SCIENCE MAGAZINE (January 16, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Shear Wonder’ – Chain-like materials manifest complex strain responses..
SCIENCE MAGAZINE – JANUARY 17, 2025 ISSUE
Tag Archives: Science
Science: Nature Magazine – January 16, 2025 Preview
NATURE MAGAZINE (January 15, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Punk Rocks’ – Spiky 3D fossils add to the diversity of ancient molluscs…
Male spiders smell with their legs
Sensory organs on the walking legs of the male wasp spider can catch the scent of a female in a mood for romance.
Particle accelerators get an assist from AI co-pilots
Large language models can propose fine-tuning adjustments for an electron accelerator in Germany.
How the brain cleans itself during deep sleep
Blood vessels in the brain rhythmically constrict and dilate to drive waves of cleansing fluid through the organ.
Cosmic carnage: planetary rubble spotted at a dying star
Dust cloud is thought to be the first debris disk to be seen around a planetary nebula.
Culture: The New Atlantis Journal – Winter 2025
THE NEW ATLANTIS JOURNAL (January 14, 2025): The latest issue features…
The New Control Society
The gatekeepers are dying. Why is everything so mid?
We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It
Introducing “How the System Works,” a series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life
The Tyranny of Now
There’s no time like the present to revisit the warning of forgotten media theorist Harold Innis: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.”
Nature Magazine: Top New Science Books Of 2025
What the Body Knows
John Trowsdale Yale Univ. Press (2024)
To understand the body, “we might picture the heart as a pump, the brain as a kind of computer, the lungs as bellows, the kidney as filters”. But what about the immune system — asks immunologist John Trowsdale in his engaging analysis. It has no straightforward analogy, operating simultaneously as an antiviral software, a surveillance camera, a weapons system and a way to share resources. The system is “unobtrusive yet extensive, nowhere and everywhere, redundant yet essential, powerful yet remote”.
Wild Chocolate
Rowan Jacobsen Bloomsbury (2024)
When residue inside decorative pots from ancient Mexico was analysed, it yielded traces of cacao — early evidence of cocoa consumption. The Spanish word chocolate might have been influenced by the Nahuatl (Aztec) cacahuatl, or cacao water. Journalist Rowan Jacobsen’s appealing book explores wild chocolate’s history as he travels through Central and South America, meeting chocolate makers, activists and Indigenous leaders who revive the bean’s variety in taste and prestige, lost during its modern industrial manufacture.
Talking Images
Eds Silvia Ferrara et al. Routledge (2024)
The logo of the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games was a figure with a red dot ‘head’, blue ‘body’ and single, straight green ‘leg’ — adapted from the Chinese character zhi, meaning ‘birth, life’, ‘arrival’ and ‘achievement’. It is one of a huge variety of “talking images” in a collection edited by three scholars interested in writing. Images range from Palaeolithic symbols and ancient Mesopotamian pictograms to modern Chinese calligraphy and Indian comics. The book traces links between images, marks, language and writing.
Do Plants Know Math?
Stéphane Douady et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
Science Magazine —- January 10, 2025 Issue
SCIENCE MAGAZINE (January 9, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Not Skipping Meals’ – A narrow diet not responsible for extinction of short-faced kangaroos…
Fish could personalize cancer treatments
The first clinical trial of zebrafish embryos acting as cancer “avatars” will start soon
‘Good boring’: How Bluesky is shaping scientists’ discourse
The fast-growing platform may be more equitable than X, but gives scientists a smaller stage
Dogs sniff out truffles—in the name of science
Their keen noses are helping researchers uncover the diversity of the Pacific Northwest’s underground fungi
How a neurotransmitter drives brainwashing during sleep
Pulsating blood vessels push fluid into and out of the brains of slumbering mice
Science: Nature Magazine – January 9, 2025 Preview
NATURE MAGAZINE (January 8, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Skin Deep’ – How the crocodile’s head got its scales…
This digital-memory device keeps its cool even at 600 °C
A battery-like technology uses a metal called tantalum to create an equivalent of digital 0s and 1s.
