SciTech Daily Review - science, technology, future developments, innovations, implications

History in a cell: Steve Olson, the author of Mapping Human History, retells the story of humanity -- including the creation of different "races" -- through the information encoded in our DNA ... [more]

Medical errors kill more people in the US each year than auto accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. Could automating medicine prevent tragedies like the Andrea Yates case? ... [more]

If there is a species of tree in the forest, and no systematist is around to diagnose it, is it still a species? asks Jody Hey in Genes, Categories, and Species ... [more]

Sim nature: Peter Bentley's new book, Digital Biology, recounts the quest of engineers, computer programmers, and other scientists to hone their craft at Mother Nature's feet ... [more]

Always wanted to be a philosopher but didn't know where to start? Here are 12 top tips to reach your goal ... [more]

Meir Lehman has been studying the life cycles of computer programs since he was a researcher at IBM 30 years ago. One of these days he's going to get it all figured out ... [more]

Children who learn to play an instrument may reap their real rewards when they grow old ... [more]

The ongoing debate over the origins of the first Americans has anthropologists battling with Native Americans, white supremacists and the US Army Corps of Engineers, as Canadian journalist Elaine Dewar discovered while researching Bones: Discovering the First Americans ... [more]

A plea to save biodiversity: In The Future of Life, Edward O Wilson tells why scientists should be activists, species preservation is affordable, and humans have a debt to Earth ... [more]

When looking for needles in a haystack, it helps to have magnets. Computers and the Internet are the magnets that find missing kids (registration required) ... [more]

As the Internet is increasingly woven into the daily lives of users, they are getting more out of it while spending less time online ... [more]

Three new, very different books all propose the same thing: merging humanity and robotics to transcend our mental and physical limitations. It's becoming more possible every day ... [more]

They go by different terms -- grid, peer-to-peer and net computing to name a few -- but the growing consensus among computer wizards is that networked computing is making a comeback ... [more]

The taboos of touch: The controversial new book Harmful to Minors has stirred up a hornet's nest of moral conservatives, and raised thorny questions about ideological censorship of research ... [more]

Ever wonder what cyberspace looks like? Ever wonder why you should care? The cybergeographer knows ... [more]

The colour-blind Web: Is it really a techno-utopia, or just a fantasy to assuage liberal guilt? ... [more]

Are weblogs the blinking neurons of an emerging, chatterbox superbrain? Or are these proliferating online diaries merely podiums for bush-league blowhards? Truth be told, they're a bit of both ... [more]

A new breed of spam filter combines Napster-like networking with machine learning to cut junk email to near zero ... [more]

Be careful with that unflattering instant message about your boss: Interest in IM monitoring is soaring as companies try to control information leaks and discourage cyberslacking ... [more]

Hack attacks are on the rise, and if you're online, you are a target. (It doesn't help if you're casual about giving out your password to complete strangers) ... [more]

A legal dispute between online aquatic plant enthusiasts and a pet supply store illustrates the perils of casual opining on the Web ... [more]

The Common Thread is a candid account from the front line of the fiercest scientific battle of the last ten years: the struggle to sequence the entire human genome ... [more]

Charles Wynn and Arthur Wiggins consider the wily charms of pseudoscience in Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction -- and discover how its tentacles slither into the world of real science ... [more]

Media analysts say a tsunami is heading our way -- a third wave of online journalism that will make Web publishing so yesterday. The future, they say, is wireless ... [more]

How should we teach kids Newtonian physics? Simple. Let them play the right computer games ... [more]

Why can't real-life medical staff be more like the heroes of medical fiction? And why do so many real-life patients want them to be that way? ... [more]

Love is a many-moleculed thing. Studies of the brain from Joseph Ledoux and Peter Hobson promote competing visions of nerve cell signals or social interaction as the key to our behaviour -- but are they missing the point? ... [more]

A suicide attempt that was reportedly foiled by a community of people using an internet chatroom has been praised as an example of online community spirit ... [more]

Are we still crazy in love with the Web? Naah. Now it's like an enduring, comfortable marriage, says Michael S Malone. It doesn't make our heads swim anymore, but it has become an inextricable part of who we are ... [more]

For all the advances of science, we are no closer to understanding the essential mystery of the self. But perhaps the strange world of autism offers clues, suggests Peter Hobson in The Cradle of Thought ... [more]

Ever wonder how Google gets such good results, so quickly? It's all due to their low-cost, high-efficiency Pigeon Clusters ... [more]

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, finds that epidemics come in many shapes and sizes -- some of them in the form of ideas and behaviours ... [more]

Can a machine have consciousness? Why not? What intrinsically differentiates a lump of metal and plastic from a lump of grey meat? ... [more]

The Gutenberg Bible is going online to allow scholars to take a closer look at one of the world's most priceless treasures ... [more]

Some types of computer games can stimulate kids' learning -- but there's still room for improvement before simulations and adventure games enter the school curriculum ... [more]

The earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years, says William Calvin in A Brain for All Seasons -- and we are descended from those who were smart enough to survive these catastrophes ... [more]

A row has broken out over public access to rice genome data. Scientists fear there will be restrictions over who can use the data when it is published in the academic journal Science ... [more]

Scientist movies have come a long way from 1962's The Brain that Wouldn't Die. But will portraying scientists as action heroes actually help recruit people to the tough-but-rewarding job of finding out about the universe? ... [more]

Ancient Greek poets were slaves to the beat. Mathematical analysis shows that Greek poets had more rhythm than the Romans ... [more]

The pristine myth: Charles C. Mann, the author of 1491, talks about the thriving and sophisticated Indian landscape of the pre-Columbus Americas ... [more]

In this age of overnight mail and global travel, it's all too easy to transport tree snakes to Guam, foot-and-mouth disease to the UK, or St John's Wort to the western US. Two recent books take a close look at the growing war on alien species ... [more]

A DNA-based computer has solved a mammoth logic problem, setting a new milestone for an infant technology that could someday surpass the electronic digital computer ... [more]

If girls understand their biological makeup and know what nature is pushing them toward, they will be happier and less at war within themselves, says Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Girls. After all, biochemistry is destiny ... [more]

Google time bomb: Will Weblogs blow up the world's favorite search engine? Link-rich blogs are increasingly influencing its algorithms ... [more]

If you're an ant scholar, an ecologist, or just an amateur myrmecologist, an online trip to the first complete database of the world's ant species could be just the ticket ... [more]

Hollywood is in cahoots with tobacco manufacturers, despite a voluntary agreement to curb indirect tobacco advertising in films, according to a study of previously secret industry documents ... [more]

Faking it: sex, lies, and women's magazines: How can women's magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women in Afghanistan, but tell complete lies in articles about sex? ... [more]

Russ Parsons' How to Read a French Fry reduces the science of cooking to a rich stock of information for the investigative cook ... [more]

How to find the good and avoid the bad and the ugly: a short guide to tools for rating the quality of health information on the internet (registration required) ... [more]

Gaby Wood's Living Dolls is a magical history of the quest for mechanical life ... [more]

