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A probability paradoxUPDATE: The solutions, and poll results are now upHere are four questions. They sound very similar. But be careful. They are not.1. Mrs Smith has two children. The eldest one is a boy. What’s the chance that both are boys? Continue reading...

Stress and emotional tension tends to be associated with distress – but a form called ‘eustress’ can be healthy and productiveStress has become a defining feature of the 21st century, contributing to the mental-health crisis, fuelling a boom in mindfulness apps and even, science has suggested, affecting unborn children. But it is not always the villain it is made out to be. Psychologists are keen to arm us with the knowledge that some stress can be good, healthy and productive. This type is known as “eustress” and without it, they say, our lives would be dull and meaningless.“Stress has got such a bad rap,” says Daniela Kaufer, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s this perception that stress is always bad for the brain, but that’s not true. Your stress response is crucial to your survival. It elevates your performance, is super-important for alertness and prepares you to adapt to the next thing that comes along.” Continue reading...

In the 1950s, photojournalist Lennart Nilsson set out to capture the earliest stages of existence. His foetus images seized the public imagination – and sparked a controversy that has raged ever sinceIn April 1965, Life magazine put a photograph called Foetus 18 Weeks on its cover and caused a sensation. The issue was a spectacular success, the fastest-selling copy in Life’s entire history. In full colour and crystal clear detail, the picture showed a foetus in its amniotic sac, with its umbilical cord winding off to the placenta. The unborn child, floating in a seemingly cosmic backdrop, appears vulnerable yet serene. Its eyes are closed and its tiny, perfectly formed fists are clutched to its chest.Capturing that most universal of subjects, our own creation, Foetus 18 Weeks was one of the 20th century’s great photographs, as emotive as it was technically impressive, even by today’s standards. And its impact was enormous, growing into something its creator struggled to control, as the image was hijacked by the fledgling anti-abortion movement. Continue reading...

Toxic air contributes to health conditions such as asthma, cancer and stroke, say expertsFive people die each week in Bristol as a result of high levels of air pollution, a study has revealed.Researchers at King’s College London examined the combined impact of PM2.5, which is mainly from domestic wood and coal burning and industrial combustion and nitrogen dioxide, which mainly comes from older polluting vehicles. Continue reading...

New research sheds light on the parlous lot of women during the Industrial RevolutionThe women of the 19th-century urban poor were at it. Sneaking around, getting some. That, anyway, is the conclusion drawn from some recently reported DNA research, published in the journal Current Biology.The authors of the paper compared the Y chromosomes of 513 pairs of men who supposedly share a common ancestor to determine the prevalence of what they called “extra-pair paternity” over the past 500 years – in other words, the number of times in the men’s family trees that the father named on the birth certificate wasn’t the same as the man who supplied the sperm. Continue reading...

Exploring the therapeutic benefits of magic mushrooms at a ceremony in AmsterdamI’m at a weekend retreat in a converted church near Amsterdam. There is soft, celestial music playing and I’m sipping fresh herbal tea while discussing my hopes and fears for tomorrow’s “ceremony”, which is retreat parlance for a psychedelic trip. Consuming the truffle parts of magic mushrooms is permitted in the Netherlands and my nine fellow guests and I will be eating a variety called Dragon’s Dynamite. We’re not taking recreational drugs, but rather using psychedelics as self-exploratory and therapeutic “plant medicine”. Welcome to the age of the psychedelic retreat.Synthesis opened its doors in April 2018. It was co-founded by Martijn Schirp, a former poker player who found salvation through psychedelics. “I had my first mushroom trip nine years ago and that changed my life,” he says. “I was walking through this forest and it was so peaceful, it was like a fairy tale. I felt this huge self-critical voice lift off me.” He believes he’d still be estranged from his father if it wasn’t for the perspective psychedelics have given him. His entrepreneurial mind saw that what was missing was a retreat with “medical supervision, private one-to-one coaching and professional standards in a modern context”. Continue reading...

Evolutionary genetic changes in the brain are at the root of severe mental disorders, Professor Sir Michael Owen to tell this year’s Darwin lectureMajor psychological disorders such as schizophrenia will continue to affect humans because men and women are continually generating genetic mutations that disrupt brain development.This will be the key conclusion of Professor Sir Michael Owen, director of Cardiff University’s centre for neuropsychiatric genetics and genomics, when he gives the annual Darwin Lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine this week. Understanding such conditions at an evolutionary level will be crucial to developing treatments, Owen believes. Continue reading...

