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This week's magazine

23 February 2002

Issue 2331

91av issue 2331 cover

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On the cover

Features

Perfect casting

News

It's the pits

Opinion

Act now, think later

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91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Perfect casting

Features

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Snooze control

Features

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Return of the skulls

Features

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Body talk

Features

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Mind over metal

Features

Table of contents

News

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

It's the pits

"BEING punched in the back of the neck with a blunt instrument." That's how William Morton, a retired flautist with the Royal Opera House orchestra in London, describes the blast of sound that assaults the senses of musicians performing in the confined spaces of an orchestra pit. Musicians in these claustrophobic dug-outs can struggle to …

News

It's a dirty job…

News

E-mail thievery

News

Physics

Judgement day

News

Physics

Weighing up the odds

News

Muddy waters

News

Bigger ain't better

News

In hot water

News

Green harvest

News

Beating back a killer

News

Kitchen cosmology

News

No sex for you, we're trying to save the species

News

More than the sum of its parts

News

The brainy bunch

News

Taming the tsetse

News

Vaccinate or go to jail

News

Grow your own bladder

News

No more sushi

News

Got that swing

News

Something to smile about

News

Earth

All fished out

News

For a fistful of mirror matter

News

Smash and grab

News

Gagging order

News

We can copy cats

News

Grim outlook

News

Hotter in Nevada

News

Metric martyrs

News

Pep pills for old age

News

Nasty or nice?

News

Supersonic shock

News

Fast-forward sewage test helps fish breathe easy

News

They've got take-away tastebuds

News

Bad for baby

News

Use it or lose it

News

Battered, but not beat

News

Going up

News

Changing times

News

Technology

Monitor that mast

News

Technology

Fusion made simple

News

Past perfect

News

Marine magic of the single-cell chemist

News

Pitch perfect

News

Technology

Muscle in on vaccination

News

Opinion

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Act now, think later

WESTERN democracies are founded on a complicated network of compromises, the best known of which stems from the conflict between the needs of the state and the rights of the individual. Without compromise on one side the result is totalitarian government; on the other it's anarchy. In Britain, another of these balancing acts is about …

Opinion

Don't mention the 'c' word

Opinion

Washington diary

Opinion

Double espresso, please

Opinion

Consider her ways . . .

Opinion

Features

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Perfect casting

A pinch of this, a squirt of that. David Tompsett was a craftsman who had mastered a tricky process using methods of his own devising. His unique skill was in creating solid casts of delicate hollow structures: blood vessels and airways, animal or human. The results of his work, mostly from the 1950s, are on …

Features

Snooze control

Features

Return of the skulls

Features

Body talk

Features

Mind over metal

Features

More

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

. . . and taxes

Last Breath: Cautionary tales from the limits of human endurance by Peter Stark, Macmillan, £16.99, ISBN 0333905709 "MEDITATION on inevitable death should be performed daily," wrote the 18th-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo. "Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease." Such acceptance of our mortality …

Books & Arts

Sans everything

Books & Arts

Box of tricks

Books & Arts

Infinity and us

Books & Arts

Pinch me

Books & Arts

Shangri-la?

Books & Arts

Who's reading what

Books & Arts

Regulars

91av. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Feedback

DOESN'T IT drive you insane when a company answers the phone with one of those horrid, time-consuming, automated systems? Press 1 for this, 2 for that, 3 for the other. And then press 1 for something else, 2 for something different, and so on, until you end up saddled with something completely different from what …

Regulars

The Last Word

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word