High and dry? Party drug could target excess drinking

A patent has been filed for a drug that produces some of ecstasy’s euphoric effects – and seems to put the brakes on boozing THINKING of taking a break from the booze? Many of us drink more than we probably should and wish we were better able to control our intake. Several drugs now in development could help us do just that.In 2012, alcohol played a part in 3.3 million deaths worldwide. Awareness campaigns and prevention services have done little...

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Alcohol archaeology: I recreate beverages with heritage

Resurrecting ancient beers and wines is a subtle alchemy, but Patrick McGovern knows all the tricks. Who's for an Etruscan ale? How did you start making ancient drinks?One of the first we made was the Midas beverage, based on residues in bronze vessels recovered from the Midas tomb in Turkey, which dates from 700 BC. These pointed to an unusual drink combining wine, barley beer and mead. There were also food remains in the tomb that suggested a barbecued...

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Masculine-sounding lawyers less likely to win in court

In the adversarial, macho environment of the courtroom, a booming voice might seem like a good trait for a lawyer to cultivate. Not so - men who sound very masculine are actually less likely to win a US Supreme Court case than their more gentle-sounding peers.It's well known that the sound of our voice shapes how people perceive us, which in turn may affect how successful we are in various walks of life. Men, for example, are more likely to vote...

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Loneliness is a modern epidemic in need of treatment

In recent decades, social isolation has been recognised as a major risk to our health and longevity. It's twice as bad for you as being obese and nearly as bad as smoking. The rising number of people who say they are affected, across a wide range of ages, is startling. Yet obvious mechanisms – such as self-neglect – do not explain the full health toll. So what else is going on?To answer this question it is worth noting that you can suffer the ill...

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2014 review: The most awesome stories of the year

STORY OF THE YEAR: COMET LANDING Philae landed on a comet that from some angles looks like a rubber duck (Image: ESA/Rosetta/Navcam) SPACE & PHYSICS The Philae landing"We are there and Philae is talking to us. We are on the comet!" These words marked the high point of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko after a decade-long journey. Besides the dramatic touchdown of Philae in November,...

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Man vs sherry trifle: Can I eat myself drunk?

What happens if you try to get mashed on potatoes and sauced on sauce? It's a sobering insight into what really happens to the booze we cook with I LOVE cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.Ah, the old ones are the best. But here's an oldie that is well past its sell-by date: if you cook with wine, all the alcohol is "burned off" by the heat.When I started telling people about my plan to see if I could eat myself drunk, I heard...

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Russia boasts best mental agility at World Mind Games

The summer Olympics may be a distant memory, but the World Mind Games are something altogether different, seeing international memory athletes flock to China to compete with brain instead of brawn.This extravaganza of mental muscle finished in Beijing, China on 17 December, with Russia emerging as the big winner. The event saw 150 athletes from 27 countries competing in 14 variations of five sports, including chess, go, draughts, bridge and xiangqi...

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Split-colour bird is half male, half female

(Image: Brian D. Peer and Robert W. Motz) No, this bird didn't dye its feathers. The half-red, half-white plumage of this northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) is the result of gynandromorphy. In other words its sex chromosomes did not segregate properly after fertilisation, so the bird is half-male, half-female. Males are usually bright red all over while females are a more subdued white, but due to the developmental quirk, the bird's colours...

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Reverb: Why we dig messy sound

From concert-hall designers to pop record producers, everyone in the music industry knows we love reverb. But why? THE TALL, arched, windowless space has just enough light for me to make out the explicit frescoes of naked bodies and skeletons adorning its walls. But I'm not here in the suburbs of Oslo for the visuals. For people in my line of work, the mausoleum of the Norwegian artist Emanuel Vigeland (photo below) is most famous for its stunning...

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Fancy naming a world after someone this Christmas?

WHAT'S in a name? A chance of cosmic immortality, if you get it right. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is asking "public and astronomy-interested organisations" to officially name 305 planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy.While pondering ideas, history offers us a few lessons. Flash back to 1781: musician and amateur astronomer William Herschel was peering through a telescope in his garden in Bath, UK, when he spotted a curious object...

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The piste at the end of the universe

(Image: Neil Stevens) Weary of Whistler? Find Davos dull? For a vacation with a difference, blast off with our winter sports guide to the best off-earthly snow and ice Few things spell the holiday season like a sprinkling of snow. It may not always be the cold white stuff we're accustomed to on Earth, but there's plenty of opportunity for future space explorers to have winter fun in the solar system ... and beyond.As the solar system's innermost...

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Y(ou)r q(ua)ntifi(e)d s(el)f, a short story

Continue reading page |1|2 |3 (Image: Kyle Thompson/Agence VU/Camera Press) YOU want to be healthy. You want to know about yourself. You want to be happy. You need to know about yourself. You want to live a long, productive life. It starts and ends with yourself.How long does it take to get going on an average day? What's your boot-up time? The norm is a bell-shaped curve, much broader than you, personally, would like to see. You'll want to narrow...

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Try the hardest crossword ever set by a computer

Down. 1: Silicon word whizz was Oprah guru, by the sound of itSilicon-chip logic is remorseless, but it can think laterally enough to flummox human minds. Up for the challenge? There's a prize to be won if you are MATTHEW GINSBERG can't help feeling a little sorry for his crossword-solving computer program. He points to a recent New York Times clue: "Food or drink dispensers". The answer? "MachinesV". "How is a computer meant to figure that out?"...

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Pitch us a movie and win an invite to our writing room

No game: Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing (Image: Rex Features) Send us an elevator pitch and you could find yourself developing your best screenplay idea in the company of a hand-picked crew of writing professionals SCIENCE has been swallowing the film world of late. No sooner did Alfonso Cuarón's 2013 thriller Gravity strip space flight back to its heroic basics, than the British Film Institute launched a major national celebration of...

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The mystery of yawning: We all do it, but why?

WHEN I give talks about my work, I know that before too long the audience will start to yawn. Just thinking about yawning makes us do it, but the mechanisms behind this everyday behaviour are a mystery.Yawning is often the first thing we do when we wake up, but we also do it when we are bored, tired or anxious. It is a primitive reflex that we share with other animals, from fish to mammals. We first start yawning in the womb, at around 20 weeks gestation,...

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QI elves: Our magpie minds and favourite facts

Tell us a bit about your TV programme, QI James Harkin: It's based on the idea that everything is interesting if you look at it in the right way. We find interesting things then ask comedians to answer impossible questions about them.How did the show first come to be made?James: The story goes that when John Lloyd [the show's creator] had kids, he realised that he didn't know the first thing about anything. So he started reading encyclopaedias. He...

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How to make an origami universe

Click on the image to find out what it all means (Image: Dave Stock) The rules by which gravity sculpts the cosmos are mirrored in the Japanese art of paper folding – we show you how to do it yourself OUR universe was shaped by origami. Gravity took a primordial paper sheet and folded it to form galaxies, thus bringing light and life to the cosmos.This original take on the creation myth is more than just empty metaphor. One astrophysicist is discovering...

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New Scientist 2014 holiday quiz

See question 10 (below) (Image: Keystone/Getty) For this year's quiz, New Scientist has teamed up with the QI Elves, the researchers behind the brilliant BBC panel show QI and its many spin-offs (see "QI elves: Our magpie minds and favourite facts"). The Elves read New Scientist every week, plucking out the juiciest and most surprising facts to use in their TV shows, radio shows, podcasts and books. Here is a quiz based on their 10 favourite things...

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