I crew launch vehicle, NASA's chosen successor to the space shuttle.

Following the test, Time magazine hailed the Ares line of rockets as the best invention of 2009. Fair enough, right?

Not according to vocal critics like Keith Cowing, who runs the NASA Watch website. Cowing complains that so far the Ares I rocket "only exists on paper". "I guess Time magazine got carried away with all the noise and hype," he says in a recent post.

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm yesterday until 6pm 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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Tasers safer than batons and fists Using a Taser to subdue a violent suspect is safer than wielding batons and fists, says a study of US police incidents

Mobile botnets show their disruptive potential Researchers demonstrate how a small number of infected phones could be used to attack a mobile network, making it impossible for most users to make calls or send texts

Limp reception for female 'libido drug' A drug dubbed 'female Viagra' that boosts women's libido may have come a step closer, but is it really necessary?

NASA seeks its one true glove The second Astronaut Glove Challenge for more dextrous space gloves takes place this week

Icelandic gene saga ends in bankruptcy Personalised genomics biotech deCODE Genetics has filed for bankruptcy, reports Andy Coghlan

Copenhagen - how the Danes will salvage a deal The organisers of the Copenhagen climate conference have conceded that it cannot deliver a legally binding deal. What is left for it to offer?

Don't pack your parachute: Totally free fall Teams of modern-day birdmen are racing to pull off a stunt they hope will be groundbreaking - but only metaphorically

Innovation: The dizzying ambition of Wolfram Alpha The knowledge engine's tie-up with Microsoft is just the beginning of a bold vision for the future

Toddlers insensitive to fear go on to commit crimes Adult criminals tend to be fearless, but whether this quality emerges before or after their crimes wasn't clear until now

Computational cameras perfect your photos for you New photography techniques will enable novice snappers to produce stunning images thanks to onboard image manipulation

Drink culture: it's as old as the hills Alcohol is central to human history, argues Patrick McGovern in Uncorking the past: The quest for wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages

Climate change gives ancient trees growth spurt Rising temperatures are boosting the growth of the oldest trees on Earth, but the adolescent growth spurt may - or may not - benefit the climate, say scientists

Fears over 'own goal' HIV vaccine revived Cold virus used in vaccine may raise HIV infection risk after all

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Andy Coghlan, reporter

A pioneering Icelandic company set up 13 years ago to discover links between genes and disease by analysing the health records and DNA of Icelanders this week filed for bankruptcy.

Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics discovered genes linked to diseases including osteoporosis, but its personalised DNA testing services failed to generate enough revenue to keep the company afloat.

In recent years, the scientific validity of individualised gene profiles aimed at foretelling someone's risk of disease have been challenged, undermining faith in the results from personalised DNA risk profiles. When a New Scientist reporter had deCODE Genetics generate his DNA profile, an error led to questions over whether the DNA was human.

But deCODE was at the forefront of efforts to unravel the links between inheritance and disease at a time when the first sequencing of the human genome promised a revolution in healthcare.

The blog Genetic Future has more on the financial fall out, and speculation on what would happen to genetic data in the result of a bankruptcy. 
 

This is a digest of the stories posted to newscientist.com from 6pm Friday until 6pm 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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Time-travelling browsers navigate the web's past Old versions of websites will be as easy to find as current ones with new time-travelling technology

Bangladesh mass poisoning mystery solved Researchers say they have discovered why arsenic turns up in lethal quantities in wells across Bangladesh - microbial oxidation is to blame

Meteor showers: good for skygazers, bad for satellites Several space missions have been damaged or destroyed by meteoroids over the years - David Shiga rounds up the casualties

Headphone risk to pacemakers The small powerful magnets used in modern headphones can cause pacemakers and defibrillators to malfunction

Hunger strike draws attention to food security summit As the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's world summit on food security opens in Italy, Jessica Hamzelou asks whether it is all a waste of time

On the Origin of Species, Revisited The most influential piece of popular science writing ever was published 150 years ago. Now New Scientist brings you a 21st-century remix of Darwin's classic by geneticist and author Steve Jones

Mystery 'dark flow' extends towards edge of universe Over a thousand galaxy clusters are streaming in one direction across the sky - some think it's the first sign of a neighbouring universe

NASA to restart primate irradiation testing The effect of space radiation on astronauts is still a big question mark for deep space exploration - primate research is meant to cut it down to size

Making music on thin ice Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has composed a multi-media symphony using sounds of ice melting that he recorded on a trip to Antarctica in the hopes of delivering an urgent message about climate change.

