Christmas Eve spacewalk a success for NASA

Astronaut Rick Mastracchio, on the first of two successful spacewalks (Image: NASA)

Take a breather, spacewalkers. Working tirelessly over the holiday, astronauts equipped with snorkels successfully repaired damage to the vital cooling system on board the International Space Station.

The system circulates ammonia to keep internal and external instruments at the correct temperature. NASA had to power down parts of three ISS modules when the system malfunctioned on 11 December.

On 24 December, astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins completed the second of three planned spacewalks to replace a failed pump module on the station's exterior. Although they were hit by a "mini blizzard" of toxic ammonia flakes that burst from a supply line, they finished the job ahead of schedule, eliminating the need for a third outing.

Snorkels on standby

Hopkins was wearing the same spacesuit used last July by Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, who nearly drowned when his helmet started filling with water. NASA investigators concluded that the most likely cause of the leak was contamination in the suit's cooling system, which blocked a filter.

Although the filter was cleared NASA didn't want to take any chances so instructed the astronauts to fashion snorkels from plastic tubes and Velcro. That would allow them to breathe air from lower in the suit in the event of a leak. As it was, their helmets remained bone dry.

While things went smoothly, the repairs meant delaying the first resupply mission for private company Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia. Its Cygnus cargo craft is now scheduled to begin official deliveries to the ISS in January.

On return to the ISS, Hopkins thanked ground crew: "Merry Christmas to everybody. It took a couple of licks to get her done, but we got it."

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Feedback: Positive beauty of laboratory tests

BABELFISH, in Douglas Adams's masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, were small animals that you put in your ear to translate all languages. They thus "caused more and bloodier wars than anything else", Adams said. Feedback suspects Google Translate has some way to go to be credited with even a small war.

Journalists have been struggling to piece together what is happening with MERS, the scary coronavirus that at the time of writing had infected 163 people and killed 71. Most of the cases have been in Saudi Arabia, but epidemiological reports issuing from the country are scarce.

So enterprising non-Arab-speaking journalists have been machine-translating reports in papers such as Al Arabiya – and discovering headlines such as "Medical tests prove the innocence of the beauty of the 'Corona' yet". This article goes on, according to Google, to say that the quest for "scientific knowledge of whether beauty ...

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Why whisky makes you frisky (and gin makes you sin)

"Brandy impairs us more than beer – but beer drinkers are more likely to drink and drive" (Image: Brett Ryder)

What's your poison? How it affects you depends on much more than the amount of raw alcohol it contains

"WHAT noise does Tintin make?" "Pop!" answers my excitable 3-year-old nephew, as my father – who prefers "Tintin" to "grandad" – squeezes the cork from a champagne bottle. It has become a tradition in my family, cracking open a bottle of champagne on Christmas Day. It is the drink of celebration, after all. Sure enough, before long our banter is as bubbly as the contents of our glasses.

What if we had drunk neat gin instead? Chances are we would have become fed up or feisty rather than festive. What about beer? Sleepy or rowdy. Cider? Don't even ask. It is common knowledge that alcohol's effects depend not just ...

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2014 preview: The key to surviving climate change

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Be prepared – for anything. That will be the message of the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its first attempt in seven years to forecast the impact of climate change on specific geographical regions. Due out in March, it will emphasise versatility over any fine-tuned mitigation measures.

Building on the IPCC's October report on the latest climate science, the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report is designed to predict how those global trends will change the areas we live in – as well as wildlife, water supplies, flooding, food and national economies. In other words, the stuff people really care about.

Drafts of the report suggest that, in some cases, it will deliver. There is now increased confidence that droughts will worsen in southern Europe, the Middle East, south-western US states and probably southern Australia. Higher northern latitudes – Scandinavia, say, and Canada – can expect more rain and snow. And warnings have been ramped up about the vulnerability of world food supplies and warming in the tropics.