Instead of operating out of basements and bedrooms, some cyberpunks have taken to "wardriving" -- roaming around in vans with laptops, hacking into corporate wireless networks ... [more]

The maths behind the monsters: Fresh back from Monstropolis, Nature's John Whitfield reports on the cutting edge of cartoon physics ... [more]

Mirror images: Artist David Hockney's bold theory that Caravaggio, Leonardo and others used lenses to create their masterpieces has turned the art world upside down ... [more]

Whom should we trust for sensitive and practical advice about love? Perhaps there is more wisdom to be found in the philosopher's library than on the psychotherapist's couch ... [more]

Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and one of the Web's most celebrated online troublemakers. But does she actually exist? If so, who is she? ... [more]

The downside of copy-protected music CDs is that some of them just won't play when you get them home ... [more]

The Worldwide Computer: An operating system spanning the Internet would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips ... [more]

Do androids dream of First Amendment rights? A Net-controlled robot reporter from MIT may be headed for Afghanistan ... [more]

Despite nearly 400 years of fast and furious city life, New York City is home to a world of flora and fauna that goes far beyond sidewalk planters and pampered pets. In Wild Nights, Anne Matthews explores this unruly, abundant, and often overlooked universe ... [more]

Philip Ball's Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color offers a stained-glass window into the history of chemistry and materials science ... [more]

Eric Schlosser, an award-winning investigative journalist, uncovers the "dark side of the all-American meal" in Fast Food Nation ... [more] ... [more]

Hermits and cranks: Fifty years ago Martin Gardner launched the modern skeptical movement. Much of what he wrote about is still current today ... [more]

Hi, Mom! I just won a gold medal! Cell phones have invaded every corner of our existence -- even the Olympic Parade of Nations ... [more]

Philosophically inclined psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell's daring final work explains that the ecstasy of romantic love doesn't fade away over time -- we kill it ... [more]

He's billed as the world's greatest explorer. He's also an army reject, a baronet and a descendant of Charlemagne. Plenty there for Ranulph Fiennes to talk about, then. So why is he so reticent about it all -- including his new novel? ... [more] ... [more]

Apocalypse made easy: A top-secret US government scenario for the aftermath of nuclear war reveals something truly scary -- cockeyed optimism ... [more]

Who -- or what -- will write tomorrow's news leads? Newsblaster uses artificial intelligence techniques to sort and summarise online news reports. But will it ever replace the intrepid newshound? ... [more]

A half-century ago, we thought we'd finally defeated micro-organisms. Madeline Drexler's Secret Agents brings home how very, very wrong we were (registration required) ... [more]

Edward O Wilson argues passionately in The Future of Life that there is still time to avoid an abrupt crash in the variety of species on Earth (registration required) ... [more]

Beef stew: Mad Cow Disease could be much ado about nothing -- or a terrifying threat to our food supply. It's time for the media to take another look ... [more]

In Sacred Pain, Ariel Glucklich attempts to make sense of pain as a transformative experience, a biochemical phenomenon and, sometimes, a secular remedy ... [more]

The medicine man: Oliver Sacks talks about storytelling in science, and the clinical skill at the heart of every great novelist ... [more]

"Spyware" sneaks onto your hard drive, swipes personal data from your computer and sells it to the highest bidder. Are you worried yet? ... [more]

You can tell a lot about a man by the company he keeps. Neuropsychiatrist, author and card-carrying magician Richard Restak, for instance, is pals with a parrot ... [more]

Science and socialism are his inspiration, and as a radical biochemist he is an opponent of Darwinian fundamentalism. Steven Rose is the combative 'Professor Jekyll and Comrade Hyde' ... [more]

Being Edwin Abbott: How the 19th-century mathematical fiction Flatland gave us our point of view ... [more]

Many thousands of doctors, researchers and health policymakers in developing countries now have free Web access to an enormous collection of biomedical literature ... [more]

The Jedi knight of DNA: John Sulston and Georgina Ferry tell how motorbiking radical John Sulston saved the human genome from big business in The Common Thread ... [more]

In Sonic Boom, journalist John Alderman tracks the digital music revolution, which did not begin and end with Napster (registration required) ... [more]

How does being an environmentalist affect the decision to have a baby? And how does the environment at large affect the prenatal environment? Those questions are central to Sandra Steingraber's Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood ... [more]

Explorer and biologist Alan Rabinowitz treks Beyond the Last Village to a Himalayan rain forest, to discover a lost world of primitive people and species (registration required) ... [more]

An intrepid band of architects, chemists and engineers is determined to produce practical nanocomputers, even if it means completely reinventing the computer ... [more]

A new computer programme that can spot subtle differences in authorial style could be used to settle long-standing literary debates ... [more]

Geologist Peter Ward and artist Alexis Rockman have teamed up to produce Future Evolution, portraying a possible future of square tomatoes, kangaroo rats and universally brown-skinned humans who don't need food ... [more]

We are drowning in unassimilated information -- can it be that communication has become too easy and too cheap? ... [more]

Our fascination with the science of identification -- Whose corpse is this? Whodunnit? -- is simple to explain. Living as we do in a world of doubt and disinformation, the technical wizardry of forensic science holds out a rare promise of certainty ... [more]

Democracy should guide science in its search for truth, says Philip Kitcher, and his goal in Science, Truth, and Democracy is to equip the philosophy of science with the ethical dimension it still largely lacks (registration required) ... [more]

Science fiction has always had much to say on the subject of The Future Biology of Sex. Writer and biology professor Joan Slonczewski explores worlds where humans have only one sex, more than two, or none at all ... [more]

In the battle against computer crooks, new technology may not save the day. Instead, better computer security may come from a change in attitude ... [more]

Baring the cyber soul: Whether admitting to cross dressing, nosehair burning, a used panty addiction or even murder, guilt-ridden netizens are turning to online confession sites ... [more]

The emotional machine: Steve Grand, designer of the artificial life program Creatures, talks about the stupidity of computers, the role of desire in intelligence and the coming revolution in what it means to be "alive" ... [more]

All over the major towns and cities of Ghana, Internet cafes are sprouting like beans -- one sign that Africa is entering the digital age ... [more]

Sometimes it seems that alien species are taking over the world. Two new books, Tinkering with Eden and Nature Out of Place, bring news from the front lines of the war on exotic invaders ... [more]

Amour online: Is online dating a bleak reflection of an overworked, commodity-oriented society, or a love panacea that will forever change human relationships? ... [more]

In Creating Mental Illness, sociologist Allan V Horwitz considers where we have come from and where we now stand regarding the classification of mental disorders -- and argues that the system needs a good overhaul ... [more]

The Oxford Companion to the Body: everything you never knew you wanted to know about facial expressions, faeces, fainting, Fallopian tubes and farting ... [more]

Lawrence Lessig's passionate new book, The Future of Ideas, argues that the US's concern with protecting intellectual property has become an oppressive obsession, leaving cyberspace less free than the real world (registration required) ... [more]

The very public battle of Dawkins vs. Gould is perhaps the best-known intellectual stand-off in modern science. Philosopher Kim Sterelny guides readers briefly through the belief systems of the two protagonists, and explores some of the disagreements between them ... [more]

