New Scientist 14Feb2020

8 February 2020 | New Scientist | 3

On the

cover

42 Spider consciousness

Inside the amazing mind

of an arachnid

16 Quantum freeze

Nanoparticle cooled to

nearly absolute zero

38 Sanity check

The flawed experiment that

shook psychiatry to its core

News

Views

Features

14 SpaceX Starlink

Astronomers want to sue

to protect the night sky

15 Smells like teen vaping?

Why concerns over e-cigarette

use may be overblown

20 Nuclear winter

Nuclear power was meant to

save us from climate change,

but it is on the way out

23 Comment

Andrew Barron on the

evolution of sexuality

24 The columnist

Graham Lawton on why

aiming for net zero could work

26 Letters

Ask an AI to explain how

an AI made a decision

28 Aperture

A swarm of locusts flies

through Kenya eating crops

30 Culture

How to fight back against

everyday racism

51 Science of cooking

How to temper chocolate

52 Puzzles

A quick crossword, a beetle

problem and the quick quiz

53 Feedback

Joy of the rovers and a puzzle

puzzle: the week in weird

54 Almost the last word

How can you get flu after

vaccination? Readers explain

56 The Q&A

Psychologist Suzi Gage

on saying why to drugs

34 First alphabet

Meet the inventors of our ABCs

38 Sanity check

Inside the iconic experiment

that devastated psychiatry

42 Spider consciousness

Arachnid intelligence is more

sophisticated than we thought

46 Wiki’s missing women

Why Jess Wade is writing history

The back pages

Vol 245 No 3268

Cover image: CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS.

Dan Higgins, MAM

7 Coronavirus

Understanding the

Wuhan outbreak

Zoonosis: when viruses

jump species

What happens next?

34 First alphabet

Untold story of a writing

revolution

12 Sinking seabed 14 Robots that

sweat 28 Locust plague 46 Wiki’s

missing women 18 Close-up of the

sun’s surface

This week’s issue

Instant Expert:

Human Evolution

Join six expert speakers

in London on 29 February

for a one-day masterclass.

Find out more at

newscientist.com/events

42 Spider intelligence The remarkable abilities of arachnids

LE

FT:

CF

KA

M/

GE

TT

Y^ IM

AG

ES

;^ AB

OV

E:^ S

HU

TT

ER

ST

OC

K

Feature

23 Comment

“ Sexuality could be influenced

by hundreds of genes and

there is no single gene for

same-sex attraction”