91É«ÇéƬ

In media coverage on the topic of significantly extending human lifespans, there seems to be a general view that doing so would be an unalloyed good. But the most significant impact would be an increase in population. If we all lived an average of 12 per cent longer than at present, that would amount to …

I read with interest about the "insect-eye" compass that can navigate by the sun even on cloudy days. While I can see a use for it in drones, it is relatively easy to compensate for the magnetic fields drones generate, and hence conventional systems can work. Where it may come in handy is for manual …

It is suggested that the orbits of planets in our system would probably be unaltered by a star passing at about 100 astronomical units from the sun. But what of the many Oort cloud and Kuiper belt objects? They would be much closer to the passing star and more easily disturbed ( 9 December, p …

The arrival of the GNoME artificial intelligence model to predict new inorganic crystal structures is indeed exciting. Its positive potential is justly lauded, having increased the number of known inorganic crystal structures from around 48,000 to over 2 million, with potential for making better batteries, solar panels, computer chips, alloys and more ( 2 December, …

Why chase the theoretical date of a global temperature rise of 1.5°C when carbon dioxide levels can be measured in real time anywhere? Adopting temperature rise as a measure of the climate emergency is akin to using rates of skin cancer as a measure of the extent of the ozone hole. CO 2 is the …

At last, an advocate in James Wong for leaving nature to deal with leaf fall on your lawn. I would like to add that worm species are also important recyclers. In the UK at least, anecic earthworms form vertical burrows and drag leaves underground. No need to do any work ourselves ( 9 December 2023, …

I sincerely hope that Peter Turchin is right in his predictions of the growing resilience of modern-day societies, but I fear that few of the civilisations of the past 5000 years on which he has based his conclusions would have had communication networks that could spread panic in minutes, along with just-in-time supply chains that …

If we are trying to find alien life, why go to all the trouble of searching for biosignatures on remote exoplanets? Several novelists have pointed out that, if aliens are as enthusiastic tourists as we are, they will leap at the chance of visiting Earth, where, by pure coincidence, the sun and moon are about …

Graham Lawton's article on the true cost of goods when emissions are factored in led me to wonder about the true cost of a copy of New Scientist . The only applicable research I could find was done in Sweden by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology's Centre for Sustainable Communications in 2007. It compared …

You report that by far the highest known rate of long covid has been in Switzerland, a wealthy country with a northern temperate climate. This rate variation points to unknown factors being involved in developing long covid. Does some factor put certain wealthy Westerners at greater risk? Intriguingly, among the earliest recorded outbreaks of the …