Today on New Scientist

Extreme weather could become norm around Indian Ocean Climate models predict that the torrential rain and severe droughts created by El Niño's sibling will be typical by 2050 if nothing is done to stem warmingThe night: Your nocturnal transformation revealed Darkness triggers a cascade of changes that transforms you into an alien creature. While you're lost in dreams, your nocturnal nature is getting busyCopycat Russian android prepares to do the...

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Extreme weather could become norm around Indian Ocean

What do the torrential rains that swept across a swathe of East Africa in 1997 have in common with the record-breaking drought that Australia has just emerged from? Both can be blamed on El Niño's Indian Ocean sibling.A study looking at how climate change will affect this ocean oscillation pattern has predicted that if the world is allowed to warm uncontrollably, these kinds of extreme events will become the norm by 2050.The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)...

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The night: Your nocturnal transformation revealed

Night turns us into alien creatures (Image: Kiril Standev/Gallery Stock) Read more: "The night: The nocturnal journey of body and mind"THE transformation starts while you are still awake. Just before bedtime, body temperature plummets almost half a degree from its mid-evening peak. Melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone, surges in response. Suddenly, the pressure to sleep that has built throughout the day no longer encounters the resistance of a high...

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Copycat Russian android prepares to do the spacewalk

(Image: Mikhail Pochuyev/Photas/Tass/PA) This robot is looking pretty pleased with itself – and wouldn't you be, if you were off to the International Space Station? Prototype cosmobot SAR-401, with its human-like torso, is designed to service the outside of the ISS by mimicking the arm and finger movements of a human puppet-master indoors.In this picture, that's the super-focussed guy in the background but in space it would be a cosmonaut operating...

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Crazy comet ISON returns bearing solar system secrets

You can't keep a good comet down. After a nail-biting night in which comet ISON disappeared into the sun and then initially failed to re-emerge – prompting premature declarations of its demise – the most famous comet of recent times is now back.What remains of the teasing, icy fuzzball is unlikely to provide us with the spectacular lightshow that once looked possible. But ISON looks set to remain a source of bafflement and scientific data – not to...

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The benefits of realising you're just a brain

Our hopes, loves and very existence are just elaborate functions of a complicated mass of grey tissue. Accepting that can be hard, but neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland tells Graham Lawton that what we know should inspire us, not scare us You compare revelations in neuroscience with the discoveries that the Earth goes around the sun and that the heart is a pump. What do you think these ideas have in common?They challenge a whole framework of assumptions...

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The night: What happens at night, stays at night

Worshipping the night light (Image: Steven Schofield/Corbis) Read more: "The night: The nocturnal journey of body and mind"WHAT is "night"? A mundane answer is that it is the result of a planet rotating under a shining star. But for humans it has always meant much more than that. Night is a strange and special time, not only different from the day but also a place of unorthodox beliefs and behaviours.If we look at how various cultures imagine the...

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Feedback: Light of whose life?

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more POWER your home "24 hrs a day with green energy generated by your solar system," says the website aweenergy.com, plugging the "revolutionary product" Midnight Sun. It goes on to say that users can still benefit from the "Feed in Tariff". That's what the UK government calls the "guaranteed" price at which people with solar panels can...

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The night: A surprisingly strange place to visit

"FEWER people have been there than have walked on the moon."The places that can make that claim – the ocean deeps, the bowels of huge caves – tend to be few and far between.But not all mysterious places are physically remote. Every human on the planet visits one of the most peculiar every single day – or rather, night. Think of night as a place, rather than a time, and its oddity becomes apparent (see "The night: The nocturnal journey of body and...

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Synthetic primordial cell copies RNA for the first time

We are a step closer to understanding how life began, and we can thank the humble lemon.For the first time, genetic information has been copied inside a simple cell designed to mimic primordial life. Until now, such copying had the unfortunate side effect of destroying the cell, but researchers have found that the cell can be stabilised by adding a dash of citrate. The substance is synthesised from citric acid, a chemical found in lemons and oranges."We've...