Elsewhere, though, it turns out to be harder than expected to make sense of future trends. As the various climate models that underpin the report are improved, they are not converging on agreed forecasts but are disagreeing more and finding new unpredictabilities, particularly in Asia and Africa. One draft says simply: "The impact of climate change on water availability in Africa is uncertain." For Asia it is similarly vague: "There is low confidence in future precipitation projections." In part, this may be down to the IPCC getting its fingers burned in 2010, after it made the erroneous claim that the Himalayas would be ice-free by 2035, dubbed "glaciergate". But mostly, the caution is justified: scientists just don't know.

In the absence of specifics, how should countries prepare for climate change? We can no longer expect to get detailed forecasts that allow us to fine-tune our responses – building bigger dams, say, or investing in air conditioning. Instead, we have to think more about reducing our vulnerability to whatever climate change may throw at us, for example by breeding crops that can handle both droughts and floods, or building flood defences to cope with anything.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Survival of the versatile"

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Kalahari trackers who read ice-age life in footprints

Clay bison of Tuc d'Audoubert (Image: Sisse Brimberg/National Geographic)

Generations of archaeologists puzzled over ice-age footprints in French caves – but these three men can read them like a book

IN THE darkened recesses of a remote cave in the Pyrenees, three Namibians crouch over something in the ground. They have travelled to France from the Kalahari desert, more than 7000 kilometres away. The cave is cold and wet, and they are wearing waterproofs, hard hats and headlamps. Each holds a laser pointer. As they huddle together, talking in Ju/'hoan – their native dialect – red points of light bounce around the cave floor, finally settling on a semicircular depression. It is a print made by a human heel.

The footprint dates from the Magdalenian period of the European Upper Palaeolithic – about 17,000 years ago. The Namibians are San bushmen who were brought here by archaeologist Tilman ...

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Kissing by numbers: Party like it's n = 1999

Multiply your social success with some cunning calculations (Image: Vincent Villeret/Picturetank)

Want the formula for a perfect party? Meet the mathematicians who can solve your social problems, from who to kiss to bathroom etiquette

AS IF things haven't been strange enough, there is someone sitting, smiling, at the door of the gent's toilet. It's already been a weird enough party – weirdly happy, given that it is celebrating a divorce. The only people who look hassled and serious are the people moving through the crowd, clipboards in hand. Apparently, they are something to do with how we are all going to take our leave at the end of the night.

The smiling toilet attendant also has a clipboard, and now he is out of his seat. "Excuse me, sir," he says, brightly. He introduces himself and shows me the clipboard. Before I go in, Evangelos Kranakis wants ...

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Short story: Images of Undiluted Love

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(Image: Darren Hopes)

In the bunker is an unsettling world, where we must face our past, present and future selves. A short story by Joanna Kavenna

When I received the invitation, I thought, well, so that's what happened to Guy Matthias. He had retreated, back to his bunker.

It was a long story.

The invitation said:

"GUY MATTHIAS WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO HIS 2013 END OF TIME CHRISTMAS PARTY at THE BUNKER nr ITHACA, New York. Come as you are..."

"The bunker" was not actually near Ithaca – it stood in a lonely valley, further north. Guy bought it in 1999, when he was getting ready for the Y2K Apocalypse. He thought the end would come bang on time, as the new millennium dawned, he actually thought it would all fit neatly into the Gregorian calendar! When the apocalypse didn't fit neatly, and didn't come at all, Guy had a long dark night of the soul but then he emerged full of hope again. He'd just mistimed it. He was wary of the obvious next time around: he decided not to sign up with the Mayans. The year 2012 wasn't in his sights at all. He was going for 2013.

It's like the old adage about crying wolf. He'd cried one apocalypse already. How many times can you cry Certain Doom? I read the invitation over and over and I wondered – was it serious? I couldn't imagine Guy being ironic but if it was genuinely happening I was keen to see it. And 14 years was a long time. Long enough for a person to get really gnawed by the ravenous monster of Ordinary Life, chewed up, spat out again.

I asked my ex-wife if I could take the kids with me and she thought for a few seconds and said no.

"But they might enjoy it," I said.

"I doubt that, Doug."

