Rainbow 'bird's nest' MRI reveals how a heart beats

(Image: Laurence Jackson) This is not a colourful bird's nest: it is the collection of muscle fibres that work together to make a mouse heart beat.The vivid MRI picture was captured using diffusion tensor imaging, which tracks the movement of fluid through tissue, using different colours to represent the orientation of the strands.The fibres, which spiral around the left ventricular cavity, curve in different directions around the inside and outside...

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Don't have a cow: Making milk without the moo

EIGHT thousand years ago, one of our ancestors had the bold idea to collect and drink animal milk. This was a game-changer: here was a beverage that was not only easy to obtain yet rich in nutrients. Through the centuries, milk in its many forms has become a staple in diets across the world.Fast-forward to the 21st century and milk production is an industrial process in many places, but this comes at a large environmental – and if you ask me, ethical...

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Biggest X-ray eye in space to hunt hot cosmic objects

A mighty X-ray warrior is going to spring forth to hunt monster black holes and chart interstellar storms. The European Space Agency (ESA) last week approved plans for the Athena X-ray space telescope, which will be the largest of its kind ever built.Costing about €1 billion, the flagship project will launch in 2028. It will weigh in at 5 tonnes, be about 12 metres long and will provide 100 times greater sensitivity than existing X-ray missions.The...

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Swedish space rock may be piece of early life puzzle

A fossil meteorite unlike anything seen before has been uncovered in a Swedish quarry. The mysterious rock may be the first known piece of the "bullet" that sparked an explosion of life on early Earth.Roughly 100 fossil meteorites have emerged from the limestone quarry west of Stockholm, which is being mined for flooring. All of the meteorites are part of an iron-poor class called the L chondrites. They date back about 470 million years to the Ordovician...

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Today on New Scientist

Virtual flashlight reveals secrets of ancient artefacts The device projects computer-generated models on to ancient objects, filling in missing details of shape or colour wherever its spotlight is directedMy cell fitness test will fine-tune your health Victor Darley-Usmar measures how well cells make energy under stress – and says his system could be as useful to doctors as a blood pressure meterTime to kick cigarette butts – they're toxic trash...

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Virtual flashlight reveals secrets of ancient artefacts

Have a look at any ancient artefact and there's probably something there that you cannot see: stone corners that have long since chipped off; carvings rubbed away by time; or once-glorious colours that have faded. Now those missing features can be brought back to life, thanks to Revealing Flashlight, a system that projects computer-generated models on to real objects, filling in missing details wherever its spotlight lands.The system has been piloted...

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My cell fitness test will fine-tune your health

Victor Darley-Usmar measures how well cells make energy under stress – and says his system could be as useful to doctors as a blood pressure meter You stress the importance of bioenergetics. What is it?It's a broad term in biology that refers to how energy is produced and used. We focus on the cellular level, primarily with mitochondria, which produce the energy used by the cell.How can it measure how healthy we are?We are developing a measure called...

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Time to kick cigarette butts – they're toxic trash

Poisons leach from the 4 trillion cigarette filters that we chuck each year, harming health and environment alike. They should be banned FOR the past two decades, the environmental group Ocean Conservancy has organised the annual International Coastal Cleanup. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers scour beaches all over the world, picking up trash. By far the most common item they pick up is cigarette butts. Last year they removed more than 2 million...

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Acoustic art and industrial architecture make music

For six weeks this summer, coinciding with the Farnborough International Air Show, gigantic, unprepossessing buildings with names like Q121 and R52 are humming, droning and singing in celebration. It's all part of an installation created by sound artist Thor McIntyre-Burnie that utilises the buildings' exceptional acoustic properties.The buildings in Hampshire, UK, are the wind tunnels that shaped the Spitfire's peculiar, elliptical wings, as well...

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Melting ice puts emperor penguins on a slippery slope

Antarctica's iconic emperor penguins are predicted to go into decline this century. Rising temperatures will melt the sea ice on which they live and breed, and as a result two-thirds of the colonies could halve in size by 2100. The question now is whether the penguins can survive by moving to new breeding grounds.These predictions are from the first study to investigate how global warming will affect all the world's 600,000 emperor penguins (Aptenodytes...

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Supercool livers to keep transplant window open

Once removed from the body, the shelf-life of the human liver is only about half a day. Experiments on rats suggest that time could be extended to several days if the liver is pumped full of antifreeze and cooled to below freezing.There are 17,000 people waiting for a liver to become available for transplant in the US alone. Some may have to wait months because there are not enough livers for transplant. When organs are removed from the donor they...

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Rights versus bites: The great shark culling debate

Great whites may be behind most attacks around Perth (Image: David Jenkins/Corbis) Sharks have killed seven people off Western Australia since 2010. Can culling stop them – and what will be the cost to marine wildlife? EARLIER this year, thousands of protesters gathered at Cottesloe Beach in Perth, Australia. Their message was rather surprising. . They were demanding an end to shark culling.The culling – or "localised shark mitigation strategy"...

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Shanty town burning: Did anyone here get out alive?

A firefighter searches for signs of life in the ashy ruins of 400 shanty homes in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This image won photographer Mohammad Fahim Ahamed Riyad the Atkins CIWEM Environmental Photographer of the Year 2014 award.Riyad reports that four people died in this incident, including a 6-year-old child. But no casualties were officially reported and the reason for the fire remains unknown."This photograph gains power from the contrast between...