Blood vessel function found to improve within a month if tobacco replaced with e-cigarettesSwitching from tobacco cigarettes to vaping improves blood vessel function within one month, researchers have found, in a study they say supports the use of electronic cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking.E-cigarettes have becoming a booming business, with the number of people who vape growing rapidly. According to a 2017 report by Ernst and Young, 2.2 million Britons use e-cigarettes, an increase of 55% over three years. Continue reading...

Soaring prices likely as potatoes rot in sodden fields and farmers struggle to sow wheatThe price of crisps and chips are expected to rise in the new year as the flooding in northern England hits the supply of winter vegetables such as potatoes, cauliflowers and cabbages.Official data released on Friday revealed a “great deal of uncertainty” around the fate of a 10th of the country’s potato crop as farmers count the cost of the deluge that has overwhelmed parts of South Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the Midlands. Continue reading...

Muff Busters exhibition begins in Camden in hope of tackling myths on ‘taboo’ body partsIn a bright indoor space in Camden’s Stables Market, a giant tampon is flanked by giant menstrual cups. Illustrations of female genitalia are dotted around the walls and some underwear is in a glass case.This is the world’s first vagina museum dedicated to gynaecological anatomy, which opens this weekend in north-west London. Continue reading...

New research raises hopes of oral vaccine for dogs, the chief source of transmission to humansResearchers have discovered a way to stop rabies from shutting down critical responses in the immune system, a breakthrough that could pave the way for new tools to fight the deadly disease.Rabies kills almost 60,000 people each year, mostly affecting poor and rural communities. Continue reading...

Callum Roberts is a British oceanographer, author and one of the world’s leading marine biologists. Sitting down with Ian Sample, Callum talks about his journey into exploring marine habitats, his subsequent work observing the world’s coral reefs and how, despite the urgent threat posed to the majority of these densely populated habitats, he still maintains an almost unswerving optimism for the future of his profession and of coral reefs in general Continue reading...

US corporation says its lunar lander concept would reduce ‘complexity and risk’ of Nasa missionThe American aerospace corporation Boeing has proposed a lunar lander to Nasa that it claims would reduce the “complexity and risk” of returning astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2024. Nasa’s original plan was that astronauts would launch from Earth and dock with a space station in lunar orbit before transferring to a lander. It even awarded the first contracts to build the Lunar Gateway in May.Boeing’s lander concept would bypass the Lunar Gateway station, allowing astronauts arriving from Earth direct access to the moon’s surface. The concept is similar to the Apollo lunar landing missions of the 1960s. Boeing says its lander would still be capable of docking with the Lunar Gateway if needed. Continue reading...

Illegitimacy more likely over past 500 years among urban poor, say geneticistsThe Romans had a phrase that summed it up nicely: mater semper certa est, pater semper incertus est. The mother is always certain, the father is always uncertain.Now, researchers have found that some people have more reason to doubt their fathers than others, or at least have had over the past half millennium. Continue reading...

My friend Davina Wynne-Jones has died a few weeks after celebrating her 70th birthday at Herbs for Healing, the field in Gloucestershire where she had her home and business, and where she created an Eden bursting with purpose and abundance, growing and supplying medicinal herbs.Daughter of the garden designer Rosemary Verey, Davina grew up at Barnsley House, near Cirencester, Gloucestershire. She found her mother’s gardens both magical and inspirational. Plants remained an obsession all her life. She once said: “I never get bored. They are nature, healing and beauty; the whole plant has a magic that gets lost in pharmaceutical research.” Continue reading...

Lancet Countdown tracks impacts of global heating covering disease, wildfires and malnutritionThe climate crisis will determine the lifelong health of today’s children, doctors have warned, noting that global heating was already causing harm.Children are especially vulnerable and the global team of researchers say rising temperatures mean the bacteria causing deadly diarrhoea will thrive while poorer crop yields could lead to more malnutrition. Continue reading...

DNA analysis helps work out origin of nearly 6 million mummified ibisesAn ancient Egyptian mystery has been solved, according to researchers, who say they have cracked the conundrum of where millions of mummified birds came from.Pharaohs and members of the nobility were often mummified, but the practice was not reserved for humans – cats, crocodiles, mice and mongooses are among the mummified animals that have been found. Continue reading...

