"Just goes to show that you should never bother with New Scientist. New Scientist is to science what Noddy and Big Ears are to literature."

A bit harsh, Steve. Science is a rather larger subject so even getting a superficial overview of what is happening is a tremendous task and New Scientist and Scientific American (both of which I subscribe to) make a solid attempt. Of course, when you find something of interest you need to start to get into JSTOR or the Lancet or whatever, and start looking at actual papers written by actual scientists, but you won't get any sort of overview that way. It is a full time job just to keep up with quite a narrow speciality as anyone involved at that level is well aware.


I should declare an interest: New Scientist has published letters I've written in the last few years. But whether that makes Steve's case stronger is open to debate!