For those people, like myself, whose science education ended with a hard-won pass in O level biology, the weekly publication New Scientist is an excellent guide to current ideas and discoveries made by the scientific world. It is an entertaining and informative read, the language it uses being, usually, simple enough to enable an inexpert reader to keep in touch with up-to-the-moment experiments, discoveries and ideas.
The magazine is adept at uncovering quirky pieces of information – news of the manufacture of an everlasting sandwich caused something of a stir a couple of years ago. A brief glance through recent editions will reveal that, as occasionally reported in the New Scientist, the world is a delightful place inhabited by strange creatures – the discovery of ‘singing mice’ comes to mind . When presented with female pheromones these peaceful rodents woo each other with songs ‘nearly as complex as those of birds,’ with vocalisations made at ultra-sonic frequencies.
The report on this phenomenon (5/11/05) is accompanied by a photograph which portrays a real mouse as appealingly as those pictured in Beatrix Potter’s books.
The world of technology is explored by Duncan Graham Rowe in ‘Even A Chatbot Can Turn Nasty’ (15/10/05) which reports that the Chatbot (a small humanoid robot made of lego) will become aggressive when sexually propositioned and that humans are willing to ‘continue abusing bots long after they would have stopped being rude to a person.’ The conclusion is that human beings find it necessary to stress their superiority even over ‘a lowly machine.’ A study in Israel reported in N.S. (22/1/05) has revealed that ultra orthodox Jewish pedestrians in one city in Israel were found to be three times more likely than average to jay walk or to launch themselves across a busy road without looking out for traffic. Research on the subject concludes that religious believers may take extra risks because ‘they are more fatalistic, and have less fear of death.’ In the same issue of New Scientist, there is an interesting report by Fred Pierce entitled ‘Return to Eden’ which describes how lands ravaged by years of war can be restored to fertility by forward planning and the safe storage of vital seeds and plants. In Cambodia many unique varieties of plants have been lost forever and in Afghanistan, the ‘genetic heartland of a number of globally important plants, decades of rule by warlords, the Russian military and the Taliban have left most of the land a scientific black hole.’ But thanks to the work of dedicated scientists and conservationists many varieties of irreplaceable seeds and plants are safely stored away for future planting, so that once productive lands can be restored to their former fertility.
On a lighter note, the New Scientist reports on a suggestion by Karen Polinger Foster of Yale University that the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon may in fact have been a sunken garden in Nineveh made by the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib in about 700bc. Ancient Egyptians favoured sunken gardens to ‘create a cool, damp micro-climate which later became connected with the idea of kingly power’ at a time when ‘carpets were designed to resemble gardens, while garden building had features resembling carpets.’ This suggests that the hanging gardens were in fact ‘a spectacular sunken carpet of flowers that appeared to be suspended in mid-air when viewed from above.’ (N.S. 22/01/05) This information would have been useful to me when, as a student teacher in the 1950s, I was faced with a forty minute lesson in which to explore the subject of ‘The Hanging Gardens’ with a group of truculent 15 year olds at a technical school in Chislehurst, Kent.
Recent editions of New Scientist have addressed the rise of fundamentalist religious beliefs with particular reference to the debate on Darwinism and an opposing view of Intelligent Design. Apparently nearly half of Americans questioned in a recent poll not only ‘do not believe in evolution by natural selection, but do not believe in evolution at all’ and that ‘many who do accept the fact of evolution, cannot however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection.’ The implication of this widespread belief in the USA is alarming. It means, in effect, that warnings of the progress of global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer can be dismissed, and the pursuit of free market economies can continue in the belief that God will take care of us.
Cicely Herbert recommends the New Scientist magazine as a useful tool for scientific literacy.