Paradox lost: molecular collisions kept early Earth warm 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was so faint, the oceans should have been ice. They weren't, and now a modelling study suggests the greenhouse effect, and nitrogen explain why

First universal programmable quantum computer unveiled Ion-trap two-qubit device put through its paces

Meteor shower this week as we cut through comet trails Hundreds of Leonid meteors an hour will stream across the sky on Tuesday when the Earth passes through old comet streams

How reputation could save the Earth The power of reputation should be harnessed to stop selfish people from wrecking the planet, say David Rand and Martin Nowak

Ray Mears: We'll struggle to survive climate change Ray Mears is Mr Bushcraft. He wants people to be confident about surviving in the wild, but reckons most of us won't make it through a global climate crisis

Impact reveals lunar water by the bucketful NASA's LCROSS mission has confirmed an icy store of water at the moon's south pole

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Jessica Hamzelou, reporter

For the bosses of two major world organisations, it was an unusually austere weekend. Food and Agriculture Organization director general Jacques Diouf and UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon undertook a 24-hour hunger strike (YouTube). 

The fast was timed to draw attention to the FAO's world summit on food security, which opened in Rome, Italy, today.

With over a billion of the world's population going hungry - a record high - agricultural aid remains the FAO's "primary global issue of concern".  

But a draft declaration (PDF) drawn up at the summit for European heads of state to sign has been criticised for shirking commitments to eradicate world hunger.

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Philip Rosedale: The web needs to be more lifelike Residents of Second Life have spent one billion hours in this digital world. Now its founder has plans to push the concept much further in a new virtual venture

Failed stellar bombs hint at supernova tipping point Two peculiar white dwarfs with more oxygen than carbon are like nothing anybody has seen before

Trees in far north provide biggest climate benefit Planting forests in the tropics could be a waste of time and money, compared with planting them at high latitudes

Plastic-hardening chemical makes men soft A compound commonly found in plastic food and drink containers appears to cause erectile dysfunction and other sexual performance problems in men. But how worried should we be, asks Nic Fleming

Cocaine and pepper spray - a lethal mix? A mouse experiment suggests deaths in US police custody may have been the result of an interaction between capsaicin and psychostimulant drugs

A joyride through the nanoworld George Whitesides and Felice Frankel take you on a whirlwind tour of the tiny in No Small Matter: Science on the nanoscale

Piezoelectronics gets green makeover Piezoelectric materials have traditionally been made from lead, but now there's a clean alternative that could soon perform just as well

Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans Consistent patterns linked to awareness of particular images could be used to detect consciousness in brain-damaged people

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Nic Fleming, contributor

Regular contact with high levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a compound commonly found in plastic food and drink containers, appears to cause erectile dysfunction and other sexual performance problems in men.

The finding, reported in the Washington Post, is likely to add fuel to the controversy over whether exposure to normal lower levels is harmful to humans and encourage campaigners calling for an outright ban.

According to the new study, male workers in four Chinese factories making BPA or using it reported an average fourfold increase in erectile dysfunction, a sevenfold increase in ejaculation difficulty and a fourfold decrease in sexual drive when compared to controls.