Dramatic shift from wet to dry climate could have caused crop failure in Neo-Assyrian empireThe Neo-Assyrian empire was a mighty superpower that dominated the near east for 300 years before its dramatic collapse. Now researchers say they have a novel theory for what was behind its rise and fall: climate change.The empire emerged in about 912BC and grew to stretch from the Mediterranean down to Egypt and out to the Persian Gulf. Continue reading...

Unlike Star Wars projection, 3D technology whips polystyrene bead round at high speedIt may not rival the technology found in a galaxy far, far away, but everyone has to start somewhere. Researchers in Sussex have built a device that displays 3D animated objects that can talk and interact with onlookers.A demonstration of the display showed a butterfly flapping its wings, a countdown spelled out by numbers hanging in the air, and a rotating, multicoloured planet Earth. Beyond interactive digital signs and animations, scientists want to use it to visualise and even feel data. Continue reading...

The meet-cute is neatly postponed in this entertaining story of two next-door neighbours, both seeing therapists and looking for loveMuch like the process of psychotherapy, patience is required for results while watching this modestly entertaining slow-burn Parisian romance from Cédric Klapisch, who pulls off a neat trick by bumping the meet-cute to the end of the film.What happens before his protagonists clap eyes on each other is a kind of emotional spring clean. Both of them, a man and woman in their early 30s, are struggling with anxiety and stress; they find their way to therapy and sift through their secrets and problems, and then, when they are emotionally shipshape … bang! Cupid strikes. It’s a nice idea – but the delay doesn’t do much for dramatic tension, and Klapisch’s shallow observations about loneliness and atomisation in the city don’t help. Continue reading...

Astronomers say S5-HVs1 ventured close to supermassive black hole before being ejectedAstronomers have spotted a star heading out of the Milky Way at more than 6m km/h (3.7m mph), or 1,700km per second, after an encounter with the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy.The star is moving so fast that in about 100m years it will exit the Milky Way and spend the rest of its life sailing alone through intergalactic space. Although it was predicted 30 years ago that black holes could fling stars out of the galaxy at phenomenal speeds, it is the first time that such an event has been recorded. Continue reading...

Authorities working to contain outbreak of disease that is worse than bubonic plagueTwo people in China have been diagnosed with plague, the latest cases of a disease more commonly associated with historical catastrophe.Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and can arise in three forms – a lung infection, known as pneumonic plague; a blood infection, known as septicemic plague; and a form that affects the lymph nodes, called bubonic plague. Continue reading...

The night sky above the US midwest was illuminated by a meteor on 11 November. The fireball was caught on video streaking past the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri. There were more than 100 reported sightings across nine US states Continue reading...

Exclusive: tiny particles produced by motor traffic can invade the brain and carry carcinogensNew research has linked air pollution nanoparticles to brain cancer for the first time.The ultra-fine particles (UFPs) are produced by fuel burning, particularly in diesel vehicles, and higher exposures significantly increase people’s chances of getting the deadly cancer. Previous work has shown that nanoparticles can get into the brain and that they can carry carcinogenic chemicals. Continue reading...

The Dutch philosopher and artist believes we should change our relationship to animals. This involves recognising that they talk to us – and granting them proper rightsFagan the horse is enormous, nervy and then, suddenly, inexplicably calm when Eva Meijer strokes his neck and whispers in his twitching ears. Meijer, a Dutch philosopher, novelist, visual artist and singer-songwriter, is visiting the splendidly acronymed Faith (For Animals In Trouble, there’s Hope) animal rescue centre in Norfolk.Our photographer is hoping to obtain a portrait of Meijer talking to the animals, Dr Dolittle-style, for this interview about Animal Languages, her fascinating, accessible new book about how animals communicate, and what this means for their place on a human-dominated planet. Continue reading...

Bambang Hero Saharjo has received death threats for testifying against companiesA scientist who takes on the companies responsible for massive wildfires across Indonesia has won the prestigious John Maddox prize for standing up for science in the face of harassment, intimidation and lawsuits.Bambang Hero Saharjo, a fire forensics specialist at Bogor Agricultural University, gathers evidence for criminal trials against firms that are accused of using illegal slash-and-burn methods to clear peatland for cash crops such as palm oil, pulpwood and rubber trees. Continue reading...

