91av

View in the app Check out this magazine in our easy-to-navigate mobile app Find a previous edition online Search through our digital archive of over 30 years of magazines

Editor's picks

Physics

Intergalactic subway: All aboard the wormhole express

Earth

How to dismantle a nuclear reactor

Humans

Middle age: A triumph of human evolution

Physics

Medieval modern master: Colour decoded before its time

Table of contents

News

Spider silk spun into violin strings

Strands of the silk were twisted and bundled together into violin strings, producing a brilliant timbre – listen and judge for yourself

Tevatron collider’s mighty boost for Higgs hunt

Mutant bird flu virus still as deadly as first thought

Oceans acidifying at unprecedented speed

Health

Symptoms of late-stage Alzheimer’s can be delayed

Cheetah robot breaks land speed record

Seedy scientists are polluting Antarctica

60 Seconds

Health

Exotic electrical effect pops up in soft mammalian tissue

Fukushima meltdown: the nuclear industry, one year on

Earth

Fear after Fukushima to push up carbon emissions

Earth

Japan’s refusenik farmers tackle nuclear waste

Humans

Extra female genes make men more masculine

Physics

Physics ‘demon’ reveals fundamental heat of forgetting

Humans

Gorilla DNA unlocks secrets of our species

Life

Bonobos are caring because they are led by females

Health

Superfast drugs target shape-shifting enzymes

Health

Gas-filled aspirin is a potent anti-cancer drug

Health

Cancer chimeras complicate therapy

Technology

Metal detector can identify buried bombs

Snakes on an inclined plane control scales to climb

Environment

Wild bear uses a stone to exfoliate

Peaceable matter-antimatter pairs glimpsed in the lab

First Americans: were they Iberian, not Siberian?

Broken coral embryos become clone army

Health

Exercise instantly boosts fat-busting genes

Technology

AI designs its own video game

Humans

Be school prom queen in ‘social physics’ game

Humans

Avatars set to shape real-world habits

Technology

A different way to game

Technology

Splish, splash games with the water controller

Opinion

Fukushima’s dirty inheritance

The nuclear industry must clean up its past messes if it is to secure its future

Midlife needn’t be a crisis

Health

Should we rewrite the autism rule book?

How LulzSec kept itself safe during the summer of ‘lulz’

Humans

The story of language: culture not nature

Aperture

The first portable digital camera – cassette included

It weighed 4 kilograms and stood 22 centimetres tall, but in 1975 this behemoth was way ahead of its time

Features

Physics

Intergalactic subway: All aboard the wormhole express

New theories of gravity could make deep-space travel through wormholes a reality, says Marcus Chown

Earth

How to dismantle a nuclear reactor

Humans

Middle age: A triumph of human evolution

Physics

Medieval modern master: Colour decoded before its time

Culture

The only humans left on Earth

See more: An illustrated version of this article will be published within the next two weeks on our CultureLab books and arts blog In Lone Survivors, Chris Stringer explains how forensic technology offers surprising insights into our evolutionary predecessors

Make yourself more creative

Speed-dating, stolen cars and Scrabble

More

Enigma Number 1688

Regulars

Feedback: Illegible demand for legibility

Advice that is easier to take than read, email for life – as long as you die soon, minibar medication, and more

This Week’s Letters

Back in black

Think again

Hard tea fallin’

Browse past issues

View all

25 February 2012

18 February 2012

11 February 2012

4 February 2012

28 January 2012