White holes: Hunting the other side of a black hole

Forget black holes, weirder stuff happens in white ones (Image: Jen Stark, photograph: Harlan Erskine) Black holes suck – but do they have mirror twins that blow? A far-flung space telescope is peering into galactic nuclei to spot one for the first time PHYSICS is full of opposites. For every action, there's a reaction; every positive charge has a negative; every magnetic north pole has a south pole. Matter's opposite number is antimatter. And for...

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Books out, 3D printers in for reinvented US libraries

Continue reading page |1|2 Across the US, libraries are setting up maker labs as they turn themselves into hubs for high-tech innovation and training IN THE small town of Fayetteville in northern New York, you'll find the local library in an old furniture factory dating from the turn of the 20th century. The refurbished building retains hints of its industrial past: wooden floors, exposed beams, walls lined with carefully labelled tools.But instead...

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Fix farms in a few countries and feed 3 billion people

Give us the right levers and we shall feed the world. The lion's share of the world's food production problems stem from just a handful of countries. If we could concentrate on these problem areas, we could potentially feed 3 billion more people and massively reduce the environmental damage from farming."The way we're growing agriculture right now is totally not sustainable," says Paul West of the University of Minnesota in St Paul.West and his colleagues...

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Today on New Scientist

Waste paper turned into a super-spongy battery Treat paper in the right way and it can become a form of porous carbon capable of sucking up charge – making it the perfect battery for storing wind energyWhat will hypercomputers let us do? Good question Machines that go beyond human logic could help us understand how we think – if we can only figure out what to ask themHiggs boson glimpsed at work for first time Rare particle scattering detected at...

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Waste paper turned into a super-spongy battery

GOT an overflowing wastepaper basket? Now there's a way to use unwanted printouts to store energy.Traditional batteries use chemical reactions to store large amounts of energy, but they take time to charge. Capacitors store it in an electric field, which means they can charge and release energy quickly. But they can only hold small amounts at a time.To up capacity and maintain speed, scientists are building supercapacitors, often using forms of porous...

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What will hypercomputers let us do? Good question

Machines that go beyond human logic could help us understand how we think – if we can only figure out what to ask them WHAT is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything? In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, aliens build a city-sized computer to find out. They are dismayed when it turns out, bafflingly, to be 42. The problem, the unrepentant computer suggests, is that they never really knew the question... and to...

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Asthma drugs stunt growth - but only by a centimetre

Parents of children with asthma can rest a little easier. The long-standing worry that some asthma drugs stunt children's growth looks to be overblown.It seems that children who take inhaled steroids may be about 1 centimetre shorter on average than their peers who do not. "This is very reassuring," says Andrew Bush of Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research.Steroid drugs have long been used to combat asthma, which arises when...

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US admits security breaches with deadly virus samples

Vials of smallpox in the back of a fridge; anthrax shipped to a low-security lab. A spate of biosafety breaches by US government labs can be blamed on lack of oversight and scientists failing to follow protocol, according to a report released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, on Monday.Last week, workers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, found labelled vials of smallpox virus in an...

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Today on New Scientist

High-precision hydrogen clock to hunt for new physics An ultra-precise clock that ticks to the rhythm of hydrogen molecules could offer a way to probe particle masses and look for signs of odd behaviourWill UK reshuffle boost science and environment? New environment secretary Liz Truss may prove more eco-friendly than her predecessor. Meanwhile Greg Clark is made minister for universities and scienceSpaceport UK: Locations for launch sites unveiled...

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High-precision hydrogen clock to hunt for new physics

An ultra-precise clock that ticks to the beat of hydrogen molecules could probe fundamental constants and maybe spot signs of new physics.Atomic clocks are the world's most accurate timekeepers. They measure the frequency of radiation that makes an atom's electrons jump from one energy level to another. This never changes for a given element, so a number of cycles of this radiation can define the second.The clocks don't just keep time. They have...

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Will UK reshuffle boost science and environment?

Sometimes, better the devil you don't know than the one you do. In his cabinet reshuffle today, UK prime minister David Cameron ousted the man who had been his environment secretary since 2012, replacing him with relative newcomer to the field, Liz Truss, MP for South West Norfolk.Owen Paterson's term as environment secretary was mired in controversy, involving public statements suggesting climate change could be a positive thing, and controversial...

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Spaceport UK: Locations for launch sites unveiled

Your next flight to space will be departing from Glasgow. Or it might be. The city is on the list of possible "spaceport" locations announced today by the UK Space Agency. However, no commercial space company has yet demonstrated a spaceplane that is capable of carrying paying passengers.The plan is to build a spaceport at a remote site where regular airline traffic is low. The location also has to have a longer-than usual runway or room to build...

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Amphibians' swim stroke has lasted 270 million years

Amphibians have been using the same swimming technique for 270 million years, a set of ancient footprints reveals.Massimo Bernardi at the Science Museum in Trento, Italy, and his colleagues recently found the fossilised tracks in the Italian Alps, in Permian rock deposits known to be between 270 and 283 million years old. The team reckon that the prints were made by an early amphibian around 10 centimetres long.Impressions of entire feet can be seen...

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The earth eaters mining 'Europe's biggest hole'

(Image: Bernhard Lang/Gettty) WHEN something is referred to as "Europe's biggest hole", it's not likely to be a pretty sight.The Hambach opencast mine in Germany's Lower Rhine basin sprawls across 85 square kilometres. Giant excavators mine lignite – aka brown coal – at a rate of up to 240,000 tonnes a day. That's about equal to a football stadium piled 30 metres high with coal.This effort might be considered incongruous in a country that aims to...