Dave Morris on the collective power of research and Alastair Leake on the decline in moth populationsThe efforts of campaigners to highlight important issues can often be overlooked by a historical approach that focuses on individuals, often academics or politicians. An example is in the obituary of the biologist Victoria Braithwaite (Obituary, 9 November), which asserts that “until the early 2000s everyone knew that fish do not feel pain”. But almost 20 years earlier, we had produced and started to widely distribute a leaflet called Fish Feel Pain. And of course hundreds of thousands of people were already refusing to eat fish on those very grounds.In that same era, our group and others were campaigning on a range of other matters – such as traffic pollution, junk food, the arms trade, non-renewable energy, single-use plastics, environmental destruction – which may have seemed marginal at the time but are now acknowledged as mainstream concerns. Continue reading...

Boarding schools | Wellington college fees | Steve McQueen’s Year 3 project | Spike Milligan’s election advice | Shared ancestry | Parliamentary disillusionGeorge Monbiot’s article on boarding schools (Journal, 7 November) will have been a painful read for many, and may well have been painful for him to write. As a director for Boarding School Survivors Support (BSSS), I read of experience after experience of suffering. I applaud Mr Monbiot for having the courage to bring his story into the public eye. For those who suffer, there is help: visit the BSSS website as a first step.

Big floods likely to become more frequent because of climate breakdownPoor management of the rural landscape along with global heating and building on floodplains are the main factors that led to the floods that have engulfed towns in northern England, according to experts.Sheffield, Rotherham and Doncaster are among the places flooded, 12 years after they were badly hit when the River Don burst its banks in 2007. Many affected areas, including Meadowhall shopping centre, where customers were stranded overnight, lie within the river’s floodplain – low-lying land next to the river that naturally floods during high flow. Continue reading...

Many of us crave historical connections – but ultimately, everybody now is descended from everybody thenAfter watching Ant & Dec’s DNA Journey on ITV, I can confidently say that one thing it failed to do for me – and which genetics could definitively answer – is clarify which one is Ant and which one is Dec. Alas, this mystery remains unsolved.Aside from that, the documentary is entertaining enough. In the first episode, Ant and Dec travel around, talking to genealogists and distant relatives who have been identified by having similar bits of DNA to them – like Who Do You Think You Are? but with bonus genetics. We are introduced to Dixie Carter, who is described as a “genetic cousin” to Dec, though I couldn’t tell precisely what relation she is. The two shared an ancestor from around 150 years ago, and her presence provides light relief as she is a Texan wrestling promoter. Continue reading...

Infection found in patient who required quadruple amputation after developing rare conditionDoctors have discovered an aggressive flesh-eating infection that spreads around the body when two strains of microbe combine to overcome the host’s defences.The infection was found in a patient who required a quadruple amputation after they developed necrotising fasciitis, a rare bacterial condition that is lethal in nearly a third of cases, even when treatment is on hand. Continue reading...

Silver-backed chevrotain caught on camera after it was feared lost to scienceA distinctly two-tone mouse deer that was feared lost to science has been captured on film foraging for food by camera traps set up in a Vietnamese forest.The pictures of the rabbit-sized animal, also known as the silver-backed chevrotain, are the first to be taken in the wild and come nearly 30 years after the last confirmed sighting. Continue reading...

Politicians running scared of big pharma and the taboo around cannabis are blocking access to these vital drugsThat the government will allow a few serious epilepsy and multiple sclerosis sufferers to get cannabidiol medicine to relieve their symptoms is good news. That is all that can be said. Once more a decision emerges from the caverns of Britain’s NHS that reveals the evils of a politicised, centralised, deadened health service.Related: Legalisation of cannabis in the UK would help protect its users from harm | James Nicholls Continue reading...

A new survey of England’s dialects is instead likely to shine a light on social tribes and generational differencesAre you a blatherskite? Do you have murfles? Are you frightened of Old Harry? In the 1950s, the Survey of English Dialects sent fieldworkers across England to track regional variations in everyday words. Blatherskites were gossips, murfles were freckles and Old Harry was a bogeyman.Now the survey is being repeated. The research will undoubtedly provide a fascinating update on the changing contours of the English language. Not only have regional dialects shifted, but immigration has introduced many new accents and dialects. Continue reading...

