Zoologger: Fickle female guppies fancy fresh faces

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world Species: Poecilia reticulataHabitat: The tropical fresh waters of northern South America and the southern Caribbean.The excitement of the new. The attraction of the exotic. Sometimes it's nice to have a change.This is a feeling female guppies know all too well. After being courted by one male, a female will shift her preference...

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Beat temptation with the marshmallow psychologist

Today, we want everything now, yet you've just written a book about self-control. Why?It's a widespread perception that the world is more and more one in which people are orientated to immediate gratification and don't know how to delay it. But when you look closely, I think that's probably not the case. If anything, there has been improvement in overall self-control. In fact, we're attempting to test that question in a study now.What is really going...

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How air conditioning overwhelmed its hothead haters

Book information Cool: How air conditioning changed everything by Salvatore BasilePublished by: Fordham University PressPrice: $29.95Without air-con we'd be packed in worse conditions than bananas (Image: Ashely Cooper/Aurora Photos) It was a fight between vested interests and institutional boneheadedness, but as Cool: How air conditioning changed everything explains, common sense won out "AN ATTACK dog of a tycoon" looms large in Salvatore Basile's...

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Chimp social network shows how new ideas catch on

Three years ago, an adult chimpanzee called Nick dipped a piece of moss into a watering hole in Uganda's Budongo Forest. Watched by a female, Nambi, he lifted the moss to his mouth and squeezed the water out. Nambi copied him and, over the next six days, moss sponging began to spread through the community. A chimp trend was born.Until that day in November 2011, chimps had only been seen to copy actions in controlled experiments, and social learning...

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Earth gets a new companion for trip around sun

Add one to the entourage. A newly discovered asteroid called 2014 OL339 is the latest quasi-satellite of Earth – a space rock that orbits the sun but is close enough to Earth to look like a companion.The asteroid has been hanging out near Earth for about 775 years and it will move on about 165 years from now, say Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid in Spain, who have just described it.Quasi-satellites orbit in...

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Blame climate change for heatwaves that struck in 2013

The verdict is in: climate change is guilty. Greenhouse gas emissions made five heatwaves in 2013 more likely.That's the conclusion of the third annual assessment of the role of global warming in extreme weather events from the previous year. For 2013, the research included five separate heatwaves in Australia, China, Japan, Korea and western Europe. The report found that climate change played a part in all of them.Australia's results were particularly...

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Today on New Scientist

Hong Kong protesters use a mesh network to organise To communicate with one another, activists on the city's streets are relying on the free FireChat app to send messages without any cell connectionRogue winds swept humans to last uninhabited islands Shifting wind patterns could solve the mystery of how Polynesians colonised the most remote islands in the worldEarth's navel: Stare into an eye-wateringly big hole The Siberian mining town of Mirny...

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Rogue winds swept humans to last uninhabited islands

Expert navigation and advanced boat-building technology were not enough for humans to finally colonise the world's most remote islands – shifting wind patterns also played a part.There were no humans on Easter Island in the south-eastern Pacific until the middle ages, when expert Polynesian sailors spread from the central Pacific islands. Within a few hundred years, they colonised previously uninhabited islands all across the South Pacific. But how...

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Earth's navel: Stare into an eye-wateringly big hole

(Image: Slava Stepanov/gelio.livejournal.com) THE eastern Siberian mining town of Mirny is home to the second-largest excavated hole in the world. The Mir diamond mine operated for 54 years, producing over 10 million carats (2 tonnes) of diamonds per year at its operational peak in the 1960s.It was established in 1957, after geologists discovered traces of kimberlite, a rock known to sometimes contain diamonds. Once excavation was under way, the...

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Behind the smile: What dolphins really think

Beguiled by a smile? (Image: Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures) They have been hailed as the second most intelligent animal on the planet, but could a soft spot for dolphins have led us to terribly misjudge them? EVERY day, regular as clockwork, the bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay swim to the shallows to be hand fed and beamed at by a gaggle of tourists. Meeting them was to be the highlight of my trip around Australia. I was expecting to commune with...

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How to be genuinely yourself when always online

Book information The End of Absence: Reclaiming what we've lost in a world of constant connection by Michael HarrisPublished by: HarperCollinsPrice: $26.95Book information The Glass Cage: Automation and us by Nicholas CarrPublished by: W. W. NortonPrice: $26.95Don't lose yourself in a digital world (Image: Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos) If you want to be free in a digital age, must you switch off your computer, ask two new books, The End of...

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Today on New Scientist

Japan eruption practically undetectable in advance The type of eruption that left an ashen landscape at the peak of Mount Ontake could occur at many apparently sleeping volcanoesChagos marine reserve polluted by politics Exiled Chagossian islanders complain that a marine reserve gives fish more rights than them. They have a point, says Fred Pearce Why we weren't ready for Ebola Peter Piot co-discovered the deadly virus nearly 40 years ago, but says...

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Japan eruption practically undetectable in advance

(Image: Reuters/Kyodo) Rescue workers are the only dots of colour in the ashen landscape at the peak of Mount Ontake in Japan, after the volcano erupted without warning on Saturday.Hikers and volcano-watchers were smothered by fine ash and other debris that swept down the mountainside without warning. Up to 36 people may have died and the emergency services report that there are still people missing.The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has raised...