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Genetic info copied in artificial cell for first time

We are a step closer to understanding how life began, and we can thank the humble lemon.For the first time, genetic information has been copied inside a simple cell designed to mimic primordial life. Until now, such copying had the unfortunate side effect of destroying the cell, but researchers have found that the cell can be stabilised by adding a dash of citrate. The substance is synthesised from citric acid, a chemical found in lemons and oranges."We've...

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Beer brewing could help make better bricks

THERE'S more to brewing than beer. A by-product of the process could be about to give an upgrade to a workhorse building material – red clay bricks. By blending in the grains left over from making beer, the bricks can be more environmentally friendly and better insulators.Bricks are often impregnated with polystyrene as a way to enhance their heat-trapping abilities. This is appealing, because the bricks remain strong, and they can be built into...

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Today on New Scientist

Mathematical crime-fighter helps hunt for alien worlds A statistical tool called Benford's law has been shown to fit existing exoplanet data, supporting the notion that the galaxy is brimming with alien worlds'Soft' biometrics is the new way to monitor people The US government is challenging researchers to use cameras to ID people by unique features like their gait or the shape of their earsThe night: The nocturnal journey of body and mind Explore...

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Mathematical crime-fighter helps hunt for alien worlds

A curious mathematical crime-fighter has just boosted our confidence that the galaxy is brimming with alien worlds.The statistical phenomenon, called Benford's law, has been shown to fit existing data on both confirmed and candidate exoplanets. The results suggest that of the thousands of planetary candidates, the majority will turn out to be real worlds and not errors in the data.Initially a mere mathematical oddity, Benford's law states that the...

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'Soft' biometrics is the new way to monitor people

The US government is challenging researchers to use cameras to ID people by unique features like their gait or the shape of their ears CAMERAS are strewn around our environment, catching glimpses of our faces everywhere we go, yet even the best facial recognition technology still has a hard time picking us out of the crowd.So the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has called for a new approach. The agency announced...

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The night: The nocturnal journey of body and mind

(Image: Tim McDonagh)For most of human history, dusk augured a night full of mortal terrors. We may have tamed the dark, but our ancient fear of it has left an indelible mark on us.In these articles, we explore this still-unfamiliar world: the eerie ways it can transform our bodies and minds, the unseen creatures that thrive in it, and our increasingly successful efforts to banish...

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Crunch time as comet ISON hurtles towards the sun

(Image: Emily Lakdawalla/ESA/SOHO/NASA) It is make or break time for Comet ISON as it nears its closest approach to the sun, set to occur just a few hours from now.The won't outshine the moon as previously thought, but astronomers suspect it could match the brightness of Venus – if it survives its solar encounter.This animation from NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which orbits the sun, gives a taste of what ISON has in store. The images...

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Smart software uses drones to plot disaster relief

Video: An army of drones to the rescue A coordinated army of smart software and pilotless aircraft could help emergency workers save lives and mitigate damage after disaster strikes IN THE aftermath of a disaster like the massive typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines on 8 November, confusion often reigns and sketchy information abounds. This can leave responders unsure if their efforts are being put to the best effect.A coordinated army...

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Quantum lab is dazzling vision of computer chip future

THE record-smashing quantum computer reminds me of Prince of Persia . A dizzying array of lenses and prisms that stretch across the room, it looks rather like the light-directing puzzles common in such video games. I long to twist the lenses and shoot laser beams everywhere.That wouldn't make me popular here. A quiet stillness pervades the Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information, part of the University of Bristol. Because quantum states are...

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Inbreeding shaped the course of human evolution

TALK about an inauspicious beginning. For thousands of years our ancestors lived in small, isolated populations, leaving them severely inbred, according to a new genetic analysis. The inbreeding may have caused a host of health problems, and it is likely that small populations were a barrier to the development of complex technologies.In recent years, geneticists have read the genomes of long-dead humans and extinct relatives like Neanderthals. David...

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If diabetes causes Alzheimer's, we can beat it

Evidence is growing that Alzheimer's could actually be a late stage of type 2 diabetes – if it is, we all have another big reason to live healthier lives JUST over 100 years ago, German pathologist Alois Alzheimer dissected the brain of a 57-year-old woman who had died, demented, in a hospital in Kassel. He found tangles of strange fibrous deposits that seemed to have destroyed her brain from within.Today, the disease that bears his name is a bogeyman...

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