Research scientists have largely gone unnoticed as major users of unrecyclable material. Now some universities are helping them kick the habitScientific research is a largely ignored consumer of single-use plastics, with the biomedical sciences a particularly high-volume offender. Plastic petri dishes, bottles of various shapes and sizes, several types of glove, a dizzying array of pipettes and pipette tips, a hoard of sample tubes and vials: they have all become an everyday part of scientific research. Most of us will never use such equipment, but without it, we wouldn’t have the knowledge, technologies, products and medicines we all rely on. It is vital to 21st-century lives, but it is also extremely polluting.In 2015, researchers at the University of Exeter weighed up their bioscience department’s annual plastic waste, and extrapolated that biomedical and agricultural laboratories worldwide could be responsible for 5.5m tonnes of plastic waste a year. To put that in context, they pointed out that this was equal to 83% of the plastic recycled worldwide in 2012. Continue reading...

The Trump administration is putting profits before people by pressuring the country not to ban harmful chemicalsYou know it’s a dark day for America when foreign leaders have to lecture US officials about the importance of prioritizing public health over corporate profits.Yet that is what is happening now, as the Trump administration pressures Thailand not to ban three pesticides that scientific research has shown to be particularly dangerous to children and other vulnerable populations. Continue reading...

‘Pernicious’ campaign is unfair on well-meaning people who want to help – expertThe battle between climate change deniers and the environment movement has entered a new, pernicious phase. That is the stark warning of one of the world’s leading climate experts, Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.Mann told the Observer that although flat rejection of global warming was becoming increasingly hard to maintain in the face of mounting evidence, this did not mean climate change deniers were giving up the fight. Continue reading...

Over the past decade I’ve watched a young boy grow up and become a daily reminder to me of just how proud his mother would have beenI remember there was an aquarium in the hospice where my cousin Billie spent the last few weeks of her life. Luis, her son, liked going to visit her there more than to the hospital, not realising what her move to a palliative care centre really meant. He liked watching the big guppy in the fish tank kiss the glass when he pressed his face up against it. He’d kick a football down the corridors; seven years old and often straight from school in his too-big uniform, polished black shoes loudly slapping the lino as he ran to her room.I call Luis my nephew because Billie was always more of a sister to me. Throughout her six-year illness – she was diagnosed with a brain tumour at 26 and died at 31 – I helped look after Luis. He was just two when Billie had the first operation and although she did her best to carry on as a young working mother (she was a really in-demand makeup artist), I know she appreciated that family and friends babysat when we could. Continue reading...

Clinic hopes to help those at risk of losing ability to speak maintain sense of identityA pioneering centre aimed at preserving and re-creating people’s voices using artificial intelligence has opened in the US, with researchers hoping it will change the lives of people who face losing their ability to speak.Researchers say the venture – a joint effort between Northeastern University in Boston and the company VocaliD – could play an important role in maintaining a sense of identity among those with conditions ranging from throat cancer to motor neurone disease, by offering them the chance to sound like themselves even after self-generated speech has become impossible. Continue reading...

University of Leeds researchers to update groundbreaking 1950s language surveyAre you terrified by “harvest men” or “long-legged tailors”? Do you have “ferntickles” or “brunny-spots” on your face? If someone called you “gibble-fisted” would you be affronted or amused?The words for daddy long-legs, freckles and left-handed are all examples of English regional dialect discovered in the 1950s by a team of fieldworkers in what was the most comprehensive survey of its kind ever undertaken. Continue reading...

In 1992, Anthony Pelosi voiced concerns in the British Medical Journal about controversial findings from Hans Eysenck – one of the most influential British psychologists of all time – and German researcher Ronald Grossarth-Maticek. Those findings claimed personality played a bigger part in people’s chances of dying from cancer or heart disease than smoking. Almost three decades later, Eysenck’s institution have recommended these studies be retracted from academic journals. Hannah Devlin speaks to Pelosi about the twists and turns in his ultimately successful journey. And to the Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, about how revelations from tobacco industry documents played a crucial role Continue reading...

FoI release shows how embassy and FCO staff sought to make sense of mystery illnessesOfficial emails and diplomatic telegrams marked as sensitive reveal for the first time how the British government scrambled to understand a series of alleged “sonic attacks” on US diplomats who became ill in mysterious circumstances while on duty in Cuba.The US government ordered all non-essential staff at its embassy in Havana to return home after dozens of diplomats and family members developed headaches, dizziness and problems with balance, concentration and sleeping in a wave of illness that struck between 2016 and 2018. Continue reading...