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Threatwatch: Top malaria drug may lose punch in Africa

Threatwatch is your early warning system for global dangers, from nuclear peril to deadly viral outbreaks. Debora MacKenzie highlights the threats to civilisation – and suggests solutions Malaria is one of humanity's most ancient foes. It helps keep whole regions mired in poverty and kills more than half a million people a year, mostly African children. Africa is hit hard because poverty and a warm climate favour the mosquitoes that carry the malaria...

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How to cash in on cheap Earth-watching satellites

Start-ups could use the flood of small, cheap satellites heading into orbit for everything from commercial data gathering to mining the waste in landfills THERE are some big plans brewing for small satellites. With hordes of cheap orbiters filling the skies, researchers and start-ups are promising a powerful new perspective on earthly activities that range from global commerce to perfecting the art of mining landfills for recyclable materials.On...

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Today on New Scientist

Morphing dimpled skin could help cars reduce drag The "smorph" surface can change its aerodynamic properties on the go to best suit the wind speeds it encounters, which could reduce drag on cars and planesPollution on other worlds may show advanced alien life A NASA telescope should be able to sniff the atmospheres of Earth-sized worlds for industrial gases like CFCs – a sign of civilisationShoppers tracked as they go wild in the aisles A system...

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Morphing dimpled skin could help cars reduce drag

Wind resistance has met its match: an adaptable surface that can alter its aerodynamic properties to best suit the wind speeds it encounters.The surface, dubbed Smorph for Smart Morphable Surface, relies on simple mechanics to achieve this effect. "We use wrinkling," says Pedro Reis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who leads the project.The team has created a prototype out of silicon (see photo). The hollow ball is wrapped in a very...

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Pollution on other worlds may show advanced alien life

Life is messy. So to find aliens, why not look for their pollution?As part of its mission, NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to look at starlight filtered through the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets and search for signs of life. Most proposed plans involve hunting for highly reactive gases such as oxygen that usually need a living source to replenish them. But these methods might only hint at relatively simple life...

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Shoppers tracked as they go wild in the aisles

ON YOUR last trip to the supermarket, where did you walk, what did you look at, and which products did you ultimately buy? Proximus, a start-up based in Madrid, Spain, wants to know.Using movement sensors placed around a store, Proximus tracks where individual shoppers go. By combining this data with purchase records, managers can get insights into how to organise their stores to make the most of their customers' habits.Online, many firms rely on...

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A vampire mite injected this bee with a deadly virus

Like many pollinating insects, honeybees have been in decline across the UK for some time. Many things have contributed. One is deformed wing virus (DWV), which most honeybee colonies have as it lurks in their food. DWV can leave bees with stubby wings and shortened, rounded abdomens. Their movements also become tottering and stunted. About 20 per cent of UK bee colonies are lost to DWV each winter.But the disease has become much more severe in the...

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Make robots useful by teaching them to talk like us

When Ashutosh Saxena wants some coffee or ice cream, he can ask a robot to make it for him.Tell Me Dave is a large, vaguely humanoid bot that can cook simple meals according to spoken instructions. But programming Tell Me Dave to understand even one kind of order is tricky: humans have an annoying tendency to ask for the same thing in a variety of different ways, or to combine several discrete steps into one short command.So Saxena and his colleagues...

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Forget passwords – to log in, just start typing

Software can identify peole based solely on the way they use their mouse and keyboard, and it could let us do away with passwords altogether AS WE sit hunched over our keyboards, it is hard to believe that the way we peck at the keys and swish the cursor around is unique. But several companies believe this could be used to prove our identity, doing away with one of the most annoying aspects of digital life: passwords.From e-commerce sites to social...

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Child refugees can be dogged by poor health for life

It wasn't a good year. In 2013, 10.7 million people were displaced from their homes because of conflict or persecution, according to a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released last week. This brought the worldwide total of refugees to 51.2 million, the first time since the second world war that the figure has surpassed 50 million.Children figure prominently in the UNHCR tally – half of the refugees are under...

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Feedback: Dolls of destiny

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more BARBIE dolls: does playing with them discourage a future in research? Feedback suggested that it's more a matter of how you play, given a report of doll mummification (5 April).Support for this thesis is provided by a friend of Feedback reporting a film re-enactment involving a row of dolls buried neck-deep in sand. The scene was from...

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Huge ‘whirlpools' in the ocean are driving the weather

Giant "whirlpools" in the ocean, up to 500 kilometres across, are driving the world's climate on a scale previously unimagined. We just don't know exactly how yet.The bodies of swirling water, called mesoscale eddies, are 100 km to 500 km in diameter. They form when patches of water are destabilised by obstacles like islands. The eddies carry huge volumes of water and heat across the oceans, until they slowly stop spinning over days or months and...

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Ethical land-grabbing could feed 100 million people

Land grabs by foreign companies in poor parts of Africa and Asia could feed an extra 100 million people if the land is used to grow crops. But the gain will be minimal if the grabbers export the produce to countries that are already well fed.Massive areas of land in poor countries have been bought up by powerful companies over the last decade. The aim is to use it for farming, but these land grabs have displaced and harmed many local people, so several...

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