Fancy birds decorate nests with a natural pattern: snakeskin
The use of shed skins might help to ward off predators, experiments suggest.
A blood test detects aged cells
Proteins could serve as biomarkers for senescent cells, which have stopped dividing but have not yet died.
That Christmas jumper is a marvel of complicated physics
Models and experiments demonstrate what happens when a knitted fabric is deformed.
Research Preview: Science Magazine – Dec. 20, 2024
Science Magazine (December 18, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Light Emission with a Twist’ – Hot, twisted carbon nanotube yarns emit bright circularly polarlized light…
Can psychedelics improve well-being in autism?
A brace of new studies probes benefits and risks for an understudied group
Thermal radiation with a twist
Carbon nanotube filaments with a twisted geometry emit spinning heat waves at high temperatures
Scientific American Magazine – January 2025
Scientific American (December 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Search for Planet Nine’….
We May Be on the Brink of Finding the Real Planet Nine
If there’s a hidden world in the solar system, a new telescope should find it
Engineering Lucid Dreams Could Improve Sleep and Defuse Nightmares
Great Apes Joke Around, Suggesting Humor Is Older Than Humans
Research Preview: Science Magazine-Dec. 13, 2024
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The long shot
An injectable HIV drug with a novel mechanism shows remarkable ability to prevent infection
Mantle waves sculpt the continents
When the forces of plate tectonics tear continents apart, it’s an incredibly violent process, unfolding in slow motion. It was also thought to be very local: Magma from hot, rising mantle rock seeds volcanoes along the rift zone, while the far-removed cold interiors of continents remain intact.
Multicellularity came early for ancient eukaryotes
Microscopic algalike fossils from China reported early this year astounded evolutionary biologists with their extreme age. Dated at 1.6 billion years old, the specimens suggest one of the hallmarks of complex life—multicellularity—arose far earlier than previously thought.
A new type of magnetism emerges
For 98 years, physicists knew of two types of permanently magnetic materials. Now, they’ve found a third. In familiar ferromagnets such as iron, unpaired electrons on neighboring atoms spin in the same direction, magnetizing the material so that, for example, it sticks to a refrigerator. Antiferromagnets such as chromium have zero overall magnetism, but they possess an atomic-scale magnetic pattern, with neighboring electrons spinning in opposite directions. Novel altermagnets—hypothesized 5 years ago—share aspects of both.
Politics: The Guardian Weekly-December 13, 2024
The Guardian Weekly (December 11, 2024): The new issue features The fall of Syria’s brutal dictatorship. Plus The best books of 2024.
Not even the most optimistic of rebels could have predicted the rapid collapse, last weekend, of the Assad dynasty that ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than 50 years. Yet while there was relief and joy both inside Syria and among the nation’s vast displaced diaspora, it was also accompanied by apprehension over what might come next.
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Spotlight | Russia and Ukraine wait warily for Trump transition
The idea of the US president-election as a saviour for Ukraine, as unlikely as it may seem, holds an appeal for an exhausted nation without a clear path to victory. Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer report
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Environment | The jailed anti-whaler defiant in face of extradition threat
Capt Paul Watson talks to Daniel Boffey about his arrest on behalf of the Japanese government, his ‘interesting’ Greenland prison, and separation from his children
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Feature | The growing threat of firearms that can be made at home
One far-right cell wanted to use 3D-printed guns to cause ‘maximum confusion and fear’ on the streets of Finland. Could the police intercept them in time? By Samira Shackle
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Opinion | Farage is lying in wait. Britain can’t afford for Starmer to fail
It is not enough for the Labour leader’s ‘milestones’ to be achieved. Voters must feel the improvement in their daily lives, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
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Culture | The best books of 2024
From a radical retelling of Huckleberry Finn to Al Pacino’s autobiography, our critics round up their favourite reads of the year
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