A diet high in added sugar, impossible to escape in processed foods, has been linked to diabetes, heart disease and possibly cancerThere’s a delectable scene in André Aciman’s latest novel Find Me where three characters sit down to lunch. They have just purchased fresh fish and scallops from the market, plus spinach and wine. On a balcony overlooking Rome, the woman “split open the branzini she had broiled in a cast-iron frying pan, removed their bones, and on a different plate came the spinach and old puntarelle, over which, once we were seated, she sprinkled oil and freshly grated parmesan”.Related: Fishy business: should we all be seagans? Continue reading...

Anti-vaxxers keep telling the same obvious lies without shame, despite being debunked and factcheckedYet again a popular show is giving an anti-vaxxer a high-profile platform to spread lies and cause harm to an audience of millions. This time it’s Bill Maher who last week hosted Jay Gordon, a controversial doctor who peddles misinformation about vaccines and is best known for providing hundreds of personal belief exemptions for families to forgo school vaccine requirements.The 14-minute interview on Real Time with Bill Maher doubled down on all the dangerous views we’ve heard before: highlighting discredited work on vaccines and autism, disingenuously labelling measles a benign illness, and questioning a vaccine schedule that has been proven safe and effective by decades of research. Continue reading...

New research has found that being an extrovert makes you happier. So I spent a week attending social events to see if I could trick myself into being more naturally outgoing

Bavarian fossils of likely common ancestor of humans and apes ‘put back start of bipedalism by millions of years’The distinctive human habit of walking upright may have evolved millions of years earlier than thought, according to researchers who uncovered the remains of an ancient ape in southern Germany.Excavations from the Hammerschmiede clay pit in Bavaria turned up fossilised bones belonging to a previously unknown baboon-sized ape that lived nearly 12m years ago, long before humans split from their modern-day cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos. Continue reading...

My brother Dan Lobb, who has died aged 80, was a designer of optical instruments for spacecraft, working at the Scientific Instrument Research Association (Sira) in Chislehurst, Kent, from the 1960s onwards.Early on in his career, he became a designer of laser projector-based flight simulators, and spent a year in the US working at the Naval Research Laboratory, in Washington. Then, in the 80s Sira began developing optical instruments for space satellites, mainly for the European Space Agency (ESA). As an inventor of uniquely clever designs, a driver of computer analyses to optimise the shapes of the lenses and mirrors, and a very good physicist and mathematician, Dan was central to the work. Continue reading...

Debate has raged for years as to whether female sexual pleasure exists for its own sake or has a role in reproduction. But the two views need not be at warThe results are finally in – a study in Clinical Anatomy has found that the clitoris does play an important role in reproduction, activating a series of brain effects (taking as read, incidentally, that it is done right: so we are talking about a female orgasm, not about an ignored clitoris, sitting there, minding its own business). Those brain effects in brief: enhancement of vaginal blood flow, increased lubrication, oxygen and temperature, and an altered position of the cervix, which paradoxically slows down the sperm and improves their motility.From a lay perspective, this feels pretty uncontroversial. The clitoris is right there in the reproductive ballpark; it would be weird if it did not at least try to help. Yet this – perhaps predictably, since female sexuality is involved – is a highly contested space. Continue reading...

Generations yet unborn will face rising oceans and coastal inundations into the 2300s even if governments meet climate commitments, researchers findSea level rise is set to challenge human civilization for centuries to come, even if internationally agreed climate goals are met and planet-warming emissions are then immediately eliminated, researchers have found.The lag time between rising global temperatures and the knock-on impact of coastal inundation means that the world will be dealing with ever-rising sea levels into the 2300s, regardless of prompt action to address the climate crisis, according to the new study. Continue reading...

From Sagan to Tesla, scientists have long puzzled over how to talk to extraterrestrial intelligenceSo you’ve received a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. Congratulations! You are now at the centre of one of the most important events in human history. But now comes the hard part: what do you say in return – and, more importantly, how do you say it?For the past 200 years, the problem of interstellar communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence has vexed some of the world’s greatest scientists and mathematicians. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician and inventor of the heliotrope, suggested using a large array of mirrors; Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla, pioneers of wireless communication, found a solution in radio waves; and John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, the progenitors of artificial intelligence, wanted to send computers into space as our extraterrestrial envoys. Continue reading...