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Quantum 'trampoline' to test gravity A technique to bounce ultra-cold atoms provides a new way to test the strength of gravity with high accuracy

The Peeriodic Table of Illusions Illusions can tell us much about how our brains work, but first we need to know how each one works, says Richard L. Gregory

Common cold may hold off swine flu This intriguing idea would explain why swine flu's autumn wave has been slow to take off in some countries and point to new ways to fight flu

Noisy parties no problem for musical brains Differences in brain activity may make musicians better at picking out speech from a noisy background

Tagging the tigers of the sea Beautiful, predatory and endangered, tuna are rapidly being hunted to extinction. Graham Lawton joins the high-tech anglers to save them

Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics A contact lens fitted with an LED and the circuitry to harvest power from radio waves is the first step towards a new kind of head-up display

Tuna in peril as catches reach triple the limit Times are tough for tuna as scientists' advice on managing stocks falls on deaf ears

Propelled by light: the promise and perils of solar sailing Despite earlier failures, the Planetary Society is gearing up to test another solar sail in space in a year – executive director Louis Friedman explains why

Less loud sounds can still damage ears If the results in mice translate to humans, the laws that determine the noises workers can be exposed to may need to change

Muscular monkeys prompt sports doping fears A new gene therapy appears to bulk up monkeys' muscles - it adds to the worries about gene doping in sport, says Linda Geddes

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Linda Geddes, reporter

A gene therapy that appears to bulk up muscle mass and strength in monkeys - reported today in Science Translational Medicine - will undoubtedly raise fresh concerns about the potential for gene doping in sport.

We already know that some athletes use drugs like erythropoietin to increase the amount of oxygen their blood delivers, and steroids to bulk up muscle mass.

The big advantage with gene doping is that it should be harder to detect. That's because it's difficult to test for a protein that the body already produces, especially when its levels naturally vary between individuals - which might explain why some people are inherently better at sports than others.

In the new study, Janaiah Kota and colleagues at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, used gene therapy to add extra copies of the follistatin gene into the leg muscles of monkeys. Follistatin has been previously shown in mice to block myostatin, a protein that decreases muscle mass, resulting in bulked up "mighty mice".

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Suite of chatterbox genes discovered A set of 116 genes influenced by Foxp2 could have coevolved to give humans language

Fair play: Monkeys share our sense of injustice Our instinctive reaction to displays of greed and conspicuous consumption has its origins in the primate world, says Frans de Waal

Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months Detailed studies of ancient climate have revealed that the onset of Europe's "Big Freeze", 13,000 years ago, was anything but glacial

Mars rover battles for its life NASA's veteran explorer faces its toughest challenge yet as it prepares to free itself from a sand trap where it has been mired for the past six months

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for Forget the God particle - the rebooted Large Hadron Collider will give us much greater revelations

Boys with ALD bring gene therapy in from cold Two boys treated with a gene therapy for the brain disease X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy have fared so well that doctors are seeking more volunteers

Ultimate emergency call uses all open channels A new satellite radio promises to use all known communication methods to raise the alarm when the owner is in a spot of bother

Backward star ain't from around here The nearest neighbouring star to orbit the galaxy backwards appears to have come from a much brighter place

Alcohol and sports sponsorship don't mix Psychologists claim that alcohol sponsorship tarnishes the image of sport and harms athletes' health

Water purifiers for the poor fail to prove their worth Ceramic filters are the only water cleaners proven to work, as many studies into the effectiveness of treatments are flawed

DARPA: Inventing this side of the impossible In The Department of Mad Scientists, Michael Belfiore gets half the story of DARPA, the US military agency that brought us the internet and GPS

Good vibrations get a club-winged manakin going When it comes to wooing a mate, one bird finds it pays to make like a grasshopper

Will probe's upcoming fly-by unlock exotic physics? All eyes will be on the Rosetta comet-chasing probe when it flies by Earth on Friday - a past fly-by revealed a mysterious speed boost that general relativity cannot explain

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Healthcare reform bill now faces Senate test Barack Obama's landmark healthcare reform legislation passed the US House of Representatives but faces a stern test to get through the Senate

Why smells from childhood mean so much The first scent you associate with an object may be given privileged status in the brain

Ink breakthrough puts the shine into printed images A printer that can blend a range of metallic inks has made it possible for the first time to reproduce an object's sheen as well as its colour

Andrea Marshall: Queen of manta rays The marine ecologist discusses diving, underwater beauty parlours and the discovery of a new species

Cinderella fruit: Wild delicacies become cash crops From chocolate berries to monkey oranges and gingerbread plums, Africa is the home of thousands of tasty fruits whose potential is ripe for the plucking

Stone Age humans crossed Sahara in the rain Wet spells in the Sahara may have helped early humans migrate out of Africa

Super-efficient cars racing to win the X prize With $10 million prize money at stake, the race to build energy-thrifty cars that appeal to the mass market is hotting up

Energy agency warns of 'irreparable' damage New figures from the International Energy Agency warn of huge increases in carbon emissions if we do not switch to low-carbon energy sources, says Jim Giles

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Jim Giles, consultant

Take all the power stations in the United States. Together, they produce almost 1000 gigawatts of electricity - enough to boil several billion kettles simultaneously.

