Virtual hearts get to the crux of sudden cardiac death

Virtual human hearts beating on supercomputers are helping get to the bottom of the most mysterious of heart diseases – sudden arrhythmic death syndrome.When someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly, there is often an underlying cardiac problem. If a post-mortem doesn't find one, sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS) is recorded as the cause. SADS can result from a number of genetic conditions that affect the way electrical signals pass through the...

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Today on New Scientist

Sync your sport to your body clock for a personal best Larks and night owls perform drastically better if a sporting event is timed to suit their circadian rhythmCancer-warped skeletons imagined for building design The extreme deformities caused by bone cancer push the human body to its limits. Our amazing ability to adapt could inspire future architectureThe world's wellness obsession has gone too far Being urged to optimise every aspect of our...

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Sync your sport to your body clock for a personal best

From diet to running shoes to volcanic crater training, there are lots of ways to maximise sporting performance. For the most committed, there might be another option: timing the activity to suit your body clock.Natural early risers, or larks, hit peak performance around noon, according to a study that tested elite hockey players at different times of the day. The night owls among them did best at around 7 pm – irrespective of what time they got...

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Cancer-warped skeletons imagined for building design

(Image: A project by Irene Cheng in collaboration with Dr Issam Hussain and Dr Francesco Proto) This is what bone cancer looks like as it takes over the body – as interpreted by the artistic eye of Irene Cheng, who studies architecture at the University of Lincoln, UK.Cheng analysed data from patients, acquired in a collaboration with Issam Hussain of the university's School of Life Sciences, showing how the cancer mutates bone structure over time...

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The world's wellness obsession has gone too far

Being urged to optimise every aspect of our lives to improve well-being is sometimes counterproductive, say two organisation researchers Fitter, happier, more productive. If you need a wry slogan for the growing pursuit of wellness or well-being at every turn then Radiohead's lyric seems a good fit. And if there is a natural home for talking up wellness, then medicine may be it. American surgeon and writer Atul Gawande recently argued medics should...

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Leak suggests big bang find was a dusty mistake

Last year's big bang breakthrough has finally bitten the dust. In March last year, researchers using a telescope called BICEP2 at the South Pole made a splash when they claimed to have discovered primordial gravitational waves, a signal from the very early universe.Now details of a new analysis of their results have leaked, and they seem to reveal that galactic dust is the likely cause of their observations.The BICEP2 results were initially hailed...

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Feedback: Nice slice of fried man, Sir?

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more NEWS reaches Feedback of a grim, cold first Monday back at university, and a class introducing humanities graduate students to statistics. Our informant was distracted by her neighbour snacking on McCoy's crisps – and especially by the prominent legend on the packet: "MAN CRISPS".Could this snack actually be deep-fried slices of man?...

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The bitcoin rush: Pioneers on the financial frontier

Meet miners, outlaws and sheriffs all striving to get ahead in the volatile new world of virtual money THE past year has seen a 21st century gold rush, and speculators have been falling over themselves for a piece of the action. The discovery of gold always brings a world in its wake and bitcoin – a virtual currency "mined" using a computer – is no exception.There are miners chasing gold, crooks targeting the naive, black market traders operating...

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Möbius strips of light made for the first time

Twist a two-dimensional strip of paper then tape its ends together and it transforms into a one-dimensional loop. It's not magic; it's a Möbius strip. These mathematical structures show up everywhere from M.C. Escher drawings to electrical circuits, but almost never in nature. Now, a team of physicists have shown for the first time that light can be coaxed into a Möbius shape."Light can kind of turn one-sided and single-edged under certain conditions,"...

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Just four credit card clues can identify anyone

Drop the disguise: your metadata still gives you away. Four pieces of information is all that's needed to match individuals to their anonymised credit card records.The findings suggest that tougher measures must be put in place to protect users' privacy, because real identities may be too tied in to the rich metadata, such as GPS coordinates, collected by modern devices.Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge...