Ghost arcade: Supercade is a coffee-table book for classic-game geeks, making an entertaining and effusive case for the value of early video games as pop-culture artifacts ... [more]

In his new book Our Cosmic Habitat, Martin Rees takes a closer look at the idea that our universe is just part of a greater collective; part of a 'multiverse' in which most of the other universes are empty ... [more]

A surprising 25% of Web users are surfing for religion (registration required) ... [more]

Kids and TV may not be such a bad mixture after all. Some types of television viewing may actually enhance children's intellectual development ... [more]

The geeks who saved Usenet: Google's restoration of digital history relied on a few heroes' packrat mentality and a mountain of decaying mag tapes ... [more]

What activity provides a creative outlet to people who can't draw or paint? Photoshopping, of course ... [more]

The story of mathematician John F Nash Jr as told in A Beautiful Mind is, in the words of the fictionalised protagonist, "elegant, but wrong" ... [more]

The collective upward human gaze yields numerous special images of space every year. Here are ten of the best from 2001 ... [more]

Anthropologists don't have to like what Patrick Tierney says about their colleagues, but they should be glad he says it. That seems to be the conclusion of the American Anthropological Association's inquiry on the controversial book Darkness in El Dorado ... [more]

It jolted Americans out of complacency and showed that their enemies were smarter than they thought. Paul Dickson, the author of Sputnik, compares the days of that shocking satellite to our own ... [more]

The Kolam tradition: A tradition of decorative figure-drawing by women in southern India expresses mathematical ideas, and is attracting the attention of computer scientists ... [more]

Men and women have decidedly different tastes in humour, with men preferring aggressive jokes and women favouring wordplay, an online humour experiment has found ... [more]

SMS is insidious, turning kids into button-pushing, instant-messaging automatons, all under the guise of using an ordinary cellular telephone ... [more]

The universe is our backyard -- but with a backyard this big, it's good to have a guide. If Martin Rees's Our Cosmic Habitat is the pocket guide to the cosmos, Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell is the illustrated atlas ... [more]

For people with synaesthesia, letters and numbers have their own colours, and scents can have distinct shapes. Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens discusses the blending of senses from an insider's point of view ... [more]

Movie stars who smoke on-screen may be the tobacco companies' best allies when it comes to hooking adolescents. But parental attitudes influence kids, too ... [more]

In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg claims the global environment is getting better, not worse, and that threats to our planet have been grossly overstated by environmental organizations and the media. How do his claims hold up under the scrutiny of respected scientists and leaders in their fields? ... [more] ... [more]

The secret history of Mr Happy: David M Friedman, author of A Mind of Its Own, chats about the long, uncut history of the penis ... [more]

Imagine Silicon Valley buried like Pompeii. What could we learn about this very particular place and time from the objects of everyday life? Archaeologist Christine Finn sifts through the Artifacts ... [more]

Women who look to newspapers for information about breast cancer may be getting a distorted picture about the value of routine mammograms for those in their 40s ... [more]

Trauma culture: From Oklahoma City to New York, we've turned violent human loss into epic narratives of suffering and patriotism. Does this help people heal or hurt them? ... [more]

Do you feel the need to visit the Virgin of Guadalupe, but just can't find time for the trip? Now you can surf to the Virgin Mary ... [more]

Most science museums omit to mention Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden. Instead, you get dinosaur replicas, fossils, models of spiraling DNA. That's tantamount to brainwashing, says Ken Ham, so he's building a Creationist Museum to even things out ... [more]

Interactive TV is a great idea -- if you don't mind having your television watching you ... [more]

From your lips to your printer: Software that can convert speech to typed-up text isn't yet foolproof, but it's far more advanced than most people realize ... [more]

Generation Rx.com More young people get health information from the Internet than use it to download music, play games, or check sports scores, says a new survey ... [more]

Victorian sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's life-sized dinosaurs may not have been very accurate, but he did his best ... [more]

Despite the spectre of biowarfare raised by media coverage, and books such as Germs, chemical and biological weapons have a rather poor track record ... [more]

The Devil's playthings: Author Michael W. Cuneo has traveled across the US observing exorcisms. Here he discusses the strange things he's seen and the likelihood of demonic possession ... [more]

The Importance of Being Ernst: Thoughts on an evolution expert who has taken seriously the warning "publish or perish" ... [more]

As any poker player knows, Reading Faces is not as easy as it looks. Dr Leslie Zebrowitz has been studying why that is so ... [more]

New generations of computers will be sensitive to your emotions, which causes some to wonder about our relationships with robotic pets -- especially when combined with the human tendency to hack ... [more]

The chemical industry insists all of its products are perfectly safe. But the industry's own documents tell a different story -- and now they are available online ... [more]

The invisible nightmare: Biological weapons are not that hard to produce, says a chilling new book written before September 11 -- and they're getting easier all the time ... [more]

Educational computer games that target specific regions of the brain can help kids overcome learning disabilities -- and may prove effective against other neurological disorders ... [more]

For two decades moral philosopher Mary Midgley has laid into scientists who, she says, have tried to turn science into a religion. In her latest book she suggests that Gaia should be our guide ... [more]

Never mind those anxieties about the Internet's impact on privacy, intellectual property and the recreational habits of 12-year-olds. What is it doing to the future of the English language? Enriching it, says linguist David Crystal, and showing us "homo loquens at its best" ... [more]

The joy of junk mail Or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love the spam ... [more]

16-year-old Ankit Fadia has written a 624-page encyclopedia of hacking. His security site has been ranked second in the world. What have you done lately? ... [more]

Philosoper and social activist Martha Nussbaum calls for compassion in vengeful times. Her new book, Upheavals of Thought, argues that emotions are essential to ethical judgment and "full political rationality" ... [more]

Simon Winchester's new book, The Map That Changed the World, seeks to rescue a pioneering geologist from obscurity ... [interview] ... [comments by Stephen Jay Gould (registration required)] ... [more]

Pharmaceutical companies are finding ways to circumvent an advertising ban and promote psychiatric drugs for children ... [more]

According to Stephen Toulmin's Return to Reason, there are numerous signs that modern science needs an infusion of common sense ... [more]

Harry Potter and the Coca-Cola Controversy: With childhood obesity at epidemic proportions, public-health watchdogs are up in arms about the use of the enormously popular Harry Potter film to market soft drinks to kids ... [more]

The hand-held computer is taking aim at the military, using off-the-shelf software tested by the road warriors of the business world as well as applications designed specifically for the armed forces (registration required) ... [more]

On your next long, boring road trip, why not seek out the romance of rocks? There are even roadside geology guidebooks to help you tell gneiss from granite, and find your way around scarps, klippes and fault slices (registration required) ... [more]

Despite being a reknowned technological Luddite, Pope John Paul is preparing to bless the Internet ... [more]

A paternity dispute is churning around credit for a little-known scientific breakthrough, without which the Internet wouldn't work (registration required) ... [more]

As more books become electronic, the permanence of print will give way to an author's dream come true: the promise of infinite revision ... [more]

