Zoologger: Deep-freeze maggot feeds on new form of fat

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world (Image: Scott King) Species: Eurosta solidaginis Habitat: the great outdoors of North America from Florida to Canada, mostly inside cancer-like galls on the stems of the goldenrod plantThere are a few ways to resist death in the deep freeze of a cold winter. If you are a human, you might invest in a warm coat and a storage...

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Extreme hygiene: Cleaning a hippo's mighty molars

(Image: Reuters/Alex Lee) Open wide, please. Keeping a safe distance, this man is brushing the teeth of a hippopotamus at a wildlife reserve in Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, China. Hippos have 40 teeth, and with the only recorded bite measuring a colossal 8100 newtons, he can't be blamed for taking precautions.The visible canines grow throughout the hippo's life, some reaching 50 centimetres in length. As the teeth don't yellow over time, such...

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Losing our religion: Your guide to a godless future

(Image: Sylvia Serrado/Plainpicture) The human mind is primed to believe in god, so why are so many people abandoning religion – and should we be worried about living in an atheist world? ON AN unseasonably warm Sunday morning in London, I do something I haven't done for more than 30 years: get up and go to church. For an hour and a half, I sing, listen to readings, enjoy moments of quiet contemplation and throw a few coins into a collection. At...

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A visual time machine into US history

19:30 30 April 2014Only researchers could explore the fascinating corners of the American Museum of Natural History's archive of photographs – until now. The museum has just launched a digital database of more than 7000 images, now accessible on its Digital Special Collections website. Here is our pick of some of the finest images from across the collections. David Stock Image 1 of 8In 1918, artist Howard Russell Butler painted this solar eclipse...

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Stem cell revival: The 1990s are back

"SINCE what works in sheep is likely to be possible in humans, we are suddenly propelled right past the imagined techniques of Brave New World." That was how New Scientist greeted the news, in March 1997, of the creation of Dolly the cloned sheep.It has taken longer than expected. More than 17 years later, what worked in sheep finally appears to be working in humans (see "Insulin-making cells created by Dolly-cloning method"). This is a potentially...

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Neanderthals may have been our intellectual equals

Enough of the cheap jibes: Neanderthals may have been just as clever as modern humans. Anthropologists have already demolished the idea that Neanderthals were dumb brutes, and now a review of the archaeological record suggests they were our equals.Neanderthals were one of the most successful of all hominin species, occupying much of Europe and Asia. Their final demise about 40,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens walked into their territory,...

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Antibiotic-resistant superbugs now a global epidemic

Bacteria that resist antibiotics are widespread around the planet, concludes the first global review of antibiotic resistance To make matters worse, the World Health Organization, which produced the report, has revealed that there is no globally standardised way to assess and share information on drug-resistant infections – something the WHO will now make a priority."Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and...

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Execution botched despite lethal-injection warnings

A death penalty execution in Oklahoma has gone horribly wrong. And it has happened despite warnings that as states tinker with the drugs used in lethal injections, they are in uncharted territory and risk violating the US Constitution's provision against "cruel and unusual punishment".Yesterday, two inmates, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, were scheduled to be killed using an untested drug cocktail. This included the sedative midazolam, which...

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Astrophile: Dizzy exoplanet has a compact 8-hour day

Astrophile is our weekly column on curious cosmic objects, from the solar system to the far reaches of the multiverse Object: Young gas giantRotation rate: 25 kilometres a secondDo you feel there is never enough time in a day? Then don't move to Beta Pictoris b. A day on this fast-paced exoplanet lasts just 8 hours, making it a poor choice for the temporally challenged. You would also be battling a dusty atmosphere, searing temperatures and a total...

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Today on New Scientist

Cyborg angst: 5 ways computers will perplex us in 2039 What is the ideal number of fingers? Do plants need Facebook? All this and more is on the agenda of a fictional conference set 25 years in the futureFibre sends appetite-suppressing molecule to the brain Mice on a high-fat diet gain less weight if fibre is added to their food, thanks to a fibre-related fatty acid that makes a surprise beeline for the brainThe bacteria that chat back and tell...

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Cyborg angst: 5 ways computers will perplex us in 2039

Continue reading page |1|2 Brain chips mean we are struggling to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers. Self-driving cars restrict old-school human drivers to special recreation parks. And the optimal number of fingers is 12.5.Confused? It's a vision of the world in 25 years, as dreamed up by today's researchers in computer-human interaction (CHI).CHI normally means investigating better ways for people to interact with...

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Fibre sends appetite-suppressing molecule to the brain

It seems fibre really does go a long way. One of its breakdown products can ride through the blood stream of mice before settling in the brain, where it helps control hunger.Much research into appetite has focused on the role that hormones play, but in the last few years researchers have found that mice can lose their appetite even if gut hormone levels remain unchanged. The latest work, by Gary Frost at Imperial College London and his colleagues,...

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The bacteria that chat back and tell you how they are

Do you speak bacteria? The first conversations with microbes are already under way.Manuel Porcar at the University of Valencia in Spain and his colleagues are developing a way for bacteria and humans to talk to each other, by converting light waves into speech. So far the bacteria have told the team how suitable their surroundings are.Porcar's team engineered gene switches in Escherichia coli to produce proteins that emit different coloured fluorescent...

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Pfizer's AstraZeneca bid: bitter pill or welcome tonic?

News that US pharmaceutical powerhouse Pfizer wants to buy UK-based rival AstraZeneca for £60 billion has got the business world buzzing. If it happens, it would be the biggest takeover by a foreign company the UK has seen. But what would it mean for UK science?AstraZeneca is one of the two giants of UK pharmaceuticals. The other is GlaxoSmithKline. Both have innovative research programmes, often working with universities and smaller companies in...

