Home/Science/New Scientist/April 25, 2015/In This Issue
New Scientist|April 25, 2015A vote for changePOLITICS is broken. Across the globe, voter turnout has been in decline for decades. The electorate believes that “the parties are all the same, the politicians are all the same, they are not like us, it does not make any difference”, according to Ruth Fox, director of the Hansard Society, which records British political discourse.Low turnout breeds further discontent. It is impossible to construct an electoral system that is perfectly fair (1 May 2010, p 28), but low turnout exacerbates the sense of unfairness when a minority government is elected, or when tiny factions end up tipping the balance of power.Technocrats have long hoped that social media might empower the public – helping them to make their voices heard. But what has transpired has been not so much a transformation…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Greener AustraliaAUSTRALIA has a chance to forge ahead with renewable energy. The country could get 100 per cent of its electricity this way by 2050 with very little impact on the economy, says a report commissioned by conservation organisation the WWF. It could also produce zero net emissions by 2050 at a cost of as little as 0.1 or 0.2 per cent of GDP, especially by making significant changes in its supply chain and use of energy.“Australia is unusually well placed in that the technical potential for renewable energy is practically unlimited,” says the report's author, Frank Jotzo of the Australian National University in Canberra.But instead, the government is planning to lower Australia's current renewable energy target of 41,000 gigawatt hours by 2020, and has been ripping up its climate-change mitigation…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Click to voteCALL it a success for clicktivism. A new online voter registration system for the upcoming UK election has smashed all records, with over 450,000 people signing up to vote the day before the 20 April deadline.Previously, voters could only register by filling out a paper form, which some feared was off-putting, particularly for young people who may never have voted before. Figures suggest as many as 7.5 million eligible voters were not registered. “As people increasingly grow to expect that they can conduct almost every aspect of their lives online, it is time electoral registration caught up,” said government minister Greg Clark at the launch of the system last year.The online system only requires a few clicks, along with your national insurance number or other ID for authentication. Politicians, columnists…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015CO2 could make a giant battery undergroundWHAT if we transformed carbon dioxide from being a waste product into being a huge battery to help even out our energy supply? We could make carbon storage pay off, while solving problems of intermittent energy supply from renewables.So say Tom Buscheck from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and his colleagues, who presented a design for this type of energy storage at the European Geosciences Union general assembly last week in Vienna, Austria.The design stores excess grid energy in two ways: pressure and heat. First, CO2 in a supercritical state – a hybrid between liquid and gas – is pumped into brine in sedimentary rocks between 1 and 5 kilometres below the surface. Second, more of the energy is used to heat the brine that is displaced by…2 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Ready, steady, go find dark matterI FEEL a rush in my stomach as the cage drops and the pressure on my eardrums increases. I am travelling 2 kilometres underground in a metal box that will carry me to the front line in the search for dark matter. I am eager to see DEAP, the world's most sensitive detector before it is sealed off forever – but right now I wish I could stay at sea level.My guide, Jack Dunger from the University of Oxford, reassures me. “The cage is much scarier than the tunnel,” he says. “Once you are down there you will feel more normal.”The stuff Dunger's colleagues are so keen to find is anything but normal. Dark matter accounts for about 80 per cent of the universe's matter, yet only makes itself felt…4 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Space geckos seen playing in zero-gSOMETIMES a little less gravity is all it takes to cut loose. For a group of geckos on a Russian space-faring mission, the extra lift of zero-g appears to have been all 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. One gecko wriggled free of its coloured identification collar before take-off, and the collar spent the 30 days of orbital flight floating around its enclosure. On-board cameras captured the geckos – which did not float because of their sticky skin – nudging the collar around with their noses (Journal of Ethology, doi.org/3qb).It's a highly unusual display of play in a reptile, says herpetologist Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who was not…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Puppy-dog eyes bond us to our petEVER felt adoration for your pooch when it stares at you? Man's best friend may have hijacked a uniquely human bonding mechanism.When humans bond, eye contact leads to release of the “love hormone” oxytocin, which elicits caring behaviour. This in turn causes the release of more oxytocin. Using eye contact as part of this cycle was thought to be uniquely human, although oxytocin helps other mammals bond, too. “Facing others is a threatening behaviour in other animals,” says Miho Nagasawa at Azabu University in Japan.But when her team made dog owners gaze into their pets' eyes, oxytocin levels rose both in the humans and the dogs, an effect that was not seen with hand-reared wolves. They then sprayed