After eighty years together, robots and humans now share a symbiotic relationship which has inspired a new generation of art -- and scientific research -- that examines where people end and machines begin ... [more]

A new London club, the Science Media Centre, has ambitious plans to improve science news coverage. But sceptics are concerned that the centre may not benefit the public ... [more]

The Wayback Machine has opened a gateway to more than 10 billion archived Web pages. In the process, it has also opened a legal can of worms ... [more]

Bjørn Lomborg thinks the Green movement is right about one thing: we need to strive for a cleaner, healthier world. But in The Skeptical Environmentalist he argues that the environmental doomsayers are on the wrong track ... [more]

Just what is emergence? And why has it become the latest favoured explanation of nature and the universe, elbowing aside complexity, chaos and symmetry? ... [more]

Eric Schlosser, an award-winning investigative journalist, uncovers the "dark side of the all-American meal" in Fast Food Nation ... [more]

Because there are omissions, simplifications, and inaccuracies in some general biology textbooks, obviously the modern theory of evolution must be wrong, argues neocreationist Jonathan Wells in Icons of Evolution ... [more]

Researchers are taking a serious look at the psychology of humor -- and they want your help in finding the funniest joke in the world ... [more]

No matter how many different gadgets and technologies you use to keep in touch with friends and family, soon you could be using one digital double to represent you on all of them ... [more]

Robert Sapolsky, author of A Primate's Memoir talks about his years as a member of a troop of Serengeti baboons -- and what they've taught him about people ... [more]

In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks recalls the galvanizing and occasionally dangerous hold of chemistry over his youthful self ... [more]

God didn't create our brains, says Pascal Boyer in Religion Explained. Our brains created God ... [more]

A terrifying contagious disease, the threat of biological warfare and an American population "living a life of incessant dread": Elizabeth A Fenn's Pox Americana delves into an all-too-relevant part of the past ... [more]

Iris scanning may replace passports for frequent fliers, if a Dutch trial goes well. After all, you're unlikely to accidentally leave your eyes at home ... [more]

Forget bear attacks, avalanches and giant ants. The real danger in trekking around the great outdoors is alien abduction. What you need is a gen-u-ine 9-volt plug-and-play UFO detector ... [more]

Ever wish you could go back in time? Well, on the Web you can (at least as far as 1996) courtesy of a new digital library tool called the Wayback Machine ... [more]

Neurologist Jonathan Pincus has spent 25 years peering into the minds and brains of murderers. In Base Instincts, he discusses what makes killers kill, the difficulty of predicting violence and why most murderers can never be rehabilitated ... [more]

Martin Jones' The Molecule Hunt seeks clues to our past in archaeology and the search for ancient DNA ... [more]

Lord of the Harvest tells of ag biotech's ambition to beat petunias into pork chops ... [more]

Sci-fi or sci-future? How credible is the Hollywood vision of future tech? ... [more]

Confidence tricks: High self-esteem in children leads to success. But, Terri Apter asks in The Confident Child, how can parents help to instil it? ... [more]

Birds do it; bees do it; even educated professors do it: why not lie? That's the question one might be left with after reading Jeremy Campbell's The Liar's Tale ... [more]

In his new book, Dinner at the New Gene Café, journalist Bill Lambrecht unravels the politics and polemics around genetically engineered food, already appearing in never-found-in-nature combinations on a plate near you ... [more]

If you've read one instruction manual, you've read them all: thin plot, excess verbiage. They're all a real turnoff ... if you can just find the switch ... [more]

The world isn't doomed after all, says Bjørn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist ... [more] But Chris Lavers is himself sceptical about Lomborg's conclusions ... [more]

At 72, Ursula Le Guin has returned to Earthsea, to mend the wounds that have long divided her fantasy world ... [more]

Mathematician and author Ian Stewart talks about about snowflakes, sticklebacks and magical numbers in nature ... [more]

He was a child prodigy, publishing his first paper at 15. Now Stephen Wolfram says he has created a new kind of science based on simple computer programs rather than equations ... [more]

Three veteran reporters tell the story of biological weapons and the fight against them in Germs (registration required) ... [more]

We can't bake a dinosaur from ancient DNA, but we can get clues to our own past, says The Molecule Hunt ... [more]

In from the cold: Captain Robert Scott, who died with his team in Antarctica in 1912, has been denounced as an incompetent. Susan Solomon argues in The Coldest March that he was undone by freak weather (registration required) ... [more]

Web-surfing on a cellphone may seem like a good idea when you're constantly on the run, but with sites bursting with graphic images, it's not easy. Now help is on the way (registration required) ... [more]

Ever wonder what it really feels like to die -- by drowning, or hypothermia, or dehydration? Despite the claims for Peter Stark's Last Breath, you'll just have to keep wondering ... [more]

Notice any d... elays in e-mail? After the September 11 attacks has come the resurrection of Carnivore -- the FBI's e-mail scanning program ... [more]

H@ppy birthday to you! The first e-mail was sent 30 years ago this month, after a programmer came up with the "@" symbol format for e-mail addresses ... [more]

Prominent among this year's winners of the illustrious Ig Nobel Prize were a medical report on the hazards of falling coconuts and a campaign to save the apostrophe ... [more]

For too long it has been assumed that the public is largely ignorant of 'difficult' science. Elitist rubbish, says Colin Tudge. All we need is a fourth estate more aware of its importance ... [more]

Psychotherapist Adam Phillips brings out the escape artist in us all in Houdini's Box ... [more]

Longstanding assumptions about the role the Net can play in the fight against terrorism are being challenged, even as experts say that investigators are likely to be relying on Internet tools as never before (registration required) ... [more]

"What computer games need is better acting," says Professor Kenneth Perlin. "The worst B- movie actors are better than the actors in video games." But the prospects for a video heroine with personality are looking up (registration required) ... [more]

Can you keep a secret? Steven Levy gives a fascinating account of the birth of public key cryptography in Crypto ... [more]

Computer-generated speech has personality -- and the more it's like you, the more you'll like it ... [more]

Contestants on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire are mythical heroes following in the footsteps of Odysseus and Heracles, two psychologists say ... [more]

Poetic, vital, witty -- who'd have thought depression could make such an uplifting read? Andrew Solomon anatomises his breakdowns in The Noonday Demon ... [more]

Today's kids are unquestionably part of the digital generation. But how are computers affecting youngsters' health? ... [more]

As a psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Masson scandalised his profession by condemning Freud. Then his book on the emotional life of dogs had critics questioning his sanity. And now there is his account of the paternal devotion of penguins ... [more]

Seeking a better black box: Today's black boxes are far more crashworthy than earlier models, but the FAA is still looking for improvements ... [more]

Born out of chaos and sent speeding along by gossip, e-mail and the media, the new urban legends are throwing up false hopes to the needy, diversions to the melancholy and roadblocks to the rescuers ... [more (registration required)] ... [more] ... [more] ... [more]

As Patricia Thomas's Big Shot demonstrates, science needs an engaged and knowledgeable citizenry to defeat AIDS, because the best tactic is a vaccine, and after 10 years of hunting, science has failed to find one ... [more]