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One rule of life: Are we poised on the border of order?

There are signs that all living things sit on the knife-edge of criticality – something that could help them adapt to complex and unpredictable events WHEN physicists take an interest in the living world, some biologists fear the worst. After all, goes the bad joke, there's only so much you can gain by modelling a cow as a sphere. But one crucial idea from physics may hold valuable insights into complex biological behaviour in everything from birds...

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Avoid camels to escape MERS, warns Saudi minister

Saudi Arabia's health minister today warned Saudis on national television to avoid close contact with camels, and not to consume raw camel meat or camel milk, after a report that dromedaries are the "plausible" source of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus. The warning came as a team from the World Health Organization (WHO) arrived in the kingdom to investigate an accelerating outbreak.Saudi authorities announced 32 new cases of the...

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Epic Mars flooding triggered by collapsed crater lake

Noah would have loved this. Mars probably had its own colossal flood millions of years ago, when an ice-covered lake cracked open and gushed to the surface. The scenario hints that buried lakes sheltered microbes that may even now lie dormant in subsurface ice.On Mars, several huge channels seem to originate in the boulder-strewn floors of deep chasms and impact craters."Huge amounts of water had to flow through these channels," says Victor Baker...

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Today on New Scientist

Pharma megadeals do nothing for neglected medicines Drug giants are busy gobbling each other up to consolidate their strengths. What does this mean for the health challenges already on their fringes?US death penalty practices raise disturbing questions A botched execution, drawn-out court battles and fresh concerns over the innocence of those on death row are plaguing the nation's capital punishment programmesScent of a man: Male sweat stresses out...

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Pharma megadeals do nothing for neglected medicines

Big may not necessarily mean better if Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, buys UK giant AstraZeneca.The announcement that the company is to pursue AstraZeneca, despite being rebuffed in January, comes a week after Swiss firm Novartis and GSK of the UK, swapped assets. The deal strengthened Novartis's already pre-eminent position in cancer drug development, and reinforced GSK's dominance in vaccines. "By doing that, they both played...

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US death penalty practices raise disturbing questions

The crisis facing the death penalty in the US is worsening. A long-running shortage of the drugs that are typically used for capital punishment has sparked a desperate search for alternatives, even as fresh concerns emerged on Monday about the number of people on death row who have been wrongly convicted.In Oklahoma last week, two men on death row, Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner, lost their bid to compel the state to name the manufacturer that...

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Scent of a man: Male sweat stresses out lab mice

Uh-oh. Lab rats and mice get more stressed out by male researchers than by females. The finding could mean that thousands of behavioural experiments have overlooked an important factor affecting their results.More than a decade ago, researchers found that identical strains of mice behaved differently in one lab than in another, and several researchers have since suspected that mice react differently to different experimenters. Among them was Jeffrey...

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Tilting smartwatch cuts need for fiddly screen-jabbing

Video: Smartwatch lets you control apps with a twist Tapping and swiping on smartwatch apps is fiddly – and your fingers get in the way of what's on the screen, too. To the rescue comes Gierad Laput of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a tiltable watch face that could save you a whole lot of screen jabbing.At the computer-human interaction conference in Toronto, Canada, this week, Laput revealed how he and his Carnegie...

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Nested interests: A bespoke farm for edible bird nests

(Image: Ian Teh/Panos) A BOWL of soup made with animal saliva? Yours for $100. What's that, you want some of the raw ingredients so that you can make your own? That'll be $2000 per kilogram, please.Bird's nest soup is one of the most expensive foods in the world. Its production is a mega-industry, worth an incredible $5 billion a year. The nests were traditionally harvested from caves in South-East Asia where the birds – the edible-nest swiftlet,...

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Weird thought-generator: How society's fears shape OCD

Caught up in your own thoughts (Image: Daniel Stolle) From ideas of murder to irrational fears, intrusive thoughts afflict most people. But when David Adam's fear of catching HIV persisted, he developed OCD FOR Winston Churchill, it was an urge to leap from balconies and into the path of oncoming trains. For 20th-century mathematician Kurt Godel, his bête noire was random food poisoning, from his fridge or in general – he eventually starved himself...

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Safety fears spook New Zealand's drug reform pioneers

New Zealand's radical new approach to drugs may be stumbling at the first hurdle. Politicians have cancelled the first phase of a programme to legalise many recreational drugs, by banning all "legal highs" currently sold in the country until they have been proven to be low risk.The plan is still to legalise drugs that are shown to be safe – but some are worried that the government has been spooked by a flurry of media reports about addiction and...

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Watson in your pocket: Supercomputer gets own apps

Continue reading page |1|2 If you could quiz Watson, IBM's all-knowing supercomputer, from an app on your phone, what would you ask it?That is the question facing app developers now that IBM has shrunk its cognitive computer from the bedroom-sized monster that won the TV quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011 to the size of just three stacked pizza boxes. Mini Watsons can now easily be installed in data centres worldwide and made available as a cloud service...

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Insulin-making cells created by Dolly-cloning method

The dream of generating a bank of stem cells to treat injury and illness is a step closer. Embryonic stem cells have been custom-made from adult cells without manipulating the cell's genes, a process that could trigger cancer.Using a similar cloning technique to the one that created Dolly the sheep, two teams have independently shown that it is possible to turn an adult cell into an embryonic stem cell, which can then become any cell in the body.One...

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