New Scientist Sucks?

[Mojo]

They should certainly work on lifting their standards. My guess is the publisher is trying to boost circulation. Just as long as we never see a "Headless Hadron in Topless Particle Accelerator" Headline I'll be OK.

It could be worse: http://www.badscience.net/?p=238

 

[Sturgeon]

What is the best general science magazine?

I read New Scientist and I find it mostly quite good. I do see too many speculative physics and cosmology articles, which I ignore. These are often the cover stories. Otherwise it seems reasonable. But if people don't like it, what general science magazine out there is better in your opinion? I've tried Discover and was very disappointed with it. It's lightweight and they seem to like to publish controversy just for the sake of it, regardless of the scientific merits.

 

[articulett]

I like Scientific American...
and Scientific American Mind...

Michael Shermer writes for them and they are strong on evolution and have lots of good specials.

Seed is great new... PZMyers (Phraryngula) writes for them....

 

[GreyICE]

It beats Discover or "Popular ______" as a magazine.


Sure, it doesn't hit full scientific rigor, but it is pretty good. It is not anywhere near as good as mythbusters (in that it's cheerleading instead of asking "what's wrong with this picture") but we need more people interested in science, every little bit helps.

If someone reads an article on quantum teleportation, asks 'does this really works' and goes and finds out from real sources, I'm happy.

As for quoting, creationists have managed to quote Gould when attacking evolution. If you're willing to quote out of context, anything is fair game. Woo will find quotes, so it's best to just ignore it and move on.

 

[leon_heller]

I stopped reading New Scientist after their appalling article about Roger Shawyer's `reactionless' EmDrive. (http://www.newscientist.com/channel...tivity-drive-the-end-of-wings-and-wheels.html.) I suppose it's ok to cover something that's obviously crackpot: it violates conservation of momentum if it operates as he claimed, which is as plausible as a working perpetual motion machine. But it was worse than that - the article mentioned his purported theoretical explanation, which was supposed to rely on relativistic electromagnetism. The problem is that momentum is conserved in relativistic electromagnetism, so whatever is going on with his experiments, any physicist could tell straight away that his explanation must be nonsense!

I'm not sure why it annoyed me so much, but it's really on exactly the same level as writing about a perpetual motion machine and saying opinions differ on whether it works or not.

Another piece of rubbish in the article is the claim that he gets a Q of 50,000 in a microwave cavity. They can have Qs of a few thousand, but nothing like that.

I found the EmDrive web site:

http://www.emdrive.com/

Leon