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Impact reveals lunar water by the bucketful

19:38 13 November 2009  | 31 comments

NASA's LCROSS mission has confirmed an icy store of water at the moon's south pole

Ray Mears: We'll struggle to survive climate change

INTERVIEW:  10:00 14 November 2009  | 13 comments

Ray Mears is Mr Bushcraft. He wants people to be confident about surviving in the wild, but reckons most of us won't make it through a global climate crisis

Today on New Scientist: 13 November 2009

18:00 13 November 2009

Today's stories on newscientist.com, at a glance, including: why you shouldn't mix cocaine and pepper spray, a green makeover for piezoelectronics, and a joyride through the nanoworld

Philip Rosedale: The web needs to be more lifelike

INTERVIEW:  15:24 13 November 2009  | 6 comments

Residents of Second Life have spent one billion hours in this digital world. Now its founder has plans to push the concept much further in a new virtual venture

Failed stellar bombs hint at supernova tipping point

13:57 13 November 2009  | 7 comments

Two peculiar white dwarfs with more oxygen than carbon are like nothing anybody has seen before

Trees in far north provide biggest climate benefit

UPFRONT:  13:51 13 November 2009  | 18 comments

Planting forests in the tropics could be a waste of time and money, compared with planting them at high latitudes

Plastic-hardening chemical makes men soft

12:10 13 November 2009

A compound commonly found in plastic food and drink containers appears to cause erectile dysfunction and other sexual performance problems in men. But how worried should we be, asks Nic Fleming

Cocaine and pepper spray – a lethal mix?

THIS WEEK:  12:02 13 November 2009  | 20 comments

A mouse experiment suggests deaths in US police custody may have been the result of an interaction between capsaicin and psychostimulant drugs

A joyride through the nanoworld

11:00 13 November 2009

George Whitesides and Felice Frankel take you on a whirlwind tour of the tiny in No Small Matter: Science on the nanoscale

Piezoelectronics gets green makeover

18:05 12 November 2009  | 6 comments

Piezoelectric materials have traditionally been made from lead, but now there's a clean alternative that could soon perform just as well

Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans

19:00 12 November 2009  | 24 comments

Consistent patterns linked to awareness of particular images could be used to detect consciousness in brain-damaged people

FAVOURITE COMMENT

Giant crack in Earth's crust

"You're a real crack-up." lame_guy (continues)

FEEDBACK

Sports jocks library goes digital

The athletic benefits of digital books, the randomising effects of being really drunk, and some excellent news (not really) from Microsoft

CULTURELAB

How to mix an ancient cocktail

13:05 13 November 2009 - updated 14:47 13 November 2009

Mix drinks like a Neolithic bartender

Drink culture: it's as old as the hills

13:00 13 November 2009 - updated 17:11 13 November 2009

Alcohol is central to human history, argues Patrick McGovern in Uncorking the past: The quest for wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages

CLIMATE

Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months

Big freezes can happen fast (Image: Tancrediphoto.com/Stone/Getty)

Detailed studies of ancient climate have revealed that the onset of Europe's "Big Freeze", 13,000 years ago, was anything but glacial

SPACEFLIGHT

Propelled by light: the promise and perils of solar sailing

Despite earlier failures, the Planetary Society is gearing up to test another solar sail in space in a year – executive director Louis Friedman explains why

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VIDEO

Tagging the tigers of the sea Movie Camera

Beautiful, predatory and endangered, tuna are rapidly being hunted to extinction. Graham Lawton joins the high-tech anglers to save them

TECHNOLOGY

Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics

Future Vision (Image: U. Bellhaeuser/ScienceFoto/Getty)

A contact lens fitted with an LED and circuitry to harvest power from radio waves is the first of a new kind of head-up display

PICTURE OF THE DAY

The world underwater

This image of the sun coral, Tubastrea aurea, is part of The Digital Atlas of Marine Species and Locations (DAMSL), a new and unique interactive bank of photographs and educational material. Read more

SPECIAL REPORT

Swine flu: The pandemic of 2009

Keep up to date with the latest on the H1N1 flu pandemic with our special report

PRIMATES
It's not fair!  Gimme that food (Image: Pete Oxford/Minden Pictures/FLPA)

Fair play: Monkeys share our sense of injustice

Our instinctive reaction to displays of greed and conspicuous consumption has its origins in the primate world, says Frans de Waal

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