Interactive Movies

• Space Station Invaders

  02 March 2012

  Welcome to Space Station Invaders, a game that was designed especially for New Scientist by AI called Angelina. You play a scientist on board a space station where everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong. The robots have gained sentience, aliens have invaded, and that experimental virus you were working on has escaped.
  
  Whoops. You have to find the terminals on each of the three levels to save the station. Good luck!

• Parched future for the Southwest

  27 October 2011

  Climate models predict less rainfall in the US Southwest and Mexico over the coming decades.
  
  Read more: "Dust bowl looms if US Southwest drought plans fail"
  
  Roll over the dates to see the projected changes.

• How warming affects quakes and volcanoes

  05 October 2011

  Melting ice sheets and rising sea levels can alter the existing stresses on faults and magma chambers, triggering earthquakes and eruptions. Global warming may mean such events occur sooner than they might otherwise have done, but there will not necessarily be more overall.
  
  Click the text to see a photographic example of each earth-shattering event.

• Mars 500: An interactive timeline

  23 September 2011

  Read more: 520 days: Surviving everyday life on a mission to Mars

• What's in the pipeline?

  23 September 2011

  We've taken a peek at what products the big vaccine producers have up their sleeves. It's a varied bunch – from a vaccine to protect you against bird flu to one that will help you quit smoking

• Twist on a tongue

  15 April 2011

  By mimicking a chameleon's tongue, a robotic manipulator could be used for delicate manufacturing, or even bug-catching.
  
  In this animation, an inductive coil gun fires a magnetic "tongue tip", while the attached elastomer reduces impact force. The elastomer is attached to a string and is reeled back in by a motor controlled by the driver.

• Ups and downs

  10 March 2011

  How pulses of extra hot rock produce giant ripples over periods as short as 1 to 2 million years

• Stubborn US cities rated in personality test

  11 November 2010

  Cities have ingrained characters that are stubbornly hard to change – and New York, for one, is really quite average

• Archimedes's steam cannon

  13 July 2010

  Read more: Reconstructed: Archimedes's flaming steam cannon

  
  

  Did the ancient Greek inventor Archimedes build a solar-powered steam cannon that fired flaming projectiles? It's been suggested he did, and below is a graphical reconstruction of how it might of worked.

• Illusions contest: Six ways to see two curves

  14 May 2010

  A simple animated graph can send your brain into a flurry of interpretation

• Hey, green spender: Consumer perception vs environmental realities

  02 March 2010

  New Scientist's exclusive investigation reveals that there can be a massive gulf between how green the public believes a company to be and how green it actually is. You can explore the differences for yourself with our interactive graphic: choose a sector from the list at the top or click one of the dots to get started.
  
  The graphic is based on the companies' Earthsense and Trucost scores. Earthsense asked 30,000 US consumers to rate companies' and products' greenness on a scale of 1 to 10 in a 2008 survey. A company's Trucost score is the estimated cost of its environmental impact under a "polluter pays" system, as a percentage of its annual revenue.
  
  Back to article

• Unplugged: Goodbye cables, hello energy beams

  04 February 2010

  New technologies to beam power to gadgets could end the days of ugly cables. Don't have Flash? See a standard image instead
  
  Return to article

• Destination Phobos: Missions to Mars' largest moon

  28 January 2010

  A host of space probes have investigated Phobos. Find out about them with this interactive graphic. Return to article

• Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives

  19 August 2009

  Explore the capabilities of smartphone apps with this animated graphic.
  
  Hover over each of the apps to find out more. The top 8 look at what apps can do, and the bottom 8 explore the rise of apps.
  
  Return to article

• Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy?

  18 June 2009

  Throughout its history, life on Earth has been beset by mass extinctions - and almost all of them were triggered by life itself. Explore life's attempts to self-destruct with our interactive timeline

• Coloured dove

  29 May 2009

  If you stare for a long time at a large coloured image and then glance at a white background, you'll see the same image appear, but in its complementary colours. That's because the receptors in the eye that pick up the image's colour have become tired and surrounding receptors that haven't been used take over.
  
  While this effect is well-known, Yuval Barkan and Hedva Spitzer from Tel-Aviv University recently demonstrated the first example of a related illusion that causes the background colour to linger in a different part of the image.
  
  In the Coloured Dove illusion (see below), a white dove appears on a coloured background. When the background is switched to white, the dove takes on a paler version of the original surrounding colour.
  
  The team hasn't yet figured out exactly why this happens. One theory is that the dove has actually taken on the background's complementary colour from the beginning, although we fail to perceive it until the background colour disappears.

• Curveball

  29 May 2009

  If you look directly at the "spinning" ball in this illusion by Arthur Shapiro, it appears to fall straight down. But if you look to one side, the ball appears to curve to one side.
  
  The ball appears to swerve because our peripheral vision system cannot process all of its features independently. Instead, our brains combine the downward motion of the ball and its leftward spin to create the impression of a curve.
  
  Line-of-sight (or foveal) vision, on the other hand, can extract all the information from the ball's movement, which is why the curve disappears when you view the ball dead-on.

• Becoming human: A timeline of human evolution

  21 April 2009

  To scroll left and right along the timeline, hover your mouse over the left or right areas. Centring the mouse pointer will stop the timeline from moving. Click on any of the date points to find out more about them.
  Some of the older articles are restricted to subscribers.

• Megaconservation: Saving wildernesses on a giant scale

  26 March 2009

  Conservationists have unveiled plans for new protected areas of mind-boggling scale. Explore four of the proposed conservation areas with this interactive map: click the orange boxes to get started.
  
  Return to article

• Genetic link to IQ stronger than thought

  11 March 2009

  The first images of the quality of the brain's wiring reveal that more aspects of intelligence are inherited than previously known

• Ten lessons of targeted cancer therapy

  23 October 2009

  Cancer treatments are notorious for their side effects, which occur because the treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancer cells. But a new generation of treatments causes much less collateral damage. Find out how they work with this interactive graphic

• Oil: Danger zones

  23 October 2009

  A huge proportion of the world's oil supply flows through a handful of pipelines and shipping lanes. Knocking out just one of these could have dangerous consequences.

• The history of motoring

  18 June 2009

• Down to the nanoscale

  07 November 2008

• Return of the space shuttle

  07 November 2008

• Brain storm

  07 November 2008

• The history of aviation

  07 November 2008

• How the human brain works

  07 November 2008

• The reign of the dinosaurs

  07 November 2008