No more pause: Warming will be non-stop from now on

Enjoy the pause in global warming while it lasts, because it's probably the last one we will get this century. Once temperatures start rising again, it looks like they will keep going up without a break for the rest of the century, unless we cut our greenhouse gas emissions.The slowdown in global warming since 1997 seems to be driven by unusually powerful winds over the Pacific Ocean, which are burying heat in the water. But even if that happens...

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New push for better handling of football head injuries

Seeing stars? It may be from one header too many. Following a class-action lawsuit filed in California on Wednesday, there is growing pressure for FIFA – soccer's international governing body – to limit the potential for brain damage from the beautiful game.The lawsuit has been brought by a group of players and parents in the US. It claims that FIFA, alongside a number of US soccer organisations, have been negligent in their handling of head injuries.Rather...

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Today on New Scientist

Soviet dog spacesuit for pooches with the right stuff Your canine companion can strut its stuff in this authentic Soviet spacesuit, worn by genuine doggy heroes of the space race Belka and StrelkaPainful memories eased by inhaling xenon gas The odourless, colourless and mostly inert gas xenon has been used to ease painful memories in mice. It could help us to forget our own past traumasEarth's tectonic plates have doubled their speed The latest study...

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Soviet dog spacesuit for pooches with the right stuff

(Image: Auctionata) Tempted to dress up your dog as a Soviet space pioneer? Keep it real by investing in this genuine 1950s doggy spacesuit, used to test the effects of low gravity and high-speed launches. Although, judging by this model dog's expression, your dogmonaut may not enjoy the experience as much as you do.The lace-up, full-body suit comes complete with an oxygen supply tube, and will be going on the auction block on 13 September with...

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Painful memories eased by inhaling xenon gas

It's odourless, colourless, tasteless and mostly non-reactive – but it may help you forget. Xenon gas has been shown to erase fearful memories in mice, raising the possibility that it could be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) if the results are replicated in a human trial next year.The method exploits a neurological process known as "reconsolidation". When memories are recalled, they seem to get re-encoded, almost like a new memory....

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Earth's tectonic plates have doubled their speed

SO MUCH for slowing down as you age. Earth's tectonic plates are moving faster now than at any point in the last 2 billion years, according to the latest study of plate movements. But the result is controversial, since previous work seemed to show the opposite.If true, the result could be explained by another surprising recent discovery: the presence of more water within Earth's mantle than in all of the oceans combined.Plate tectonics is driven...

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Voyager 2's view of solar system's edge will be unique

Earth's second emissary to interstellar space, Voyager 2, is phoning home with new views of the solar system's ragged edge. But what it sees could be very different to what its predecessor glimpsed, revealing new details of the sun's immediate neighbourhood.Voyager 2 has reached the heliosheath, the beginning of the end of the solar system. If the experience of its twin, Voyager 1, is anything to go by, Voyager 2 is about two-thirds of the way to...

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Emailing angry? Your keyboard feels your pain

FACEBOOK, email, texting, instant messaging – more of our life than ever is lived through our keyboards. Communicating emotion through type can be hard, though.That could be about to change. By measuring the way someone is typing – the speed, rhythm and how often they use backspace – and then combining that information with an emotional analysis of the typed text, a computer program has been able to predict how they are feeling with 80 per cent accuracy.Nazmul...

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Beautiful spiral cracks could be a feature, not a flaw

UNUSUALLY beautiful and uniform cracks that form in high-tech materials could be used to manufacture micro-patterned surfaces.Joël Marthelot of ESPCI ParisTech in France and his colleagues noticed the cracks when studying thin films of silicate materials, which are used as a coating inside lasers.If the coating doesn't quite stick to the surface below, cracks can form that spiral around a central point or that etch out regular rows of crescents....

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Feedback: Tipping the quantum scales

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more INSPIRED by reports of experiments that show ever-bigger objects demonstrating quantum properties, Andrew Scott would like to propose some further research. The largest object that Feedback is aware of having gone through two points "at once" is a "buckyball", the near-spherical carbon-based molecule that is just visible under a microscope...

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Let's talk about the weather to revive climate debate

Explaining how climate change is affecting today's weather will be tricky, but it might bring home to the public the everyday reality of global warming LULL in the conversation? You can safely bring up the weather – no matter who you're chatting with, no matter where in the world you are. Unless you're talking to a climate scientist, that is.Unlike the rest of humanity, climate researchers have long avoided discussing what's going on outside the...

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3D-printed books make pictures real for blind children

TIME to get hands-on. A new project is printing Braille picture books for visually impaired children. Each page turns the pictures from the original book into raised 3D shapes alongside traditional Braille text."The advantage of 3D-printing is really about making one-of-a-kind objects," says Tom Yeh, who heads up the Tactile Picture Books Project at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Later this year, Yeh's group will work with the National Braille...