either oxytocin or a placebo into 27 dogs' noses. Female dogs that…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Seabed perfect place to store bubbly“ANIMAL notes” and “wet hair” were the terms used to describe 170-year-old champagne hauled up from the Baltic Sea in 2010. It now seems the wine had aged well, though the mystery over how it got there is even murkier.Seals on the corks showed that the 163 bottles came from the illustrious Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, Heidsieck and Juglar houses. After three of the Veuve Clicquot bottles were tasted by oenologists, 2 millilitre samples from each were sent for chemical analysis. It turned out that the grape juice in the wine hadn't turned to acetic acid, probably because of the cool temperatures and dark environment of the sea floor (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1500783112).The bottles' location suggests they were on their way from Germany to Russia when they sank, some time in the…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015One Per CentBlur, blur, mummy!See the world through a baby's eyes. BabySee, an app built by an ophthalmologist at Boston Children's Hospital, tweaks the scene your phone camera captures so it appears more like it would to an infant. A slider alters the view according to age: a newborn might only see a dim, blurry image, while a 6-month-old can pick out more colours and features.590The speed in kilometres per hour that Japan's maglev train hit last week, breaking the previous world record of 581 kilometres per hour set in 2003The robot that couldHeave! A little robot can scale walls while hauling a load 100 times its weight. The bot, built by Elliott Hawkes's team at Stanford University in California, weighs 9 grams, but can hoist more than a kilogram. It sticks…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Defying gravityADVOCATES of trickle-down economics argue that, when the rich get extra income, they invest it and create more jobs – and a higher income – for others. Those people, in turn, spend their extra money. Eventually the effect trickles down the whole system, making everyone better off, in absolute terms.So, what seems like a moral outrage – giving more to people who already have more – is in theory a socially benign action.The trouble is it hasn't worked. In the past three decades, states with pro-rich policies have seen economic growth slow, except in countries like China and Vietnam that needed to jump-start socialist economies.In the UK, upward income redistribution since 1980 has seen the share of the top 1 per cent rise from 5 per cent of national income…2 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015ProfileWhat drew you into parapsychology?Some parapsychologists enter the field because they had a personal paranormal experience, but not me. I was curious to find out what might lie behind such experiences.The term “parapsychology” can raise eyebrows. Do you encounter opposition to what you do?There is occult baggage attached to the field, which is really not related to what we actually do. We are scientists. Sometimes other scientists describe parapsychology as a pseudoscience, and that's unfair. I'll stick my neck out and say that the methodological standards of parapsychologists are sometimes higher than those of psychologists. For example, since 2012 I've been operating a parapsychology study registry; psychologists are only now starting to take study registration seriously. Parapsychologists are making extraordinary claims, so we have to ensure our research eliminates as…7 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Mind-bending nectarIN 401 BC, 10,000 Greek mercenaries were marching home from war against the king of Persia. Passing through Colchis, on the eastern side of the Black Sea, they feasted on honey stolen from beehives dotted around the countryside. Soon thousands had fallen into a stupor. The historian and soldier Xenophon describes them acting like intoxicated madmen, as if under a spell. As strangers to the region, they knew nothing of the effects of the “mad honey” made by local bees.The men recovered within a few days, but others were not so lucky. In 65 BC, troops led by the great Roman general Pompey against King Mithridates VI of Pontus, also on the Black Sea coast, lay weak and dazed after eating honeycombs strategically placed along their route by the enemy…11 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015LettersEditor's pick: UK health service is good valueFrom Jeremy GreenwoodThe UK's National Health Service does cost more than it did when founded, but I dispute that this is the fundamental problem that Christopher Burke suggests (4 April, p 54). When it was founded, the UK was bankrupt after two world wars. Now we boast of being the sixth most healthy world economy.We see attacks in the press claiming that the size of the NHS workforce is second only to China's People's Liberation Army. We don't see so much about the cost to the patient being among the lowest in the Western world and the quality of the service being among the highest. The potential costs to patients of an insurance-funded health service are fearsome.I believe that perception of the problem…7 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Supply chainsIt is fairly common for numbness to develop in an arm in which the blood supply has been temporarily shut off by lying in an awkward position. We notice when a limb goes numb and restore sensation by moving it, but could this also happen to an internal organ, and what would we feel if so?