MAGAZINE ISSUE DATE: 2 JULY 2005 (Vol. 186 No 2506)
NEWS:
SURF IN THE POOLWe've seen the small wave machines in swimming pools to make them more fun, but now pools can be fitted with a novel surf simulator that generates powerful, curling waves to help people learn to surf. Two companies in New Zealand studied 40 of the best reefs in the Pacific to find out which seabed characteristics make the best surf. They then created computer-controlled pneumatic jacks which are placed beneath a rubber mat on the floor of the pool, to mimic these characteristics and generate real waves. Page 28
ARE WE ON OUR WAY BACK TO THE DARK AGES?You may think that with faster internet connectivity, internet phone calls and iPods, that we're living in a technological nirvana. But according to a new analysis we are fast approaching a new dark age. The results show that the number of technological breakthroughs and patents peaked a century ago and have been falling steadily ever since. But this is a controversial view not held by most futurologists. Page 26-27
BLACK HOLES CAN'T ESCAPE THE PHANTOM MENACEWhen physicists first suggested that our universe could end in a big rip " where all matter would be torn apart by phantom energy " many considered it implausible because it wasn't clear how anything could destroy black holes. Now, Russian scientists say that phantom energy doesn't rip apart black holes " it dissolves them like aspirins in a glass of water. Page 17
EARTH TREMBLES AS BIG WINDS MOVE IN (Short story)We all know that hurricanes can wreak havoc, but now physicists from Georgia, USA have found that they can trigger swarms of weak earthquakes and even set the Earth vibrating. Micro-tremors in the Earth's crust were monitored when Hurricane Charley slammed into Florida in 2004, more surprisingly; the storm also caused the Earth to vibrate. Page 19
FEATURES:
END OF THE BEGINNINGMarcus Chown meets a small band of researchers who are starting to ask the question no one is supposed to ask. What if the big bang never happened? They believe that the standard big bang model has failed to predict what we actually observe in the universe, and that the solution has been to fix, wrongly, on large helpings of three ingredients: the mysterious dark energy, dark matter, and inflation. And now, first glance at results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe seem to back up these claims. Pages 30-35
WHY THE PHARAOHS NEVER SMILEDPharaohs may have been powerful and beautiful, but they had terrible teeth. The reason was simple " there were no dentists in ancient Egypt. But when a dental surgeon turned Egyptologist examined 500 Egyptian skulls, she was horrified to see teeth worn to stumps and chronic infections and disease - far worse than their living conditions would suggest. What were they eating? Pages 36-39
SMALL WONDERSA new technique is creating tiny intricate 3D sculptures far smaller than a grain of sand. The method called two-photon microfabrication is the first technique to work on the microscale that is not only fast and cheap, but can make you pretty much anything. Pages 44-45
PRIMEVAL POOLSKaren Schmidt takes a trip to northern Mexico to see the Earth as it was half a billion years ago. Desert pools with all the ingredients of a primordial sea provide living examples of the processes that led to the first ecosystems. It is one of the few places on Earth where microbes still dominate as they did billions of years ago. Pages 40-43
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