COSMOS magazine | The science of everything

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news features opinion fiction reviews gadgets media room Free sample! Read a complete digital edition of COSMOS now. View sample	Online news Sunday, 6 July 2008 Mercury shaped by titanic vulcanism Volcanic activity played a key role in shaping the planet Mercury's crater-riddled surface, and not asteroid impacts as previously thought. read more Our Solar System is egg-shaped Millions of textbooks depicting our Solar System as spherical have got it all wrong, according to studies of data sent back from deep space by NASA's probe, Voyager 2. read more Other news Fossils of early Earth life may be on the Moon Travel offsets a good idea but not popular 'Good' cholesterol aids ageing memory North Pole may have no ice this summer Genes affect voter participation Giant impact explains Martian mystery View all news COSMOS magazine: current issue On sale in newsstands now! COSMIC ROULETTE Will the world's most expensive experiment finally solve the riddle of matter? Physicists around the world are staking the lot on the Large Hadron Collider. In this issue of Cosmos, Peter Calamai reviews the odds of success. Also in this issue: Time - it can fly or it can crawl, but is it real or just an illusion? Mind maps - advances in brain scanning are allowing psychiatrists to move from cautiously diagnosing symptoms to actually seeing the underlying malfunctions of the mind. Looking to the skies - where physics and philosophy (and even theology) intersect is where Paul Davies feels most at home. What makes us human - what is it that sets us apart from other animals? Subscribe now to Cosmos magazine! View the full contents Online features The many worlds of Arthur C. Clarke by Simon Mitton \| He was many things - an engineer, a thinker, a novelist. But Arthur C. Clarke was most of all a visionary who had an incalculable influence on space travel, space exploration, and astrobiology. read more Enzymes made to order by Lauren Monaghan \| In a world first, scientists have managed to synthesise entirely new functional enzymes that could pave the way to reactions not seen in the natural world. read more Read more features Selected COSMOS magazine features The coming famine by Julian Cribb \| What's even scarier than global warming? Julian Cribb argues that feeding the global appetite in an overpopulated, affluent and resource-scarce world could be the scientific challenge of the era. read more Next stop: Mars by Richard A. Lovett \| What will it take to plant booted feet on Martian soil? And what will it take to keep them there indefinitely? We set our sights on the Red Planet. read more Read more features Fiction Not Enough Stars In The Night Science and progress has turned inward, creating new realities and entire new worlds. Fletcher works as a virtual reality tester to escape to the past, and longs for a bygone era when humankind could still gaze into space. read more Wormwords If the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, how many bits does it take to remake a man? read more Read more fiction Reviews Déjà Vu Here’s a thriller that combines the trademark pace of Jerry Bruckheimer, the gritty realism of director Tony Scott and the vulnerable action hero leading man that Denzel Washington reliably conjures up on such occasions. And then there’s the time travel. read more The Universe: A Biography The story begins 14 billion years ago. Somewhere in a vacuum (one school of thought would have it), a quantum ripple upset the apple cart and – BAM! One-ten-thousand-billionth of a second later a ball of pure energy, 10²⁹ degrees Kelvin, begins its inevitable task, as described by the Standard Model of particle physics, of creating the universe. read more Read more reviews	COSMOS newsletter! Sign up to the COSMOS newsletter Enter your email address Receive regular updates highlighting the latest in science from COSMOS. Unscientific poll How would you prefer to offset the carbon emissions of your overseas travel?: Automatically include it in the cost of the ticket Make it an optional extra I'd rather cut the amount of travelling I do Who cares? It’s all a gimmick