Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish government.

Tell me about this new file-sharing religion, Kopimism. We were founded about 15 months ago and we believe that information is holy and that the act of copying is holy.

Why make a religion out of file-sharing? Why not just be an ordinary club without defining yourselves as being a religious community? Because we see ourselves as a religious group, a church seems like a good way of organising ourselves.

The video above captures the moment when a malaria parasite invades a human red blood cell - the first time the event has been caught in high resolution.

The Plasmodium parasite responsible for malaria is transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes, and is thought to kill almost 1 million people worldwide each year.

Jake Baum at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues used transmission electron microscopy, immuno-fluorescence and 3D super-resolution microscopy to record thousands of high-definition images of separate invasion events, a process that takes less than 30 seconds.

To boost their chances of catching Plasmodium parasites in the act of attacking a red blood cell the team controlled the process using two drugs. 

Are signs and meanings just as vital to living things as enzymes and tissues? Liz Else investigates a science in the making EVERY so often, something shows up on the New Scientist radar that we just can't identify easily. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a brand new type of flying machine that we are going to have to study closely? That was our reaction when we first heard about a small conference held in June at the philosophy department of the Portuguese Catholic University in Braga. There, a group of biologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, information technologists and other scholars from all over the world gathered to discuss some revolutionary ideas for developing the hitherto obscure field of biosemiotics.

Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simple

IT WAS a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage. Horava, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to rip this fabric apart and set time and space f

We don't have any trouble coping with three dimensions – or four at a pinch. The 3D world of solid objects and limitless space is something we accept with scarcely a second thought. Time, the fourth dimension, gets a little trickier. But it's when we start to explore worlds that embody more – or indeed fewer – dimensions that things get really tough.

These exotic worlds might be daunting, but they matter. String theory, our best guess yet at a theory of everything, doesn't seem to work with fewer than 10 dimensions. Some strange and useful properties of solids, such as superconductivity, are best explained using theories in two, one or even no dimensions at all.

Prepare your mind for boggling as we explore the how, why and where of dimensions.

An invasion led by artificially intelligent machines. Conscious computers. A smartphone virus so smart that it can start mimicking you. You might think that such scenarios are laughably futuristic, but some of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are concerned enough about the potential impact of advances in AI that they have been discussing the risks over the past year. Now they have revealed their conclusions.

Until now, research in artificial intelligence has been mainly occupied by myriad basic challenges that have turned out to be very complex, such as teaching machines to distinguish between everyday objects. Human-level artificial intelligence or self-evolving machines were seen as long-term, abstract goals not yet ready for serious consideration.

Now, for the first time, a panel of 25 AI scientists, roboticists, and ethical and legal scholars has been convened to address these issues, under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Artific