Now imagine building another five power stations for every one that already exists in the United States. That is about the amount of electricity generation that the world is on track to add over the next 20 years. And three-quarters of the new stations will use fossil fuels.

These startling figures were released today by the International Energy Agency. The agency predicts that between a quarter and a third of the new capacity will be built in China, which generates over 40 per cent of its electricity from coal.

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Plan to pierce heart of urban monster volcano Next month, geologists will begin to drill into a huge volcano in Italy that has towns on top of it: is that a good idea?

Head-mounted microscope sees brain beneath the skull A microscope fitted to rats' heads watched the animals' brains in action as they roved freely

Breath of fresh air transforms stem cells Specialised lung tissue has been created by exposing stem cells to the open air

Stop selling out science to commerce Corporate might and commercial pressures are undermining research. It's time for scientists to blow the whistle, say Stuart Parkinson and Chris Langley

Gizmos allow artists to 'feel' their creations Artists are leaving keyboards and mice behind to work more intuitively with touch screens, input devices with physical feedback and air-drawing

Extraterrestrial rafting: Hunting off-world sea life Do the moons of Jupiter and Saturn harbour life in their chilly oceans? A flotilla of space probes is being lined up to haul anchor and find out

Spy-in-the-cab could improve teenage driving Novice drivers are responsible for a disproportionate number of accidents - now an in-car warning system has cut incidents of reckless driving by half

Evidence recovered from dirty DNA samples Contaminated DNA that would normally be written off can now provide evidence, thanks to amplification enzymes that tolerate pollution

Why did our species survive the Neanderthals? According to Clive Finlayson in The Humans Who Went Extinct, we were just lucky

Malcolm Gladwell's miscellany of myths Superstar writer Malcolm Gladwell teases out complexities behind the obvious and fun in the mundane in his collection of essays, What the Dog Saw

The music of Life on Earth Edward Williams's music for Life on Earth is as atmospheric and innovative as the classic 1979 David Attenborough TV series it was composed for

'Space elevator' wins $900,000 NASA prize A laser-powered robot climbed 900 metres up a cable suspended from a helicopter, winning a prize that had gone unclaimed since 2005

Innovation: Can technology persuade us to save energy? Gadgets and systems designed to steer us towards greener behaviour are under development, and they work - if we'll let them

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Triple shadows and fake reflections: Future graphics See computer graphics research to be presented at the ACM Siggraph Asia conference next month - including an art installation that casts three distinct shadows

Space bombardment could have cooked cyanide for life Comet and asteroid strikes may have seeded Earth with cyanide that prepared the planet for life

Generation specs: Stopping the short-sight epidemic Myopia is on the rise all around the world, but there might be a simple way to spare many kids the need for spectacles

Nanoparticle DNA damage study: what you should know A study has found some nanoparticles can harm cells without being in contact with them: should you be worried?

Picking up mates at the white shark café Great whites roam the oceans to hunt but always touch base at their favourite dangerous dive

How your brain sees virtual you The way the brain regards the virtual "you" may help explain why some people spend large chunks of their life online playing immersive games

Pilots' artificial horizon lined up for a revamp Conventional instruments can be misread in a crisis - or so says the inventor of what he claims is a more intuitive design

Human microbes are picky about neighbourhoods on body A map of the bacteria living on the human body shows the bugs that call us home have strong preferences about where they settle

Achtung baby! German babies say 'wäh', French say 'ouain' A new study suggests that fetuses start grappling with the specifics of their mother tongue even when cocooned inside the womb, says Celeste Biever

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Celeste Biever, biomedical news editor

It can be easy to "catch" an accent if you spend enough time in a foreign country - now it seems fetuses start grappling with the specifics of their mother tongue even when cocooned inside the womb.