• Numbness in an arm is not caused by shutting off the blood supply. It is very difficult to compress an artery sufficiently to cut off all flow, short of applying a tourniquet. Complete obstruction of an artery, such as a clot in the femoral artery (to the leg) results in severe pain, not numbness. The numbness in the arm is due to pressure on the blood supply to a nerve.The skin of the arm…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Hard line on vaccinationTHE Disneyland measles outbreak was declared over on Friday, but the death threats and Nazi references are still circulating.The outbreak, which began at the Californian park in December, has seen 147 people from seven states contract the virus. Of the 81 Californians whose vaccination status is known, 70 per cent were unvaccinated. As New Scientist went to press, Californian senators were due to vote on a bill designed to prevent parents exempting their kids from standard school vaccinations on the grounds of “personal belief” rather than genuine medical reasons.The bill has proved highly contentious, with vociferous protests from the anti-vaccination lobby, a Facebook post portraying the senator who co-wrote the bill as a Nazi and threatening emails sent to the authors' offices.The US isn't the only country struggling with its…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Bees' predicamentHOW would you like your sugar? If you're a bee, the answer seems to be “with a dash of pesticide”This is the latest twist in the tale of neonicotinoid pesticides and their disputed effects on bee health. Given a choice, honeybees and a species of bumblebee had a preference for sugar solutions with neonicotinoids (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature14414). This might result in bees getting much higher doses of these pesticides than we had realised, says Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex, UK.Other findings published this week suggest that neonicotinoids have a harmful short-term impact on wild bees. At sites treated with the substances, there was a drop in wild bee density, solitary bee nesting and bumblebee reproduction, compared with control plots, although there was no effect on honeybees (Nature, DOI:…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015FBI confesses to hair mistakesSOMETIMES you win or lose by a whisker. The FBI has admitted that flawed evidence was accepted in nearly all of the trials in the 1980s and 1990s that included microscopic hair analysis evidence.Since 2012, the FBI has been reviewing 2600 cases in which hair evidence was among that used to secure a conviction. The trials under scrutiny took place between about 1980 and 1999, when hairs were assessed by microscope – a technique criticised for its lack of rigour.Of the 268 trials reviewed so far, more than 95 per cent included evidence that was overstated by analysts. Death sentences were given in at least 35 of those cases, and nine people were executed. Another five died in prison. The trials are likely to have involved other evidence, though.Written reports…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Koala take-overWE MAY owe our survival and complexity to a stowaway virus that springs to life in the very first cells of human embryos. Not only does the virus seem to protect embryos from other viruses, it also assists genes as they build the body plan of a new human.The finding supports the controversial idea that viruses that took up residence in our DNA millions of years ago may be playing the role of puppet master, quietly influencing our existence and evolution. “We are creatures controlled by viruses,” says Luis Villarreal of the University of California, Irvine.Stowaway viruses may be playing puppet-master, quietly influencing our existence and evolutionMost viruses infect us by injecting their genetic material into our cells. Retroviruses go one step further and insert it directly into our DNA.…3 min
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CBBC Guide - Wed Sep 04 2024New Scientist|April 25, 2015Proto-quantum computer boostedQUANTUM computers should in theory 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, is difficult for an ordinary computer to solve, so physicists hope that such a device will conclusively demonstrate the promise of computing based on exotic physics. “The goal is to show quantum supremacy with the simplest approach,” says Fabio Sciarrino of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, who helped develop the new machine.Boson samplers are based on a device created by 19th-century polymath Francis Galton to study statistical distributions. Balls are dropped one by one from the top of a wooden board…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Beyond turtlesTHERE'S something amiss with iconic marine animals in the Gulf of Mexico. Five years on from the largest oil spill in US history, effects are still lingering. Sea turtle populations are in retreat, dolphins are in poor shape and whales are avoiding their usual hunting grounds.The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on 20 April 2010 killed 11 workers and the subsequent oil spill wreaked havoc on the region's wildlife. There was an immediate reverse in the recovery of the world's most endangered sea turtle. Until that point, the number of nests of the Kemp's ridley turtle, which neared extinction in the 1980s, had been growing for two decades.To what extent the oil disaster is to blame is still under debate, but the matter is shrouded in mystery, partly because…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Chimps are smart about road crossingSCREEECH! Bang! It's the sound we all dread when crossing busy roads. Now it turns out that wild chimps learn to respect roads, adopting the same cautious drills as humans, including looking both ways to check for traffic.Marie Cibot of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, and her team analysed 20 instances of wild chimps crossing a busy road in Sebitoli in Uganda. They watched 122 chimps cross a highway used by 90 vehicles an hour, many speeding at 70 to 100 kilometres per hour. Ninety-two per cent of them looked right, left or both ways before or during crossing, and 57 per cent ran across (American Journal of Primatology, doi.org/3sf).