Milky Way's quiet life leaves it with no dark matter skeleton

THE Milky Way has had a sheltered life. A search for the signs of a violent galactic upbringing has come up empty, and the finding is helping astronomers understand our galaxy's history. It could also aid the search for dark matter. Galaxies are shape-shifters. Far from being a single set of stars in an eternal spiral, the Milky Way has devoured countless smaller galaxies over its 13 billion year lifetime, and its shape has been in constant flux...

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That's no moon! Spacecraft mistaken for new natural satellite

Something looking awfully like a moon was detected in the sky today For 13 hours today, Earth had a new moon – or so we thought. Now astronomers have realised that an apparent small asteroid orbiting our planet is actually the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre (MPC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, keeps records of all the tiny space rocks in the sky and publishes new observations...

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US farms hit by bird flu - but a vaccine might make things worse

Bird flu is rampaging across the Midwestern US this week. So far 8 million chickens and turkeys have been destroyed to stop the spread of H5N2, an offspring of Asia's H5N1 bird flu. Minnesota, the top US turkey producer, declared an agricultural emergency after announcing infected farms almost daily for two weeks. Iowa, the top egg producer, killed 3.8 million hens on one farm alone. US agriculture officials hope the outbreaks will diminish as summer...

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Jolt of java helps spermbots in final race to the finish

CAFFEINE gives you a spike of energy before you crash back down – even if you're a robot made from bull sperm. Spermbots, as they are called, were first developed in 2013 by Veronika Magdanz of the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden, Germany, and her colleagues. She wanted to create a microscopic robot that could be used to deliver drugs around the body, and realised that sperm cells come with a built-in propulsion...

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Old Scientist: How biologists tussled over the Loch Ness monster

Continue reading page |1|2 Old Scientist is our occasional column dedicated to gems from our 59 years of back issues You just can't keep a good monster down, it seems. One of the most vitriolic exchanges in New Scientist's history has just broken the surface again, following a fresh look at the sacking in 1960 of a prominent scientist. Denys Tucker had claimed in our pages to have seen a mysterious creature in Scotland's second-largest lake, Loch...

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Nice legs: Native American bee poses for his close-up

(Image: Clay Bolt/www.claybolt.com, http://ift.tt/1HPXB1x) HE MAY look soft and furry – but don't be fooled. "Out of all the species of bees that I've photographed during this project, this little guy was the only one that actually looked up at me and bared its mandibles," says photographer Clay Bolt. Bolt has set himself the task of documenting every native North American bee. The project was borne out of the realisation that one species – Apis...

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19th-century champagne haul shows seabed is perfect wine cooler

"Animal notes" and "wet hair" were the terms used to describe 170-year-old champagne hauled up from the bottom of the Baltic Sea in 2010. We now have chemical confirmation that the wine had aged well, but the mystery over how it got there is even murkier. When the 163 bottles were recovered from 50 metres beneath the waves, seals on the corks showed that the wine had come from champagne houses Veuve Clicquot, Ponsardin, Heidsieck and Juglar (renamed...

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Vampire feeds on decaying matter and spawns eggs in batches

It's a tough life deep in the ocean, so you can't really blame the vampire squid for taking a break. All other species of soft-bodied cephalopod so far studied produce their offspring in one glorious bout of reproduction, usually just before they die. But not the vampire squid. This sinister-looking creature feeds on zooplankton and decaying organic material in its struggle to survive up to 3000 metres deep. Henk-Jan Hoving at the Helmholtz Centre...

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Space geckos seen playing on their trip into orbit

Video: Space geckos play in zero gravity Sometimes a little less gravity is all it takes to cut loose. For a group of Russian space-faring geckos, the extra lift of zero-g appears to have been all the encouragement they needed to engage in a bit of unprecedented tomfoolery. The 15 geckonauts took off in April 2013 on board the uncrewed Bion-M1 satellite, along with some mice, gerbils, snails and fish. One gecko wriggled free of its coloured identification...

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Does music strike a chord with everyone?

Stephen McAdams played movie tunes to Mbenzélé pygmies in the Congo rainforest to find out whether music is a universal language Why do you want to know whether music has the same effect on everyone?Every culture has music, so if we want to understand humans, we need to understand why music is there and why it is used in different ways. Deciphering what aspects of it are dependent on our basic biology and what aspects are dependent on culture will...

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Proto quantum computer inspired by Victorians gets a speed boost

Quantum computers should theoretically outpace ordinary ones, but attempts to build a speedy quantum machine have so far come up short. Now an approach based on a Victorian counting device seems to be getting close.This proto-quantum computer can only solve one problem. But that problem, called boson sampling, seems to be very difficult for an ordinary computer to solve, so physicists hope that such a device will conclusively demonstrate the promise...

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Is super-diverse Amazon microbiome something to strive for?

The Yanomami people in the Venezuelan rainforest have the most diverse population of gut microbes ever seen, far more varied than Western guts. Does it matter?Hunter-gathering in the rainforests and mountains of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela, the Yanomami eat a high-fibre diet based largely on cassava. For thousands of years, some groups have lived without contact with the rest of the world and are thought to be some of the few remaining...

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North pole of spinning dwarf planet Ceres glows in the sunlight

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA) It's the sun-lit north pole of a dwarf planet, in more detail than we've ever seen before. These images of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, were snapped by NASA's Dawn spacecraft last Friday.The spacecraft captured the photos from a distance of 33,000 kilometres as it passed over the dwarf planet's pole after more than a month on its dark side. It should soon gather...

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Feedback: Striving to name polyfailure

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more WHAT should we call the phenomenon exemplified by Feedback's perception that "anyone who suspects the probability of a set of independent failures occurring together to be vanishingly small should urgently make plans to cope with them all happening at once" (7 March)? So far, 21 readers have been keen to help.Six of you suggested Murphy's...

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Parasitic populations solve algorithm problems in half the time

PARASITES are nature's thieves, but we can harness this behaviour for our own gain.We use algorithms to work out complicated problems like the best truck route or crew schedule, because finding a good solution means fiddling with the values of many parameters simultaneously.One way they can do this is by using groups of virtual creatures that wander through "parameter space", looking for valleys that represent the lowest values. Mathematicians have...

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Eye of the beholder: How colour vision made us human

(Image: Jimmy Turrel) IT TOOK a rather unremarkable garment for people to begin to question their view of reality. On 26 February this year, a photo of a dress went viral – not for its stylishness, but because of its chameleonic colours. Some saw it as blue and black, while others thought it white and gold. Still others, to their enduring unease, saw first one combination, then the other.The discussions that rippled across the web as a result illustrated...

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Dogs tap into human bonding system to get close to our hearts

Video: Eye-to-eye bonding Ever felt hopelessly bonded to your pooch when it stares at you lovingly? It turns out that man's best friend may have hijacked a uniquely human bonding mechanism, ensuring that we love and care for it.Knock-on chemical and behavioural effects occur when humans bond: eye contact leads to release of the "love hormone" oxytocin, which elicits caring behaviour, and this in turn causes the release of more oxytocin. This loop...

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Plane creates vibrant landscape painting by firing laser pulses

(Image: Norbert Pfeifer/TU Wien) What would Turner think of a landscape painting created by a plane? This artistic-looking map was captured in 3D by laser pulses fired from an aircraft as it flew over the conservation area of Ágotapuszta in Hungary. Each type of vegetation within the mosaic of salt meadows, grasslands and marshes is represented in a different colour.The aerial system was developed by Norbert Pfeifer from the Vienna University of...

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