That's the conclusion of a new study in Current Biology that compared the cries of 30 healthy French and 30 German newborns aged just two to five days old.

We already knew that from around 32 weeks, fetuses can learn that an arbitrary stimulus is a signal that something is about to happen, and that language acquisition begins prenatally: a newborn will suck more vigorously if it hears its native language rather than a foreign one.

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Mass extinction blamed on fiery fountains of coal One of Earth's worst-ever mass extinctions may have been caused by carbon dioxide released by exploding mixtures of magma and coal

Sony demos game controller to track motion and emotion Sony looks set to be the first major console maker to bring hands-free, full-body game control to the public

TV switch-over triggers rush to see rare stars The wavelengths previously used to broadcast analogue TV in the US are now open to radio astronomers - but not for long

Nicky Clayton: Dancing with Darwin The bird cognition expert has worked with the Rambert Dance Company on its new evolution-inspired show, now on tour in the UK

Peter Diamandis: the joy of taking risks The CEO of the X Prize Foundation wants to use our competitive instincts to make the world a better place

Giant crack in Africa formed in just days A crack in the Earth's crust ripped open in just days in 2005, a new study suggests - it could be the forerunner to a new ocean

Virtual crashes and clatters get real Sounds like the clash of a cymbal used to take weeks for software to mimic - now they can be synthesised in hours

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Quakes from the 1800s still shaking planet Earthquakes far from plate boundaries can cause aftershocks centuries later

Instant Expert: The Copenhagen climate change summit The Copenhagen climate change summit is being billed as the meeting that will determine humanity's future. What is all the fuss about? We sift through the science and policy, and tell you all you need to know

Genes can show zero hour for women's biological clock A gene test available next year could tell women how long they can put off having children

Tomorrow's weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals Umbrella or sunscreen? Flood or drought? The secret of flawless weather forecasting turns out to be surprisingly simple

Skin helps heartbeat creep into consciousness Tests on a brain-damaged man suggests that nerves in the skin may play a role in our self-awareness

Salmon's ecological finprint measured Farming salmon hurts the environment less than rearing beef cattle, though there is still room for improvement

Fix climate change or else, say military top brass An international panel of military officers warns that climate change threatens global security and stability

Poorer countries make drugs the rich world won't Newly industrialised countries of the global south are developing cheap treatments for tropical diseases neglected by western drug companies

Crabs trade sex for protection This helps to explain how females defend their territory just as successfully as males despite their smaller claws

SMSes offer smart apps to basic cellphones A smart, location-based service allows cellphone users to access Facebook-like services via SMS

Why fat angers the immune system Blocking a protein could break the link between obesity and illness

Terry Pratchett: Fighting to keep the fantasy alive The prolific author discusses tinkering with science, his battle with Alzheimer's, and the odds of escaping from a crab bucket

David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs David Nutt was sacked from his role as chairman of the UK's official advisory body on drugs for his outspoken views. He explains why governments should not ignore scientific evidence

Ten inventions that changed the world See the result of a public vote to find the most important invention ever from the collection of the Science Museum, London

Murderer with 'aggression genes' gets sentence cut An Italian judge's decision to shorten a killer's sentence because of his genes is raising the question of whether genes can ever absolve responsibility for a particular act

Drug chief sacking could stifle 'polydrug' research If protests continue over the sacking of the UK's chief scientific advisor on recreational drugs, vital research on the problems of multiple drug use would be shelved

Injected cells stop body from attacking self A virtually unlimited supply of rare cells can now be produced in the lab to fight diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis in mice

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Jung's Red Book: The art of psychology Carl Jung's "lost" book - just published for the first time - is a cornerstone of our intellectual history, says its editor Sonu Shamdasani

Giant jewels and spray toads: The world's rarest species More species than ever before are facing extinction, according to the latest IUCN Red List. See some of the most endangered

Michael Green: On the shoulders of Newton and Hawking The physicist follows Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking into the Lucasian chair of mathematics at the University of Cambridge

Animated ink-blot images keep unwanted bots at bay The distorted letters we decipher to prove we are human, not a bot, are getting harder to use and easier to defeat - could images be the solution?