Robot wars: John McCrone feels his IQ drop as he follows the search for artificial intelligence ... [more]

Patent blunder: Iraqi military scientists' recipe for making the nerve agent VX in Sudan apparently came from a declassified US patent ... [more]

In The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle shines a light into the dim dark corridors of mummy research, uncovering tales of dedicated scientists and curious aspects of human history ... [more]

Is there intelligent life on the Internet? In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the US, the Internet's role as the ultimate source of unmediated news has been matched only by its notorious ability to breed rumors, conspiracy theories and urban legends (registration required) ... [more]

Doron Swade's The Difference Engine is the tale of Charles Babbage's doomed struggle to create the first mechanical computer ... [more]

Free the Encyclopedias! Got a yen to write? A free Web-based encyclopedia takes contributions (and critiques) from anyone ... [more]

Publish and perish: Putting risk-management plans for industrial sites on the Internet could help would-be terrorists attack those facilities ... [more]

Having trouble getting through to your teenager? Maybe he's moved to CyLandia -- and maybe you're next ... [more]

Do animals think? Donald Griffin, the founder of cognitive ethology, has spent three decades gathering the evidence for animal consciousness -- and in Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness he presents his case ... [more]

Paleontology as art: Each of the 544 stunning paintings in Barbara Page's Rock of Ages, Sands of Time represents a million years of geological history, depicting fossilized trilobites, snails, sponges, ferns, dinosaurs and more ... [images] ... [more]

Kenneth S Deffeyes -- a Princeton geologist who also worked for Shell Oil -- writes with good humor about the oil business in Hubbert's Peak, but he delivers a sobering message: the 100-year petroleum era is nearly over ... [more]

The gaping hole left by the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center buildings and the damage to the Pentagon is visible even from space ... [more]

In The Tapir's Morning Bath, journalist Elizabeth Royte follows researchers into the South American rain forest to study the mystery of their devotion ... [more]

A crisis like the terrorist attacks in the United States can bring out both the best in humanity and the worst -- and some of the worst is appearing on-line in the form of fear-mongering hoaxes and parasitic scams ... [more]

Telephonic tales from a bizarre Finnish festival. The moral? Don't trust mobile phones further than you can throw them ... [more]

Nostradamus predicted terrorist attacks! Er... well, no, not really ... [more]

Thousands of scientists around the world are calling for an online public library of science. They plan to boycott academic journals that refuse to make their contents freely available on the web soon after publication ... [more]

One of the more lasting (although less urgent) lessons from the terrorist attacks on the US was the importance of the Internet for communication and information gathering in time of emergency ... [more]

When the mind sounds retreat: Ben Shepard's A War of Nerves is an engrossing postmortem on how military doctors treated men and women mentally wounded by 20th-century wars ... [more]

Modern life, unplugged: It really is amazing how computers have changed our lives. Consider the humble (but vital) address book ... [more]

Technology hasn't proved to be education's miracle cure after all, says Larry Cuban in Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom ... [more]

Food for higher thought: Can you boost your intellect with a change of diet? Lorraine Peretta thinks so, and Brain Food tells how ... [more]

For 25 years, Jim Gilligan has been directing provision of psychiatric care to inmates of Massachusetts prisons. So his theories on Preventing Violence command attention (registration required) ... [more]

The computer may seem a cold medium for families making end-of-life decisions, but experts say that by adapting technology, they can help people facing difficult choices (registration required) ... [more]

Programmers are preparing to encode human behaviour using HumanML (HumanMarkup Language) ... [more]

In the Borderlands of Science, professional skeptic Michael Shermer talks about science, semi-science and nonsense ... [more]

Thanks to parasitic computing, your PC could take part in Internet-based distributed computing without your knowledge ... [more]

In William Bonadio's memoir Julia's Mother, the saintly innocence of a pediatric ER doesn't quite wash ... [more]

David Shenk's The Forgetting -- a brilliant and quirky new book on Alzheimer's -- offers food for thought on the unthinkable and a new, deeper understanding of the coming epidemic ... [more]

In his story of The Map That Changed The World, Simon Winchester is determined to rescue an abused scientist from obscurity (registration required) ... [more] ... [more]

Birds do it, polar bears do it -- and with the help of satellite transmitters, they send e-mail too ... [more]

An animal designed by committee: Platypus: The Extraordinary Story of How a Curious Creature Baffled the World is an elegantly illustrated book that opens the mind to one of Earth's most unique treasures ... [more]

Ape hearts, brain transplants, and death serum: How the movies' ghoulish doctors cure what ails ... [more]

Recently released White House tapes have revealed that John Kennedy was far from the space visionaryof popular belief ... [more]

The brain inspires new memories: Quantum memories should mimic ours, says a Swiss researcher ... [more]

Yesterday's men and tomorrow's children: The pace of change forced by today's teenage Net pioneers is liberating and exhilarating -- but does Michael Lewis need a more measured pace in The Future Just Happened? ... [more]

A latter-day bookmobile is introducing Malaysia's rural students, teachers and even parents to the online world (registration required) ... [more]

The diverse stories, poems and essays collected in On Doctoring explore the fragile relationships between humanity and medicine (registration required) ... [more]

Extra!! Extra!!! Read all about it!! Careful analysis of NASA photos proves moon landings were faked! ... [more]

How do you ask a nun for her brain? And could there be any more morbid subject matter for a book than a life-and-death study of Alzheimers? Yet David Snowdon's Aging With Grace is a wonderfully warm and illuminating account of his now famous study ... [more]

Many people who have personal Web pages are unknowingly hosting 'Web bugs' that track people who visit and send the information on to third parties ... [more]

When Nobel laureates Rabindranath Tagore (literature, 1913) and Albert Einstein (physics, 1921) met, it was "as though two planets were engaged in a chat" (registration required) ... [more]

High speed, freed: As big telecom interests fight over rights to the wireless spectrum, a group of volunteers is on a crusade to set up wireless Internet access zones throughout New York City ... [more]

Scientists have bad news for people who believe they can deftly drive a car while gabbing on a cell phone. The brain just doesn't work that way (registration required) ... [more]

Hackers make house calls: If you spend a couple of hours per day on the net, chances are you've been noticed ... [more]

The number of broadband users in the US is rising. Consumers really should take protective measures, say the security people ... [more]

Astrobiology is concerned with more than the green-skinned go-go girls of Star Trek fame. Astronomer-writer David Darling dicusses his controversial field and the near-certainty that extraterrestrial life forms exist in our solar system ... [more]

John McNeill's Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century tells a story of increasing human mastery and persuades one that the 'prodigal century' was truly different ... [more]

In Dark Remedy, Rock Brynner [interview] tells the story of thalidomide, the ultimate medical horror story -- and how it is coming back as a miracle drug ... [more]

Dog day afternoon. Three dog night. Dog tired. A dog's life. Canines are in our conciousness -- perhaps even more than we know ... [more]

Virus horror! In a new era of movies like the Farrelly brothers' Osmosis Jones, we die from bugs, not bombs ... [more]