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Detroit water shut-offs condemned as threat to health

The decision by the bankrupt city of Detroit to cut off the water supply to 80,000 homes with outstanding water bills is a public health disaster in the making, says the largest professional association of nurses in the US.National Nurses United has called for an immediate moratorium on the shut-offs, and is leading a march in Detroit on Friday to make its demands clear.The policy has been condemned by the United Nations as an international human...

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Fighting fear, denial and death on Ebola frontline

Medical staff can beat Ebola with more drugs and better health education I AM working with medical staff in the West African country of Sierra Leone, where the people have never experienced an outbreak of Ebola on this scale before. There are a lot of cases – we are really stretched – and my worry is that those we are seeing are the tip of the iceberg. To put things in perspective, in just one village between 40 and 50 cases have been reported. In...

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Reaping the whirlwind of Nazi eugenics

Book information Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the development of behavior genetics by Aaron PanofskyPublished by: University of Chicago PressPrice: $85Even twin studies aren't reliable when it comes to heritability (Image: Maia Flore/Agence VU) In the 1960s, eugenics was reinvented as behaviour genetics, but soon went back off the rails. Aaron Panofsky's Misbehaving Science explores what happened ARE some fields of scientific exploration...

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World's most endangered seal seen wrestling octopus

(Image: Ionian Dolphin Project) In the Odyssey, Homer tells of huge herds of monk seals on the beaches of ancient Greece. But these days they are hardly ever seen – their total population is less than 500, making them the world's most endangered seal.So Joan Gonzalvo, of the Tethys Research Institute in Milan, Italy, was delighted to see a monk seal while on a dolphin survey in the Amvrakikos gulf in western Greece last week."We could hardly believe...

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First boron buckyballs roll out of the lab

Score one for boron. For the first time, a version of the famous football-shaped buckyball has been created from boron.Discovered in 1985, buckyballs are made from 60 carbon atoms linked together to form hollow spheres. The molecular cages are very stable and can withstand high temperatures and pressures, so researchers have suggested they might store hydrogen at high densities, perhaps making it a viable fuel source. At normal pressures, too much...

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Spaceport UK: Government plan to launch spaceplanes

Build it and they will come. That was the message from the UK Space Agency today as it revealed ambitious plans to build a spaceport somewhere in the UK before 2018. However, no commercial space company has yet demonstrated a spaceplane that is capable of carrying paying passengers.The plan is to build a spaceport at a remote site where regular airline traffic is low. The location also has to have a longer-than usual runway or room to build one....

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Phone invaders: The rise of mobile malware

(Image: Raymond Beisinger) Your most intimate companion may be betraying you. Smartphones are lucrative targets for cybercriminals and keeping them true might not be as easy as we hoped IT'S 2 am. Do you know what your smartphone is up to? It may not be sleeping faithfully beside you. Seduced by a server far away, it springs to life and betrays your trust, giving away your secrets and running up quite a tab.For many, the nightmare is a reality. In...

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Famine puts next two generations at risk of obesity

You are what your grandmother ate, potentially, but maybe not what your great grandmother consumed. A study in mice shows that undernourishment during pregnancy increases the chances that the next two generations will develop obesity and diabetes. But by then the slate is wiped clean.If the same holds true for humans, it may mean that stressful events in our lives affect our grandchildren's health, but not great-grandchildren.Environmental stresses...

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Marine microbes march to the beat of the same drum

The ocean is known for its waves and rhythms, and so it turns out, are its microbes. Not only do photosynthetic species adopt a night and day cycle, as you might anticipate, but even their non-photosynthetic cousins dance to the same tune.Cyanobacteria belonging to the Prochlorococcus genus dominate the surface of the open ocean far from land and are possibly the most abundant photosynthetic organisms on the planet. They are autotrophs, which means...

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HIV 'cure' won't work until virus eliminated from body

A baby thought to have been "cured" of HIV last year has now been diagnosed with the virus.After being born to a mother with HIV, a baby in Mississippi was pre-emptively treated with three antiretroviral drugs for 18 months. Doctors lost track of the infant until she was brought to a clinic for a routine appointment after 10 months of receiving no HIV medication, in March last year. The team involved found no evidence of the virus in her blood, and...

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Today on New Scientist

Dinosaurs are heading home after fossil poacher jailed Mongolia will recover enough stunning fossils to start its first dinosaur museum after a prolific smuggler was brought to justice by an undercover stingFood influences body clock and may ease jet lag When you eat may affect your body's biological clock, which could provide an insight into getting back to normal after your daily rhythms are disruptedDisco-era spacecraft not dead, just out of gas...

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Dinosaurs are heading home after fossil poacher jailed

(Image: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters) These oviraptors are about to go home. A huge collection of stolen dinosaur bones has been repatriated to its native Mongolia by the US Homeland Security Investigations agency.The specimens include a nearly complete Tarbosaurus bataar tyrannosaur, two hadrosaurs and this "oviraptors' graveyard", containing at least five skeletons.Undercover agents identified the fossils in the possession of commercial palaeontologist...

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Food influences body clock and may ease jet lag

Food could be a new weapon in shaking off the effects of jet lag after research in mice showed that the insulin released as a result of eating can be a key factor in restoring a disrupted body clock.Miho Sato and her colleagues at The Research Institute for Time Studies at Yamaguchi University in Japan did experiments in mice and tissue cultures to show, for the first time, that increases in insulin affect circadian rhythms. These daily rhythms affect...

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