“Road infrastructure is spreading throughout Africa,” says Cibot. “Studying chimpanzee adaptation represents a way to reduce the…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Jolt of java helps spermbots in final race to the finishCAFFEINE 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 system: their flagellum.The team trapped the heads of bovine sperm cells inside microscopic metallic tubes, then used a magnetic field to control their direction of travel, like a compass needle aligning with Earth's magnetic field. Since then, they've been looking for ways to boost the bots' performance.Caffeine makes sperm go faster in humans,…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Every breath you takeIT HAPPENS the moment you walk in: without you being aware of it, an undercover system discreetly records your breathing and heartbeat. Welcome to the Katabi Lab, part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Called Vital-Radio, the system needs no sensors attached to the body, yet is nearly as accurate as conventional methods. Its measurements are wireless and even work through walls, so can keep tabs on your vital signs as you watch TV in the lounge or read or sleep in the bedroom. The team behind it believe it could be used to monitor and improve patient health in hospitals and at home.“Breathing and heart rate would be interesting in hospitals if you want to monitor people without having things on their…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Bank on phone creditWHEN Kyle Meade first moved to the US from Canada, he just couldn't get a loan. “I had no debt, no previous information on me in the US,” he says. “The highest I was offered was $300, because I'm credit thin.”For Meade, innovation director of credit-scoring company Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL), the situation was ironic. For millions of people around the world, particularly those in developing countries, it's a frustrating reality. Without a robust financial history, banks have trouble gauging how risky a person is, and are hesitant to give them the loan they might need to start a business, buy a house or go to school. What do you do when the system rejects you?One answer could be to pull out your phone. A handful of finance start-ups are…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Feel-good factorsMORE than 200 years ago Thomas Jefferson declared: “The care of human life and happiness... is the only legitimate object of good government.” The third US president's advice was finally taken in 2011, when the UK began the continuous measurement of national well-being. Since then all rich countries have followed suit.Has this made any difference? In opposition, UK Conservative leader David Cameron embraced a new approach: “It's time we admitted there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP [gross domestic product], but on GWB – General Well-Being.” In practice it is hard to see much sign of this during his five years as prime minister, when the economy and cutting public services were firmly centre stage.Making improved well-being the focus of policy would…2 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Beyond relativityWE PHYSICISTS have a habit of depicting our discipline as “beautiful” or “elegant”, where an outsider might be forgiven for seeing no more than an endless morass of equations. In an ideal world, those equations would be unnecessary; the ultimate goal of physics – and science generally – is to describe the world as simply as possible.One hundred years ago, one person brought us a great step closer. In this centenary year of general relativity, Albert Einstein is getting the plaudits, and no one would gainsay him that. But that same year, 1915, the excitement surrounding relativity spawned another seminal piece of work. Even among physicists, though, it is not nearly as famous as it should be. Perhaps that is down to the complexity of its mathematics, but perhaps the…12 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015The way we are…The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? Nick Lane, Profile Books, £25FOR billions of years after they first arose, living cells stayed simple. But as oxygen levels climbed, these cells began to exploit it to get more energy. Many began to evolve in the same direction, becoming larger and more complex. Some grouped together to form animals, plants, fungi and so on. These complex cells may look similar, but their genes show they evolved independently on many occasions.Except this is exactly what did not happen. Complex cells evolved just once. All those countless trillions of simple cells evolving away for billions of years, and yet they stayed simple, with just a single exception.This is very peculiar when you think about it. For biologist and writer Nick Lane,…4 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Please think of the robots!Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and moreGOOGLE has obtained a US patent for personalities in robots. Kate Darling, a robot ethicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology complains in IEEE Spectrum that such patents are not good for robotics research because they may restrict innovation by other companies. Feedback's first thought is for the welfare of the robots. We recall the sufferings of Marvin the Paranoid Android, presented as a prototype of “genuine people personality” in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.Peter Duffell sends a sign from a shop window opposite Nottingham Castle advertising a “Christian Duplicating Service”. He, too, had always wondered how the faithful reproduced…A puzzling personhood phraseCHECKING to see whether anyone was ahead of Google…4 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Waiting for MarsDREAMS of a Mars landing may have to wait. No one is going there any time soon, according to leading space-agency figures on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite plans to land on the Red Planet from companies like SpaceX and Mars One, both the current head of NASA and the incoming head of the European Space Agency (ESA) say we'll be waiting decades for humans to walk on Martian soil.