Anne Fausto-Sterling's book Sexing the Body considers the complex gender politics of intersexual babies and postmenopausal women ... [more]

Of monkey bites and avalanches: Mark Buchanan, in his book Ubiquity, argues that non-equilibrium physics could help explain why history is the way it is ... [more]

Teenage girls who read women's health and fitness magazines have an increased risk of unhealthy weight control practices, say US researchers (registration required) ... [more]

Twenty years ago, computer scientist Vernor Vinge wrote a tale of a networked world. From classroom and lab, he's watched it become a reality ... [more]

Two new books upend traditional ideas about the hidden history of contraception; Andrea Tone's Devices and Desires and Lara V Marks' Sexual Chemistry show that early birth control efforts were fostered by women (registration required) ... [more]

After decades of staring at apes, cultural primatologist Frans de Waal has written a book about what humans see when they look at primates ... [more]

With The Story of Mathematics, Richard Mankiewicz sets out to show how every facet of human activity has felt the influence of math ... [more]

Deconstructing the dead: Skeptic Michael Shermer has been "crossing over" to expose the tricks of popular spirit medium John Edward ... [more]

Pregnant women once had every reason to dread the obstetrician. Oxford medical historian Irvine Loudon’s The Tragedy of Childbed Feversets us straight on Semmelweis ... [more]

Code Red: worm assault on the Web. On July 19, 2001, the Code Red worm infected hundreds of thousands of computers in less than 14 hours, overloading the Net's capacity. Now experts say the worm may strike again on August 1 ... [more]

Late breaking news: Disaster in Egypt -- in 2200 BC ... [more]

Speech recognition software can be a sanity-saver for dyslexics -- and may even help them overcome their condition (registration required) ... [more]

Net phone calls -- how do they work? In Internet Protocol telephony, a call is sliced, diced and delivered by many routes (registration required) ... [more]

In his new book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, physicist Lee Smolin takes us to the cutting edge of the search for an ultimate theory of reality ... [more]

Could a virtual passenger make driving safer? This dashboard presence can chat to you, choose your music and warn you when you're doing something you really shouldn't ... [more]

According to lore, Oscar Wilde died of syphilis, but medical opinion a century later is that the cause was far less scandalous ... [more]

Defusing The Explosive Child: Prescribing drugs, not discipline, will only escalate conflict, lead to more difficult kids and weaken our already-lax culture of parenting, says Dr Lawrence Diller ... [more]

Technology thins the plot: Is telephone technology ruining the tried and trusted plots of film and TV thrillers? Are we doomed to nothing but period pieces from now on? ... [more]

Three years from now, solar-power could be in the palm of your hand -- recharging your laptop ... [more]

In It Ain't Necessarily So, three self-styled experts point out the myriad ways that the media gets science wrong ... [first chapter] But beware hidden agendas, warns David Appel ... [more]

Getting e-mail messages and stock quotations on your handheld is child's play. Now you can take a tour of ancient Egypt, with a pager as your guide (registration required) ... [more]

Scientists have found a cheaper way to solve tremendously difficult computational problems: build a StoneSouper computer ... [more]

Why do we like Picasso? It's all about brain wiring: Painters, composers and poets trailblaze new neural pathways to beauty ... [more]

A finger on the crime scene: Does fingerprinting deserve its hallowed reputation? Author Simon Cole seeks to answer this question in Suspect Identities ... [more]

If a Gorilla Anti-Defamation League existed, they would be up in arms over Tim Burton's new film Planet of the Apes ... [more]

Is digital technology affecting our creative capabilities? Probably. Is this good or bad? Well, there's this balance, you see ... [more]

How many times have you found yourself shouting directions to a friend on your mobile, only to realise that everyone around you has just heard the details of your plans for the evening? ... [more]

Tackling puzzles PC by PC: Millions volunteer their home and office computers to crunch data over the Net to aid scientific and medical studies. For some, it's a heated competition ... [more]

Quietly, inspiringly, and intelligibly, An Intimate look at the Night Sky by Chet Raymo makes us feel at home in the universe ... [more]

The Internet was made for fakers, says Dr Marc Feldman, and has spawned a new twist on an old syndrome: Munchausen by Internet ... [more]

Why do so many intelligent, accomplished women fall into obsessive infatuation with men who turn out to be shallow cads? Rosemary Sullivan investigates in Labyrinth of Desire ... [more]

"Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have ... no feelings," says Dr Frans de Waal, "and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'" (registration required) ... [more]

Students learn better when challenged to find the answers themselves, say creators of a technology-rich science curriculum ... [more]

Joel Best's Damned Lies and Statistics reminds us that statistics are everywhere -- but that's no reason to believe them ... [more]

Subliminal health: Television is grappling with some of the US's most pressing public health matters, courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's entertainment education program (registration required) ... [more]

Web searches are not really about logic -- they're about sniffing out information ... [more]

PowerPoint has infiltrated the schoolhouse, reaching even the youngest pupils. But are students fixating on fonts and formats at the expense of content? (registration required) ... [more]

Once upon a dimension: A sequel to the classic Flatland brings to life the mind-bending world of cutting-edge mathematics and alternate universes ... [more]

Anti-tobacco campaigners have been trying a new tactic lately: advertisements that link smoking with impotence, complete with cigarettes that droop ominously when young women walk by (registration required) ... [more]

Elementary school students, once limited to amusing themselves by underlining rude words in the library dictionary, now have a high-tech diversion: getting the school computer to cuss ... [more]

Flowers are devious, prospering by seduction. Michael Pollan tells all in The Botany of Desire (registration required) ... [more] ... [more]

David Wolfe sees the forest for the trees ... and the earthworms for the soils, the prairie dogs for the grasslands and the Rhizobium for the nitrogen. And in Tales From the Underground, he shows them to the reader ... [more]

Travelers of the future may still carry foreign language phrase books. But a pocket translator could let them carry on simple, real-time conversations with their foreign hosts (registration required) ... [more]

From archaeology to meteorology, from astronomy to palaeontology, scientists are finding that the technology behind movie special effects is opening new worlds ... [more]

Kyle Mizokami has left his online haunts and moved on, but Internet immortality means he can't escape his fling with Bigfoot ... [more]

There's nowhere left to hide. Whether you're in jail or at the supermarket, your image might be shown on the Net -- and there's not a thing you can do about it ... [more]

Environmentalists assert that our planet is in serious trouble. Bjorn Lomborg argues in The Skeptical Environmentalist that Earth is doing just fine ... [more]

Among code warriors, women, too, can fight (registration required) ... [more]

If A User's Guide to the Brain has the effect the author hopes, soon the way we approach mental disorders will change quite dramatically, from merely treating symptoms to tracing behavioral problems right down to their biological source ... [more]

Getting e-mail on your mobile is cool, huh? Well, Japan's i-mode users who opened a post containing malicious code recently were unable to prevent making a slew of emergency calls ... [more]

In search of Eve's daughters: Professor Bryan Sykes says most Europeans are descended from just seven women. Is he serious? And why are racists are seizing on the theory? ... [more]