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A to zinc: What supplements are worth taking?

(Image: Angus Greig) Vitamins, minerals, fish oils… the list of nutritional supplements you can buy keeps growing. Some are worth it, some aren't. We sift the evidence for you IN 1911, Polish chemist Casimir Funk made one of the most influential biomedical discoveries of all time. He learned that a disease called beriberi affected those who ate a diet of mainly white rice, but not those who ate mostly brown rice. He isolated a chemical from rice...

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Taming of the bunny rewrote rabbit genome

When humans tamed rabbits, we changed around 100 regions of their genome. The shifts were subtle, but they may have made domestic rabbits less fearful than wild ones.Pet rabbits will happily sit in their owner's lap, but wild rabbits are famously timid, fleeing at the slightest hint of a human, let alone a fox or hawk. This tolerance for human company was only bred into bunnies recently: about 1400 years ago in southern France. But it was not clear...

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Moving home? Your microbes will make the trip too

You may forget your toothbrush next time you go away but you can't leave your microbes behind. Millions of bacteria hitch a ride with you, making themselves comfortable wherever you go. Within only a few hours, they will have colonised a hotel room; give them 24 hours and they can take over an entire house.These are just some of the results from the Home Microbiome Study, the first attempt to trace the path of microbes from our bodies to our built...

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Mapping the web of disease in Nairobi's invisible city

THE Dandora landfill site in eastern Nairobi is a monument to the Kenyan capital's runaway growth; a junk monolith built by the city's 3 million citizens.On its rim is Korogocho, an informal settlement of tens of thousands of people that, like the dozen other such slums in the city, doesn't officially exist. More than 60 per cent of Nairobi's population live in these makeshift suburbs hammered together from scraps of corrugated iron.They house the...

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Fossil dinosaur nursery includes babysitter's bones

(Image: University of Pennsylvania) This slab of Cretaceous rock contains the remains of 30 dinosaur infants and one older individual – possibly a babysitter.Discovered in the Yixian formation in north-eastern China, all 31 fossilised dinosaurs were members of a herbivore species called Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis. This fossil specimen was originally described in 2004, but researcher Brandon Hedrick of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia...

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Today on New Scientist

Robot frogs' sexy signals lure hungry bats to attack Hunting bats don't just listen out for male frogs' mating calls: they can also use echolocation to detect when the frogs inflate their throat sacsExperiment tests whether universe is a hologram A new device searching for fundamental units of space and time has officially started taking data, and could reveal new features of the nature of realityAnd now the weather, featuring climate change blame...

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Robot frogs' sexy signals lure hungry bats to attack

Video: Robo-frog sex signals lure hungry bats Male túngara frogs need to watch their back while wooing the ladies. Their sexy moves, which involve calling out while inflating their vocal sac, are also spied on by predatory bats, prompting them to launch an attack.By using plastic robo-frogs equipped with artificial air sacs, Wouter Halfwerk from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and his colleagues have figured out which cues are...

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Experiment tests whether universe is a hologram

The search for the fundamental units of space and time has officially begun. Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois, announced this week that the Holometer, a device designed to test whether we live in a giant hologram, has started taking data.The experiment is testing the idea that the universe is actually made up of tiny "bits", in a similar way to how a newspaper photo is actually made up of dots. These...

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And now the weather, featuring climate change blame

Continue reading page |1|2 A new technique connecting individual weather events with the impact of greenhouse gas emissions could bring climate change into everyday weather reports "Well, the record-breakingly hot summer is showing no sign of cooling down. No thanks to us: the heatwave was made 35 per cent more likely by human greenhouse gas emissions." CLIMATE scientists tend to shy away from assigning blame for extreme weather events like the...

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Your death microbiome could catch your killer

MILLIONS want you dead. No, it's not a Twitter conspiracy, but a battle raging beneath your skin. The cells in your body are outnumbered 10 to one by microbial cells, and like it or not, eventually the microbes will win.Surprisingly, what happens next has largely been a mystery. Now researchers have made the first study of the thanatomicrobiome – the army of gut microbes that take over your internal organs once you are dead. The results could have...

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Europe launches two satellites into wrong orbit

ROUND and round and wrong they go. Two European Space Agency navigation satellites launched into the wrong orbit last weekend.The satellites were meant to be the fifth and sixth in Europe's Galileo global positioning system, a network of 30 satellites expected to be up and running by 2020. They launched from French Guinea on a Soyuz rocket on 22 August, but did not make it to their projected orbits. The orbits were lower than planned, elliptical...

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