“No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden told a hearing of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in mid-April.But NASA itself doesn't have a firm date for landing – its loose and unfunded plan is for humans to touch down on Mars in the…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Vaping rulesTHE smoke of choice for US schoolkids has changed. In 2014, for the first time, more high-school students smoked electronic cigarettes than traditional ones. Whether the rise of e-cigarettes is welcome news or a fresh face on an old public-health menace is not yet clear.Although the number of teenagers admitting they smoke any kind of tobacco product hasn't drastically changed since 2011, the number of high schoolers smoking e-cigarettes leaped from 1.5 per cent in 2011 to 13.4 per cent in 2014.If the 22,000 youngsters polled for the National Youth Tobacco Survey are representative of their peers nationwide, this equates to 2.4 million students vaping last year, triple the number in 2013. Using a hookah was also twice as popular in 2014 than 2013.The survey showed cigarette smoking was down…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015You smell like lunchIrresistible to mosquitoes? Thank your genes. Identical twins are similarly attractive to mosquitoes – much more so than non-identical twins. This suggests genes contribute to the body odours that attract and repel the insects (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122716).Japan moon shotJapan's space agency plans to send its first uncrewed probe to the moon in 2018 or 2019, reports The Japan Times. The mission is a follow-up to its 2007 orbiter, which was smashed into the moon in 2009. The mission could pave the way for sending people to the moon – something only the US has done so far.Sensitive soulsOuch. The brains of newborn babies appear to respond to pain in a similar way to those of adults. Researchers poked the feet of adults and babies less than a week old…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Under pressure in the operating roomI WAS prepared for the blood but the most shocking thing about watching brain surgery was seeing the surgical drapes being stapled to the patient's face. But surgeon Peter Hutchinson dismisses my concern that the tiny holes might bother the patient when she wakes up: “That's nothing compared with the massive hole we're about to make in her head.”I am at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK, to learn about craniectomy, a procedure that involves removing a large part of someone's skull, to relieve the pressure inside. There are no official tallies but it's thought that several hundred surgeries take place in the UK every year on people with head injuries or who have had a stroke. Once the brain is given room to swell, the pressure drops and the scalp…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Shrunken snails offer a glimpse of the futureIT'S the survival of the smallest. As ocean acidification begins to bite, some marine species might adapt by shrinking – threatening the profitability of commercial fisheries. The phenomenon is known as the “Lilliput effect”, after the fictional island inhabited by tiny people in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.Over time, carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere dissolves in the ocean, causing it to become more acidic. At times in Earth's distant past this has triggered mass extinctions that wiped out most species. Many marine shellfish, corals and fish that made it through the turmoil shrank by one-third or more, and remained small for tens of thousands of years, says Richard Twitchett at the Natural History Museum in London.Now it seems that the Lilliput effect is poised to return, as a direct…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Vampire squid takes a rest during reproductionIT'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 studied so far 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 for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, and his team dissected 43 female squid captured in tow nets off the coast of southern California. They found 20 adults that had released some eggs, but still had immature egg cells available for future spawning. One squid had released at least 3800 eggs, judging by her empty follicles, but still had…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Stars throw out carbon in a flurryWHEN cosmic carbon leaves home, it may move in a real rush, according to the first sighting of a star spewing it into space.Ageing stars build elements like carbon in their core. These are eventually shed when stars throw off their surface layers, but no one knew exactly how the elements move outwards from the core.Lizette Guzman-Ramirez of the European Southern Observatory and colleagues looked at a gas cloud around an older sunlike star. They found an outer oxygen-rich layer around a carbon-rich one. By modelling how the gap between the layers evolved, they calculated the star took 1000 years to dredge up its carbon (arxiv.org/1504.03349) – equivalent to 40 minutes in a human lifetime.This article appeared in print under the headline “Stars throw out carbon in a flurry”…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015A