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Editor's picks

Curled-up young fern frond

Life

Life: is it inevitable or just a fluke?

Humans

Charisma class: How to win fans and influence people

Health

Cruel cuts: Is all breast cancer surgery necessary?

Technology

Silicon sirens: The naughty bots out to seduce you

Table of contents

News

Rio+20 conference suffers lack of leadership

Devoid of world leaders and without headline-grabbing treaties to sign, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro is not looking promising

Higgsteria as trouble brews for standard model

Greece needs technological help to reboot economy

60 Seconds

Japan prepares to switch nuclear reactors back on

Health

Kids’ antibiotic prescriptions fall in the US

Secret US spaceplane shows China the future

Health

Stealthy virus that robs years of life could be beaten

Physics

Sorry Einstein, the universe needs quantum uncertainty

How to convince climate sceptics to be pro-environment

Oldest confirmed cave art is a single red dot

Life

Sex born from hard rock and heavy metal

Physics

Brand new bonding skills make boron more like carbon

Girl receives pioneering vein transplant

Physics

Plasmonic graphene controls rippling electrons

Humans

What a way to go: prehistoric turtles died during sex

Humans

Special goggles reveal when babies see in 3D

Zoologger: Angry lizard starts fights for no reason

Life

Dairy farming in the Sahara – 7000 years ago

Astrophile: Runaway is star of cosmic whodunnit

Health

Breast milk seems to kill HIV

Technology

Baby robot learns first words from human teacher

Health

Ultrasound pill helps the medicine go down

Technology

Virtually whack it with a responsive tennis racket

Technology

Future-predicting system cuts app loading time

Technology

Praying mantis bot has extra-nimble legs

Technology

Lawyerbot takes the drudgery out of law

Opinion

Humans

Cave art appreciation opens ancient human minds to us

Science may soon tell us who made ancient art, but it'll need help from unexpected quarters to explain why they did it

Health

Stealthy virus presents unique public health challenge

Technology

Two faces of chatbot technology speaks volumes about us

Set science free from publishers’ paywalls

10-year-old solves science riddle and co-authors paper

Earth

Don’t fence us in: Modern-day land grabs

Analysis

Health

Deadly flu recipe to be published – but work halted

Days before a controversial H5N1 paper is finally published, flu scientists are debating how they can safely get their research up and running

Aperture

Psychedelic nano-art in oils and ferrofluids

Ferrofluids – a mix of oil and nano-sized iron particles – are normally used in computer hard drives, but their weird properties can make for great liquid art

Features

Curled-up young fern frond

Life

Life: is it inevitable or just a fluke?

If life arises wherever conditions are right, why haven't we heard from aliens?

Humans

Charisma class: How to win fans and influence people

Health

Cruel cuts: Is all breast cancer surgery necessary?

Technology

Silicon sirens: The naughty bots out to seduce you

Culture

Is there an explanation for existence?

In Why Does the World Exist? Jim Holt spans physics, philosophy and literature to examine the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing

Advice for Earthlings

The science of sleight-of-hand magic tricks

More

Enigma Number 1703

Regulars

Feedback: Uncertain in Llanfair PG

Hamster weight wanting, heights of absurdity, new fossil surprise, and more

This Week’s Letters

The wobblies

Nosey question

Rate of escalation

Hound bound

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