Are you stumped trying to think up uses for your new illuminated keyboard? Here are 49 unexpurgated suggestions (besides the obvious) ... [more]

Gersh Kuntzman's Hair! talks about baldness cures, from the stinky to the effective, and how the tragedy of hair loss has shaped the course of empires and the cutting edge of science ... [more]

Real artists paint by numbers: Unsatisfied with the limited options offered by Flash and Photoshop, the latest trend in new media art is crunching code and writing your own software ... [more]

Punk rock. Protests. Subversion. Drugs. It's the Internet circa 1994 - - well, not exactly. But a traveling digital film festival hopes to re-create the wild sense of community that used to live on the Web ... [more]

Bones of contention: Five years ago, some bones were discovered in a bank of the Columbia River. They turned out to be about 9,500 years old. Whose ancestor are they, and who owns them now? ... [more]

Rear Windows 01: the upgraded version. If only Alfred Hitchcock had a cell phone. Here are some films that soar, or sink, with upgraded operating systems (registration required) ... [more]

For the blind child who once asked, "What is the sky?" educator Benning Wentworth now has an answer: a tactile book called Touch the Universe, based on the cosmic images made by the Hubble Space Telescope ... [more]

Doctor Who is back! And you can only find him on the Internet ... [more]

Christer Fahraeus is planning to revolutionize information technology -- with a pen and paper. A digital pen, that is, and paper marked with faint coordinates ... [more]

The press got it wrong about the NAS global warming report, says one of the scientists on the panel: There was no consensus about long-term climate trends and what causes them ... [more]

A Big Brother-type show featuring 10 fiercely competitive, anorexia-prone young women will undoubtedly make compelling TV. And there will even be a nice lady doctor on hand to reassure the public that no real damage is being done (registration required) ... [more]

Colin Beavan's Fingerprints is a surprisingly engaging history, telling how two brutal murders in 1905 provided the case police needed to finally demonstrate that fingerprint evidence was reliable in distinguishing innocent parties from the guilty ... [more]

More lights go out on the Web: The apparent demise of pioneering sites Feed and Suck leaves the online world an emptier, duller place ... [more]

Last year 100 million people turned to the Web for medical advice. Some of what they got was useful, some was confusing -- and some was just plain bad (registration required) ... [more]

The play's the thing: An urban parent speaks out in defense of video games (registration required) ... [more]

The way they spoke of quantum mechanics, it was as if they were talking about a woman they had all shared a tremendous affair with. The Closer to Truth show makes science sexy ... [more]

Experts are warning that encrypting e-mails is no panacea against the tapping of electronic communications ... [more]

Gambling odds, annuities, insurance: For a benighted era, the Middle Ages knew a lot about probability ... [more]

In a move sure to excite e-book devotees and surprise the largely Luddite publishing world, the National Book Awards in the US will now consider e-books alongside print books -- but only in printed-and-bound form ... [more]

Outrageous fortune: Some people feel that corporate sponsorship of scientific research amounts to the purchase of it. Editors of scientific journals reckon that vigilance is the answer ... [more]

To be young, Chinese and Weiku: China's dot-com boom went bust, but it gave birth to a way-cool generation of Web users who are creating their own cultural revolution ... [more]

Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column collection offers unique insights into the devices yesterday's dedicated amateurs could -- and did -- build, and insight into everyday and unusual phenomena ... [more]

The occurrence of the skin disease tinea imbricata among Gungan inhabitants of the planet Naboo (as depicted in The Phantom Menace), may help answer questions about extraterrestrial interventions in human affairs (registration required) ... [more]

Bryan Sykes's boy's own adventure, The Seven Daughters of Eve, says we can trace our maternal line back 45,000 years ... [more]

A new study says The X-Files and programs like it may be fueling a rising belief in aliens and the paranormal ... [more]

The Web makes identity theft or creating a new persona frighteningly cheap and easy. FEED's Clay Shirky, a recent victim of an Internet heist, explores a subject that is near and dear to his heart ... [more]

Proponents of mercury-based hospital instruments defend the use of the potentially hazardous substance by saying that only mercury provides the necessary accuracy and reliability. So you'd think a study refuting that claim would be big news ... [more]

Protecting wildlife across borders: Two different nations. Two unrelated universities. Two separate university programs. With so little in common, why on Earth would two university departments move mountains to create a single, joint-university course? ... [more]

Internet, cell phones, videophones, virtual reality devices, computers, modems, data banks: the communications industry is taking over. Productivity, utility, management are the watchwords. But are we masters or servants of our devices? ... [more]

The Magna Carta of alternative medicine may be in need of a rewrite ... [more]

It was only a matter of time. Now people are logging on to get e-therapy from an Internet doctor ... [more]

It looks like a large digital watch, but it is actually a maker and breaker of careers. And it works by listening in on your life, every minute of every day ... [more]

Dennis Danielson's The Book of the Cosmos presented readers with a refreshing view of the universe and made him a star among astronomers. The thing is, he's an English professor ... [more]

Do the political implications of medical breakthroughs affect their reception by the media? As with the thorny issue of stem-cell research, some see advances where others see concerns ... [more]

US students' grasp of math and science pales in comparison to other countries. Why? Because standard textbooks are so inaccurate that the Earth might as well be flat ... [more]

Britain's Oxford University says it will create the an institute dedicated to studying the Internet and its effects on society ... [more]

Maybe cheating isn't in your husband's bones but infidelity is in his genes -- and yours too ... [more]

In his new book Republic.com, law professor Cass R Sunstein argues that Internet filtering technology tends to limit citizens' sources of information, narrowing readers' minds and souls (registration required) ... [more]

Users of text messaging can receive everything from condensed church services to new literary forms -- all in TM's own unique language ... [more]

Robert Sapolsky, author of A Primate's Memoir, talks about hanging out with baboons, madness in Africa and the difference between apes and his kids ... [more]

Wireless networks are becoming more common on college campuses, but (surprise surprise) wireless browsing during class can be a distraction for students (registration required) ... [more]

Immortalised in stone: Author and geek's geek Douglas Adams is gone, but his fictional hero lives on in a newly-named asteroid ... [more]

Fuelled by a willing media, the thirst for paranoiac conjecture in the US is reaching new heights of lunacy ... [more]

Alien invasions wreak havoc on indigenous species. A new guide by the World Conservation Union details the worst of the worst introduced plants and animals ... [more]

The pigeon protocol: How the Talmud, hacker whimsy and a love of Linux inspired a group of Norwegian programmers to attach packets of computer code to birds' legs ... [more]

What is the appeal of Deepak Chopra? What pulls people like Michael Jackson, Demi Moore and Bill Clinton to this spiritual tycoon? Is it a hunger for wonders or lack of sense? ... [more]

Man versus machine: A UK firm aims to emulate 1997's famous match between Big Blue and Garry Kasparov. But the new Grand Master could find himself up against a desktop PC ... [more]

Marxist literary critics are following me! Science fiction guru Philip K Dick became a hero to radical literary theorists. But he thought those theorists were communist conspirators. So he contacted the FBI ... [more]