snapshot of pre-modern gut floraAND the prize for the most varied population of gut bugs goes to…the Yanomami people. Isolated for thousands of years, the hunter-gatherers live in the rainforests of south Venezuela.When the government made contact with one particularly isolated village in 2009, scientists tagged along and took fecal samples from the villagers to see what pre-industrial gut flora looked like. They found the villagers had nearly double the diversity of microbial species of people in the US. They also had about 40 per cent more than another group of Venezuelan hunter-gatherers that has occasionally used antibiotics and eaten processed foods (Science Advances, doi.org/3tw).Team member Jose Clemente of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York says this suggests that even minimal exposure to modern lifestyles can cause a dramatic…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Digital tattoo behind the ear can read your mindWHAT'S on your mind? For £79, anyone can buy a headset that reads the electrical activity of their brain. It's called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, and you can use it to control devices with the power of your mind. But there's a drawback: they don't work when the wearer is moving and they look silly, so no one wants to wear them.The solution could be a kind of EEG system that does away with the cumbersome electrodes, annoying gels and wires of its predecessors, replacing them with a flexible electronic skin that conforms to the body. It promises to let us monitor our brains discreetly 24 hours a day, and can be worn continuously for two weeks, staying put whether you're swimming, running or sleeping.John Rogers at the University of…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Hubble's ocean of glassTHE Hubble Space Telescope has for the past 25 years powered NASA's dream of putting people into space. Launched on 24 April 1990, it was designed to be looked after by flesh-and-blood astronauts, and repairs and maintenance have run up a bill that would have paid for several new telescopes. But what would have been the point of that?Hubble has been the training ground for a generation of spacefarers. Servicing it has taught NASA everything it knows about building and maintaining the International Space Station. It is also a very fine instrument indeed. Its work is celebrated in Taschen's new book Expanding Universe, which intersperses pictures taken by Hubble, like the one of the variable star Monocerotis below, with images of Hubble's planning and construction. This includes the photo of…1 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015ProfileWhat is so interesting about the placenta?The human placenta is unique – it's the only organ that you discard after it grows. And you might grow another one and discard that too. It does many jobs that other organs do. It provides nutrition to the baby, and functions as its lungs, kidneys and immune system.Don't we already have a reasonable understanding of the placenta?No, the placenta develops over time just like the baby, yet most of the research is on placentas delivered at birth. That only gives you a snapshot. One of the reasons we launched the Human Placenta Project is that there have been huge advances in technology in other medical fields that have not yet been applied to pregnancy. We aim to develop tools to better understand what's…2 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Have my voteTHE system's broken. Nothing changes. All politicians are the same. Why vote? It's a popular refrain, particularly among the young. People feel cut off from the political process and unrepresented by the political elite. Just 16 per cent of Britons say they trust politicians – that's even worse than bankers. “We're living through a crisis of mainstream politics,” says Carl Miller at London-based think tank Demos.Voter turnout has been steadily declining in established democracies in Europe, Latin America and the US for the past few decades. Turnout for the last three general elections in the UK, for example, has been the lowest since the 1940s. Comedian-turned-activist Russell Brand calls for revolution: “I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm.” With plenty of…11 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Space, voids, ghostsUntitled by Anish Kapoor is at the Lisson Gallery, London, until 9 MayI HAVE said this over and over again: you make what you make, and you put it in front of yourself first of all. If I started off with some big message for the world, it would keep getting in the way.There is an emotional world and an objective world, and the two mesh. Thirty years ago I began working with the idea that for every material thing, there's a non-material thing alongside it – sometimes poetic, sometimes phenomenological.I once made a stone chamber and painted it a very dark blue. Thanks to the way the eye deals with the colour's short wavelength, if you look inside the chamber it's as though this stone thing had a non-thing…3 min
New Scientist|April 25, 2015Cloud coverHow much data does the World Wide Web hold?• Whatever the amount is in any one moment, it'll be quite a bit more in the next. A good estimate floating around is 1 yottabyte, or a trillion terabytes. Yet this figure is now almost a year old and, because the web is widely described as growing exponentially, it is reasonable to assume it could now have doubled to 2 or more yottabytes.We should also consider the so-called deep web, which encompasses anything that is not found by a mainstream search engine. This includes many large databases for travel bookings, merchandise data for online shopping, any social media networks that do not put everything in the public domain, and so forth. Figures suggest that 80 per cent of the web is…1 min