I set off from my little cockroach palace in Queen's, the exile zone. The back of the car was full of detritus. The car was a symbolic representation of my inner self. My outer self was dressed casually – jeans, a sweater. Come as you are. I had RSVP-ed but received no reply. I drove in thick congested traffic, and then the city ended and I drove through half-forgotten towns, past clapboard houses, Christmas lights slung everywhere like a strange imperative. To celebrate! To worship your half-forgotten Deity! Or, if you were Guy, to herald the New Dawn!

I passed Monticello, a town I'd passed so many times. I went over snow-clad hills, as the sky turned dark blue, deep pink, as the clouds were stained by the dying sun. It was beautiful out there, and I remembered the sharp turn off the road, down a pock-marked track, which jolted the car, through thick enclosing forests.

I was almost there and then I saw the gatehouse, and drew to a halt. Guy had put up a perimeter fence. Of course he had. A crazy paranoiac leopard doesn't change his spots. He just gets more and more of them. Age brings them on. Well, I don't know. Of course, as you age, you realise, the universe really does have it in for you. It's going to bring you down, however many bunkers you build.

I spoke into a metal device, a nasal computer voice coming back at me. "The gate will open. Proceed."

I drove on, along a track which had been cleared of snow. Snow stacked at the edges. Snow piled against the trees. In the dim light the colours had faded to monochrome. I saw, ahead, the house. I remembered – two storeys above ground and three below. It looked like a typical old East Coast house, rickety stairwells, pictures of the ancestors. Then below – it was something else.

There were a few cars already there. No one came out to greet me. Instead, there was a sign which said PARTY – pointing down.

I went down a steep staircase, below the house, into an antechamber. It was whitewashed, sterile, and in the centre was a big box. I tried to lift the lid but it was padlocked. There were no windows in the bunker. One drawback with living underground and defending yourself against societal collapse and potential contamination – it's claustrophobic. It can get you down.

I walked into the next room, which was low-ceilinged, dimly lit.

This was where it got a little weird. I mean, it was already slightly weird, the random invitation, my random decision to accept the random invitation, my solitary journey into nightfall, and the thick forests, and the bunker with no one there to welcome me.

It was on the cusp of weirdness already but then I walked into the next room and I was confronted by myself.

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Goodwill hunting: Random ants of kindness

The gallant ant (Image: Rob Snow)

It's the season of selflessness, so meet some unlikely altruists – the ants that work tirelessly to rescue their sisters

YOU don't have to be a cynic to realise that the bonhomie and gift-giving at this time of year is not entirely motivated by a desire to bring pleasure to others. Go on, admit it, sometimes it has more to do with assuaging guilt, improving our standing in the eyes of the recipient, or simply hoping for something better in return. And there's nothing wrong with that. Even if we are not entirely altruistic, at least humans have regular orgies of niceness. By contrast, just a handful of examples of genuine altruism have ever been recorded in other animals.

But before we become too complacent, let's bring in Elise Nowbahari. She believes that if evidence of genuine altruism is rare in the ...

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2014 preview: Lost world under Antarctica uncovered

Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"

We have visited the moon and Mars, but there's one frontier much closer that we have only just cracked.

Last year a Russian team finally drilled into Lake Vostok – a subglacial body of water over 500 metres deep, buried under 4 kilometres of Antarctic ice. The samples they brought up are laced with DNA, which is now being analysed to determine whether there is life in Vostok.

Next year we will discover just what, if anything, lurks within the lake. Contamination from the drills could be an issue, but should researchers discover life unique to Vostok, what it looks like will be of most interest.

Any life they find – most likely single-celled organisms like bacteria – will have survived in one of Earth's most extreme habitats. For 15 million years it will have reproduced under high pressure and zero sunlight, in freezing temperatures and total seclusion. It will be the ultimate test of just how adaptable life is.

Larger creatures aren't out of the question, but a net won't draw them out. "The best way to answer questions about macro-organisms is to go in with a camera and look," says Martin Siegert at the University of Bristol, UK. "That's what's driving us."

