New Scientist

newscientist.com — 15:23 22 May 2012 For over 10 years photographer Edward Burtynsky has been making images of all aspects of the oil industry: extraction and refining, the city of Detroit, transport and motor culture, and what happens when oil's associated artefacts - large and small - reach the end of their useful life.

newscientist.com — Species don't hang around forever. Homo sapiens has already notched up a mind-boggling 200,000 years on Earth. Is the end nigh? The geological statistics suggest not - the average mammal species celebrates its millionth birthday long before it begins to slip towards oblivion.

newscientist.com — There is something unnatural lurking in the waters of the port of Gijon, Spain, and researchers are tracking its every move. It is not some bizarre new form of marine life, but an autonomous robotic fish designed to sense marine pollution, taking to the open waves for the first time.

newscientist.com — (Image: Geoff Caddick/PA/Science Museum) This is no time for hesitation. I'm conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra playing Gustav Holst's The Planets in one of the interactive pods at the Science Museum's Universe of Sound installation.

newscientist.com — (Image: Michael Leckie/Leeds University) Diverging from its stereotype of landscaped gardens and conservatories, this year's Chelsea Flower Show in London is going urban. Urban greening, that is.

newscientist.com — If ever we develop a DeLorean-based time machine, it would be handy to send information into the past revealing what kind of medical research to focus on. For years, actor Michael J. Fox was on the front line of the US's "stem cell wars", arguing that embryonic stem cells could cure conditions like his own - Parkinson's disease.

newscientist.com — You may not expect to see a ball slide up a slope. But a new trick shortlisted for the 2012 Best Illusion of the Year Contest makes it seem like it's possible to defy gravity. The models, made out of corrugated cardboard and polystyrene by Sachiko Tsuruno at Kinki University in Japan, use clever decoration to create an illusion of height.

newscientist.com — Feel a tickling sensation moving up your trouser leg? Watch out, it could be a robot. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed Clothbot, a tiny robot capable of scaling clothes and other cloth objects. The robot used a wheeled gripping mechanism to create wrinkles in a piece of cloth then simply drives straight up them.

newscientist.com — SO NOW we know: US president Barack Obama is in favour of same-sex marriage. After evading the question for months, he finally made his position clear in a TV interview. "For me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married," he told ABC.

newscientist.com — Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist magazine (Image: Catherine Ashmore/National Theatre) From the lonely birth of the nameless creature to its stumbling exit into a white haze of light and ice, Danny Boyle's Frankenstein is a remarkable, haunting production. As he exits, pursued by his creator across an endless frontier, the creature cries out: "He lives for my destruction.

newscientist.com — Warmer New York winters have a sting in the tail. The mosquito that carries chikungunya, a virus that causes joint pain, but isn't fatal, is flocking to the city in increasing numbers. The virus, which originates in Africa, is carried by the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus ) and could become endemic in New York within a few years.