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The Hard Problem is Stoppard's problem with science

Continue reading page |1|2 (Image: Johan Persson) The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard at the National Theatre, London, from 21 January, and screened live in selected UK cinemas After a long wait and a great track record transmuting science into art, Tom Stoppard's new play takes on the hard problem of consciousness – and loses As I got up to leave at the end of Tom Stoppard's new play, The Hard Problem, a man in the seat behind me was behaving rather...

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Today on New Scientist

Data archaeology helps builders avoid buried treasure Finding a boat where you want to put your building can be costly. A data analytics start-up will help companies guess what's in the ground before they digPortable mind-reader gives voice to locked-in people Once only possible in an MRI scanner, vibrating pads and electrode caps could soon help locked-in people communicate on a day-to-day basisZoologger: Judo spider finds armoured foe's Achilles...

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Data archaeology helps builders avoid buried treasure

IN 2010, when builders were excavating the site of the former World Trade Center in New York, they stumbled across something rather unusual: a large wooden boat, later dated to the 1700s.Hitting archaeological remains is a familiar problem for builders, because the land they are excavating has often been in use for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.Democrata, a UK data analytics start-up, wants to help companies guess what's in the ground before...

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Portable mind-reader gives voice to locked-in people

Continue reading page |1|2 Once only possible in an MRI scanner, vibrating pads and electrode caps could soon help locked-in people communicate on a day-to-day basis YOU wake up in hospital unable to move, to speak, to twitch so much as an eyelid. You hear doctors telling your relatives you are in a vegetative state – unaware of everything around you – and you have no way of letting anyone know this is not the case. Years go by, until one day, you're...

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Zoologger: Judo spider finds armoured foe's Achilles heel

Video: Judo spider tackles armoured foe Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world Species: Loxosceles gauchoHabitat: Human-made or disturbed natural environments in Brazil and TunisiaIn a fight between an armoured soldier and an unarmed opponent, who would win? When it comes to the recluse spider the answer might surprise you. Using its wits and speed, it can kill...

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Second blow to the head for effects of brain zapping

Researchers who threw a bucket of cold water over brain stimulation science last year have done it again.In November, they found that transcranial direct current stimulation (tCDS) – which involves applying current to the brain to alter how likely the neurons are to fire – has no consistent physical effect. Now it seems the same may apply to its effect on the brain's information processing.In recent years tCDS has been shown to improve everything...

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Mismatched ants show size doesn't matter to friends

(Image: Tom Fayle) Designing your utopian ant farm? Be sure to stock it with different-sized beasties to help them get along.Fern-dwelling ants can vary tremendously in size, as shown by the happy couple pictured: the huge (by ant standards), 3-millimetre-long Polyrhachis worker dwarfs the 0.7-millimetre Pheidole worker visible near its front left foot.And size matters in the ant world. Tom Fayle of Imperial College London and colleagues studied...

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Multibillion-dollar race to put internet into orbit

Continue reading page |1|2 The next-generation internet could come from above, with fleets of satellites delivering broadband to under-served areas of the world THE race is on to build a new kind of internet. A host of companies and billions of dollars are in play, with the ultimate goal of ringing the planet with satellites that will allow anyone, anywhere, to get online at broadband speeds.Presently, satellite internet relies on spacecraft that...

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Twinkle telescope to check out exoplanet climate

TWINKLE, twinkle little star, we're trying to figure out what your exoplanets are. That's the idea behind a proposed UK-led space telescope called Twinkle that will analyse known alien worlds to better understand them.There are over 1800 known exoplanets, and both NASA and the European Space Agency plan to launch dedicated planet hunters in 2017 to find more.But astronomers aren't content to just collect exoplanets, says Giovanna Tinetti of University...

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Cells from stressed-out mice act as an antidepressant

WHAT doesn't kill you makes you stronger, at least when it comes to stress and immune cells. Mice that received a cocktail of immune cells from bullied mice appeared to experience a mood boost. The unexpected discovery may have implications for treating depression.We know that prolonged bouts of stress take their toll on the immune system. That leaves us susceptible to illness, which in some cases can lead to depression.Most research on the link...

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