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Chagos marine reserve polluted by politics

Continue reading page |1|2 Exiled Chagossian islanders complain that a marine reserve gives fish more rights than them. They have a point ADVICE to the UK's foreign secretary David Miliband was clear. For 48 hours, memos flew from his officials, all advising him to hold back, take his time, consult and consider alternatives.He ignored them. The next day, five weeks before the 2010 election that would remove him from office, Miliband set up a giant...

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Why we weren't ready for Ebola

Peter Piot co-discovered the deadly virus nearly 40 years ago, but says it wasn't thought a major public health threat – until now You discovered the Ebola virus in 1976. How?My lab received a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had died in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). She was diagnosed with yellow fever, but when we isolated the virus, it didn't look like anything we knew. Under the electron microscope it looked like a worm.Then...

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Cosmic ray blitz: Space invaders that fry electronics

Cosmic rays threaten electronic chaos (Image: Valero Doval) Intergalactic visitors threaten to bring chaos to our electronic world. Is there anything we can do? THE travellers hurtle towards Earth at close to the speed of light. Their origin is uncertain: some may have been born in mammoth supernovae far across the universe, travelling for millennia before reaching us. Yet in the time it has taken you to read this, billions of them have smashed into...

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India's Mars triumph signals a rising space power

"There is nothing symbolic about this," says Sundaram Ramakrishnan of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The country's success in putting its Mars Orbiter Mission(MOM) into orbit around the Red Planet was about testing technology and the skills needed to manage a complex mission, he says.ISRO scientists passed that test with flying colours during the early hours of 24 September. When word came in that the craft had executed its burn for precisely...

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Today on New Scientist

Kew's Intoxication season: live the high life From blue lotus to kola nut, just what does it take to get off your face in London's Kew Gardens?Feedback: Bigger and bigger beasts Great towering measurements, helping number the number helpers, now they know how many holes it takes… and moreFour ways you can see the multiverse The multiverse, where every choice spawns many universes, sounds like a philosopher's fantasy, but these four experiments show...

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Kew's Intoxication season: live the high life

Grandmaster Sam gets Kew's Intoxication season going (Images: David Stock) From blue lotus to kola nut, just what does it take to get off your face in London's Kew Gardens? Here's something you don't see often: disclaimers being handed out to the first-night visitors before they even receive a drink.But then, it is no ordinary event and the organisers aren't taking any chances. The Plant Connoisseurs' Club, part of the Intoxication Season at London's...

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Four ways you can see the multiverse

Every time you make a choice, you spawn a multitude of universes, leading to umpteen other yous – some of them living very different lives. This raises a myriad of moral conundrums, from what we owe our other selves to the death of hope.Read more: "Multiverse me: Should I care about my other selves?"It sounds like a concept from a philosopher's fevered imagination, but many physicists believe the multiverse is real. And they've got evidence – here...

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Spacecraft duo beam back their first Mars snaps

The first snapshots from two orbiters currently dancing a waltz around Mars reveal completely different perspectives on the Red Planet. Today, India's MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission) spacecraft – also called Mangalyaan, meaning Mars Craft – tweeted its first image of the surface of Mars (see below) with the message "the view is nice up here". (Image: ISRO) Meanwhile, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft sent back four views of Mars: three images taken in different...

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Tumour traps: How to arrest cancer as it spreads

Traps and lures could stop cancer from spreading (Image: Jimmy Turrell) Some surgery to treat cancer can actually make it spread. But traps to mop up tumour cells as they infiltrate the body can boost chances of survival IT IS the medical symptom that many of us fear the most: a lump. If it turns out to be cancer, we face, at best, a painful and debilitating course of treatment, and at worst, well... the worst.And yet, paradoxically, this lump is...

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Hotspots in India's tiger-trading network revealed

Poaching gangs are using India's train networks to smuggle tiger parts across the country undetected. That's according to research that has mapped the hubs of illegal tiger poaching and trafficking activities.Researchers analysed 40 years' worth of tiger trade data, collected by the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), and found that today's trafficking hotspots form a corridor running from southern and central India right up to the country's...

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Up to half of Earth's water is older than the sun

Who would have guessed that Earth's oceans are older than the sun? Much of the water on our planet and around the solar system started out as tiny grains of ice floating in interstellar space. The discovery provides important clues about not only the make-up of our solar system, but also what planets around other stars might be like."Water is an essential ingredient that pretty much all known forms of life on Earth need to flourish," says Ilsedore...

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Make tough tasks seem easier by zapping the brain

My, what big eyes you have – you must be trying really hard. A study of how pupils dilate with physical effort could allow us to make strenuous tasks seem easier by zapping specific areas of the brain.We know pupils dilate with mental effort, when we think about a difficult maths problem, for example. To see if this was also true of physical exertion, Alexandre Zenon at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, measured the pupils of 18 volunteers...

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Ageing societies will be better for the planet

There is a silver lining to the ageing of societies in the West. Amid fears of rising healthcare costs, soaring pension bills and a declining workforce, it seems that ageing could return Germany to carbon dioxide emission levels not seen since before the 1950s.The average age is rising in most nations, as people live longer and birth rates fall. This process is most advanced in industrialised nations. Germany has a fertility rate of 1.4 children...

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