Space junk piles up into threat to future launches Burgeoning volumes of space debris are going to hit the economics of space flight hard and give mission controllers headaches

Pay us oil money, or the rainforest gets it Ecuador's offer to refrain from drilling for oil in the Amazon rainforest in exchange for money could be a novel way of combatting climate change

Telescope glitch could delay discovery of alien Earths Noise in a few of the CCDs on NASA's Kepler space telescope could overwhelm the signal of an Earth-like planet, but mission scientists are developing a fix

Cassini makes deepest dive yet into Saturn moon's jets The probe has flown farther into the plumes spewing from icy Enceladus than ever before - it will hunt for complex organic molecules that could hint at life

Chinese challenge to 'out of Africa' theory A 110,000-year-old jawbone found in a cave in southern China is stirring the debate over whether humans originated in Africa

What went wrong with NASA's rocket test? NASA's latest rocket test had a few glitches, but Henry Spencer wonders whether the launch means much for the future of US space flight

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Henry Spencer, computer programmer, spacecraft engineer and amateur space historian

On Wednesday, NASA launched the first rocket in its new Ares family. The flight was short, but went more or less as planned.

However, there was still a problem or two. And despite the hype, this launch's relevance to the future of US manned space flight is tenuous at best.

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Atmospheric 'tides' trigger landslides at night Some landslides slip more at night than during the day, probably because of tiny changes in atmospheric pressure

Signs of alien worlds from long ago and far, far away Light from 88 remote galaxies, emitted when the universe was young, provides some of the best evidence yet of solar systems beyond the Milky Way

Clearing oasis trees felled ancient Peru civilisation The Nazca people may have brought about their own destruction by cutting down trees that protected the land they lived on

Humans are an acquired taste for lions Tissue from two notorious 19th-century man-eaters shows that one of them took the lion's share of human prey

People, pollution and profits From school buses polluted by diesel exhaust to pesticides, regulators are failing to protect us, argues John Wargo in his book Green Intelligence

Microbes' globe-trotting has made them less diverse The way microbes disperse via wind and dust storms means that the number of unique species may be smaller than expected

Long-range Taser raises fears of shock and injury The Pentagon wants a projectile that can be fired from a grenade launcher to incapacitate someone with an electric shock - can it be safe?

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart IQ measures the brightness of our mental searchlight. But where we point it also matters

Old drugs reveal surprising new tricks Comparing the behaviour of different drug molecules may help prevent harmful side effects of new drugs and point to new uses for old ones

Theme-park dummy trick becomes teleconference tool Projecting a face onto an animatronic dummy allows a person to seem present to people far away through speech, expression and gestures

Magnetic 'eyesight' helps birds find their way Birds have magnetic particles in their nostrils, but it's their visual system that's critical for navigation

The best of this year's science writing Three annual collections look at everything from living off-grid to scratching an itch inside your head to the internet's potential to rewire our brains

Sticky future for the spider suture The genetic mechanism for the ultra-strong glue spiders use to trap prey has been unpicked, and could lead to bio-friendly surgical adhesives

Could you stop being hysterical? Hysteria by Andrew Scull explores the history of a disease that was once practically a fashion statement and has strong resonances today

Earthly treasures: The Prix Pictet photography award Another chance to see images from this year's shortlist for the global environmental photography prize

Controversy erupts over mock lunar lander contest A rival team is crying foul after a competitor's mock lunar lander was allowed to make an extra flight in a $1 million competition

Chemical tag to identify black-market caviar Caviar from farmed fish can now be "tagged" - which could prevent the black marketing of poached sturgeons and save the fish from extinction

Robot driving companion brings emotion to navigation An expressive, sensitive robot head for your dashboard brings a touch of WALL•E to the usually impassive wayfinding gadget

Fighting the anti-vaccine brigade - with science As pandemic flu vaccine is rolled out around the world, expect pseudo-scientific hell to break loose, says Debora MacKenzie

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