The FBI has been using Internet eavesdropping tools to track fugitives, drug dealers, extortionists, computer hackers and suspected foreign intelligence agents ... [more]

In bad faith: A researcher offers evidence that religion is good for your health. Too bad so much of it is bunk ... [more]

In the wired world of McNews, in which media concentration draws increasing scrutiny, how relevant to your life are real, printed newspapers? Less so all the time, it appears ... [more]

If you reach for your hanky as Leonardo DiCaprio slips beneath the freezing Altlantic waves in Titanic, or dive behind the sofa during Alien, you're not alone. If chimpanzees were watching with you, they might welll join in with emotional displays of their own ... [more]

Anthropologist Michael Taussig is the innovator and most extreme practitioner of a radical alternative: fictocriticism. Blending fact and fiction, ethnographic observation, archival history, literary theory and memoir, his books read more like beatnik novels than sober analyses of other cultures (registration required) ... [more]

Eminent primatologist Frans de Waal's The Ape and the Sushi Master challenges long-held convictions about what makes humans distinct from other animals ... [more]

To ban, or not to ban? Internet cafes are becoming an ever more frequent sight on street corners throughout China and are provoking fierce debate, with the government seeking to curb them while intellectuals argue their merits as a source of information ... [more]

Richard Evans, the man behind the code behind Black & White talks about group minds; how creatures, villages, and even worlds can learn; the things he had to leave out of the game; and the next big thing in AI ... [more]

Stuart Kauffman is one of a pioneering generation of complexity theorists who struggled to define life in terms of advanced mathematics. Fifteen years on, his new book Investigations makes it clear that there may be more to life than Kauffman thought ... [more]

Technical ignorance is an excuse used by too many parents and teachers in their failure to teach kids cyberethics, says computer security consultant Winn Schwartau. So he wrote a book to fill the gap ... [more]

More copies exist of one of Joe Davis's works than of all previous artworks by all prior artists. Yet his self-replicating creations have never been exhibited in the US, and he remains utterly dependent on donations of equipment and expertise from scientists ... [more]

Scientists around the world are preparing to boycott scientific journals unless they make old research papers freely available for a vast on-line library ... [more]

A prestigious US medical journal has taken the unprecedented step of retracting a study on breast cancer after an investigation found the South African researcher had falsified results ... [more]

US officials are warning that Chinese hackers are poised to increase their assault on American websites. But US hackers are joining the fray ... [more]

Christmas 2000 was the Tenth Anniversary of the Creation. Of the Web, that is. Now the two men who started it all have written their own tales of those far-off days ... [more]

Improving living standards in the developing world without destroying the environment is a challenge explored in a new interactive CD-ROM, Population and the Environment, a multimedia version of the journal Population Reports ... [more]

Eliezer Yudkowsky has devoted his young life to an undeniably unusual pursuit: planning for what happens when computers become far smarter than us. One solution he suggests is unconditional "friendliness," built into the AI as surely as our genes are coded into us ... [more]

A dot-com news site is lauded as the savior of Indian journalism. But are India's unglamorous stories and impoverished newspapers being left in the cold? ... [more]

Theodore Berger has spent 12 years slicing up rabbit brain tissue, zapping it with electrical pulses and mapping the results to learn how to teach computers to learn (registration required) ... [more]

The bad news, according to Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence is that violence is rooted in our genes. The good news is that, unlike our jungle cousins, humans are not slaves to our nature ... [more]

Volcano wars: Nine scientists met grisly deaths in a 1993 eruption in Colombia, but the battle over who was to blame rages on ... [more]

A self-appointed global army has set its sights on spam, the mass Internet mailings that annoy users and crash systems. It is a demanding and risky hobby ... [more]

More than a third of the shoppers who buy cell phones at one store in Berlin cannot hear -- but they dread the thought of being separated from their phones ... [more]

An intricate and engrossing set of fictional websites has been created as "back story" for the forthcoming film AI, giving fans a hint of the story played out in the film, and some intriguing clues about who does what to whom ... [more]

Modern boys and mobile girls: For sci-fi author William Gibson, Japan has been a lifelong inspiration. Here, the writer who coined the phrase 'cyberspace', explains why no other country comes closer to the future... or makes better toothpaste ... [more]

As the Web becomes a primary research tool, some say that digital archiving is the best way to preserve the present. Others argue that it's no panacea ... [more]

Say what you will about Tobias Schneebaum -- his life and writing afford plenty of grist for second-guessing -- but, consciously or not, he has pushed the parameters of anthropology (and reality) about as far as they can be pushed, and lived to tell the tales ... [more]

Before you punch the computer screen as your machine crashes for the fifth time today, spare a thought for the crew of the International Space Station ... [more]

2001: The real odyssey How well did Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke predict the future? They nailed it, says Sun's chief technology officer ... [more]

Music-sharing via Gnutella has much in common with human interpersonal networks. And in both cases, strengths and weaknesses are multiplied by the size of the network ... [more]

While poets, writers, and artists make wild conjectures about love, scientists may have grasped its true meaning, says Kuldip Dhiman in Emotion: The Science of Sentiment ... [more]

Are you in anthropodenial? Frans de Waal portrays altruistic apes and magnanimous monkeys in The Ape and the Sushi Master (registration required) ... [more]

Learn online -- for free. MIT is to be the first university to make its courses available on its web site for free ... [more]

Legendary sci-fi author Harlan Ellison is fighting a lonely battle against e-book pirates. Will he take Usenet down with him? ... [more]

Easy writer: Software that turns everyday language into computer code could make us all programmers ... [more]

In Synaesthesia: the strangest thing, neuropsychologist John Harrison draws on historical accounts and his own extensive research to paint a portrait of this extraordinary condition (registration required) ... [more]

Stranger than fiction: UFO investigators have a tough time coming up with anything concrete to support their claims. It's not for lack of trying, though ... [more]

A life-saving screensaver has been launched that should help scientists find a cure for cancer ... [more]

The revolution in the electronic publishing of science is just beginning (registration required) ... [more]

The highly successful Deep Green project to construct a "tree of life" for the green plants has ended, but it has seeded new projects to strengthen the branches and root the tree more firmly in new genetic and fossil data ... [more]

The real computer virus is misinformation. And despite years of warnings, this malady keeps creeping its way into the newsprint and onto the airwaves of mainstream news outlets ... [more]

Biochemist David Horrobin claims in The Madness of Adam & Eve that tiny mutations in our ancestors' brain cells triggered mankind's takeover of the world 100,000 years ago. But those same changes also cursed our species to suffer from schizophrenia and depression ... [more]

David Powell has A Fascination for Fish in all their marvellous variety ... [more]

Prima donna pop stars could soon be on the way out: The virtual sort are even better than the real thing ... [more] Or if real (but dead) rock stars are more your style, you could always have a chat with the virtual John Lennon ... [more]

Thanks to marketing aimed at parents, sales of software for toddlers is exploding. But the debate over the wisdom of giving software to infants is just beginning ... [more]

T Coraghessan Boyle talks about his new novel, A Friend of the Ea