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2013 review: The best features of the year

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Dig deeper, look closer and think harder – these are the goals of New Scientist's in-depth articles. Each one is perfect for saving in your favourite read-it-later app and curling up in front of a glowing tablet for a good long read.

These are our editors' picks of our best features of the year, and all are prime examples of the amazing breadth of big ideas that were ripe for the tackling in 2012. Normally only subscribers can read them, but we're making them available for free for 10 days from 24 December – all you have to do is register with us.

When you have finished digesting these readable meals, visit our in-depth articles archive if you're hungry for more.

Quantum shadows: The mystery of matter deepens

Richard Webb: For me, the cover story of our first issue of 2013 was the perfect thing to clear the mind of the holiday fug. Physicists and philosophers have been arguing for centuries about the true nature of matter – particle or wave? In the 20th century, quantum physics seemed to have supplied the answer: it is both at the same time. That's bamboozling enough, but not half as strange as what the latest quantum experiments now seem to be saying. Physics at its most mindboggling!

Workouts are no antidote to death by desk job

Graham Lawton: This is one of those stories that changes the way you see your life – but also help you change it for the better. It's about how too much sitting down is really, really bad for your heath even if you exercise regularly. It connected with people around the New Scientist office, and by extension the wider world, because of the universality, and surprise value, of its take-home message. Are you sitting comfortably? Well, DON'T!

The voices within: The power of talking to yourself

David Robson: Look away from your screen for a moment and listen to your thoughts. Chances are that words of some kind were bouncing around your head. Psychologists have somewhat neglected such "inner speech", but recently they have begun to explore questions once thought unanswerable: does everyone's inner voice sound the same? What about deaf people with no spoken language? And what are the benefits of all that chatter? Anyone who reads this feature by psychologist Charles Fernyhough will come away with some profound insights on their internal life.

The hologenome: A new view of evolution

Michael Le Page: Do our microbial hangers-on play a huge role in evolution? So important, in fact, that instead of thinking about natural selection as involving an individual plant or animal, we should think about it affecting a collective – including all the microbes? That's the radical idea that Richard Jefferson came up with in the 1980s. More than 30 years on, evidence is beginning to emerge that he was right.

How did we lose a 1400-tonne ocean liner?

Douglas Heaven: "Oh, by the way, we've lost a ship." So begins a brilliant old-fashioned yarn about a modern-day ghost ship. A decommissioned ocean liner breaks free of its tether and drifts across the Atlantic on a collision course with the coast of Ireland. The only problem is nobody can find it. In a year when revelations about global surveillance made it seem like there were no more secrets and nowhere left to hide the idea that we can still lose a 1400-tonne ocean liner is oddly reassuring.

The body: The great skin safari

Kate Douglas: We all have one, and we think we know it pretty well, but in this special issue we wanted to take a sideways look at the human body. The result was a really entertaining selection of articles considering all sorts of ephemera from our unruly bodily urges to the question of whether it is possible to eat so much that your stomach explodes. It's hard to pick a favourite, but for sheer creative exuberance it would have to be this one in which our news editor Rowan Hooper imagines taking a Lilliputian safari over the surface of the body. Read it. It will make your flesh crawl.

Future law: Can you be slandered by a robot?

Ben Crystall: Whenever technology has changed human capabilities, the legal world has had to adapt. In this feature Richard Fisher tells of the the mind-bending legal consequences that could arise from robots, drones and human teleportation. All that and what must qualify as New Scientist's worst joke of the year.

Fixing broken brains: a new understanding of depression

Sally Adee: Why don't antidepressants work? By the end of the 20th century, the effectiveness of drugs that worked on serotonin to lift depression was considered a done deal. Over the past decade, however, it has become clear that up to half of people treated with these drugs don't get better. Instead of branding the treatments themselves as ineffective, the response has been to cast such patients as "treatment-resistant". Could we have got it wrong about antidepressants? An investigation revealed that perhaps we've got it wrong about something much more fundamental: depression itself. This piece makes sense of a long and confusing debate about a subject that is anything but abstract.

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