52 | New Scientist | 26 September 2020
Quick crossword #67 Set by Richard Smyth
Scribble
zoneAnswers and
the next cryptic
crossword next week The back pages Puzzles
Our crosswords are now solvable online
newscientist.com/crosswordsQuick quiz #70
1 The first test of a UK atomic bomb
took place in which country?2 What is made using the
Haber-Bosch process?3 How many qubits did Google’s
Sycamore computer use to achieve
quantum supremacy in 2019?4 Latvian mathematician Daina
Taimina is best known for using crochet
models to visualise what concept?5 Ménière’s disease affects which
part of the body?Answers on page 55Puzzle
set by Chris Maslanka#78 Farewell My
Blubbery“The most interesting thing about
Milly Farlowe’s latest ‘effort’ in
the detective fiction genre is the
page numbering: it starts at 1 and
goes up to some highest number,
a number of itself quite modest,
but far too high for a plot of such
flimsy construction.” Thus spake
Zara Thrusta, the literary critic of
the Daily Grind, dismissing her best
friend’s new crime novel, Farewell
My Blubbery.Well, I had a look at the numbering
and it was just as Thrusta had said.
But I noticed something else. If you
reverse the order of the digits of the
three-digit number at the bottom
of the last page of this book, you
get exactly the same number as
the total number of digits used in
numbering its pages. “Is it a long
book?” I hear you ask. Well, you tell
me: how many pages are there in
Farewell My Blubbery?Answer next weekACROSS
1/4 2006 BBC wildlife documentary series (6,5)
8 Flower – of cherry or apple, perhaps (7)
9 Waxy, strong-smelling substance, C₁₀H₁₆O (7)
11 Fear of water; rabies (11)
12 See 14 Down
14 Part; segment (5)
15 Circling a planet or star, for example (8)
17 Safety signal; medical diagnosis (3-5)
18 See 10 Down
19 Fall of a tide (3)
20 Domestic messaging machine (11)
24 Largest continental land mass on 1 across/
4 Across (7)
25 Organic compound with a −C N
functional group (7)
26 Emulsion produced by some trees, used
to make rubber (5)
27 Thomas ___ , “The Wizard of Menlo Park” (6)DOWN1 William ___ , 18th-century philosopher
noted for the watchmaker analogy (5)
2 Ability to soak up (10)
3 Global sum of ecological systems (9)
5 Video game developer founded in the
US in 1972 (5)
6 Magnetic recording medium (4)
7 Contained in a chrysalis, perhaps (8)
10/18 Tomorrow’s ___ , long-running BBC
science programme (9,5)
13 Maps of the night sky (4,6)
14/12 Carl Sagan’s famous description of
1 Across/4 Across (4,4,3)
16 Member of the family Ptilonorhynchidae,
noted for elaborate courtship displays (9)
21 Unwanted sounds or signals (5)
22 Synthetic polymer first used commercially
in 1938 (5)
23 Hypothesis of 1 Across/4 Across devised
by James Lovelock (4)