We are used to saying yes to please others but it can be harmful not to be more assertive. And imagine what you can do with all that free timeWhen you ask someone how they are, 95% of the time they will answer with some version of “busy”, “good, but busy” or even, sometimes, “crazy busy”.Busy has become a badge of honour, a signifier of success – a humble brag that implies we are important and in demand. But if you really are “too busy”, chances are, you are not saying no enough. Continue reading...

The psychiatry professor on the polyvagal theory he developed to understand our reactions to traumaStephen Porges is professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and “Distinguished University Scientist” at Indiana University, where he has created the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He is best known for developing polyvagal theory, which describes how visceral experiences affect the nervous system and our resulting behaviour. On Monday 10 June, he will be giving a talk at Love vs Trauma, the Body & Soul charity’s day-long symposium in London, which aims to tackle issues surrounding childhood adversity and trauma. Other participants include Peter Fonagy and Lemn Sissay.Can you explain polyvagal theory in layperson’s terms?

He was often on the verge of giving up such gruelling challenges, but eventually Adharanand Finn found that ultrarunning led him to a meditative stateI never wanted to run an ultra marathon. I’ve always loved running, the freedom of it, the childish abandon, but I was a 10K and half-marathon runner, a “real” runner (in my eyes), someone who pushed the pace and gunned for fast times. Ultrarunning, with all its backpacks, poles and food, was not really running. It was running with all the joy bludgeoned out of it.So when a magazine editor asked me to run the 165km Oman Desert Marathon to write an article about it, I said no: 100 miles across sand, in the heat of Oman. It sounded like hell. Continue reading...

Award-winning writer and former mental-health nurse Nathan Filer redefines our understanding of the illnessIn 1980s Ireland, Brigid becomes obsessed with a photo of a statue of the Virgin Mary and things spiral devastatingly from there. Erica is a hardworking fashion journalist in her 20s who believes the contraceptive coil she has had fitted is actually a camera planted by MI5. James is training at Sandhurst when he finds himself on parade in his pyjamas.Each of these vignettes forms part of an instructive case study in Nathan Filer’s intelligent, absorbing narrative exploration of schizophrenia, The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia. Filer, you may recall, deservedly won just about every major fiction award in 2013 (including the Costa book of the year) for his debut novel, The Shock of the Fall, which told the story of a young man dealing with mental illness and grief. Both that novel, and this, his first full-length nonfiction book, are informed by his earlier career as a mental-health nurse. Continue reading...

Monsanto’s own emails and documents reveal a disinformation campaign to hide its weedkiller’s possible links to cancer

“From the first moment I saw a piece of space dog ephemera I was hooked,” says the photographer and avid collector Martin Parr in the foreword to a new book featuring his canine-themed Soviet memorabilia. In the 1950s, before man was sent into space, the USSR dispatched dogs up there (first a stray called Laika – meaning “barker” – then Belka and Strelka), which kickstarted a huge industry in collectibles featuring canine cosmonauts, from painted plates and clocks to Russian dolls and cigarette cases. Parr has spent 20 years scouring the internet and Moscow flea markets to source his beloved space dogs. “A useful way to understand the impact that they had on Russian society,” he says, “is to draw a parallel with the Beatles or Mickey Mouse, those western icons that generated huge quantities of memorabilia.”

Combining ribociclib with hormone therapy found to cut risk of death by up to a thirdYounger women with breast cancer have been given the hope of living longer after what is described as “one of the greatest advances in breast cancer research in recent decades”.Adding ribociclib, a targeted drug that disrupts cancer cells, to standard hormone therapy was found to boost survival among premenopausal patients who have an advanced form of the disease. Continue reading...

Dead stars from Whitney Houston to Maria Callas are going on tour again. As Miley Cyrus explores the issue in a new Black Mirror, we uncover the greatest identity crisis in music todayMiley Cyrus Q&A: ‘My personal experiences helped craft the episode’In the star-making Disney Channel switcheroo Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus played a teenage girl who is able to metamorphose from regular eighth grader to pop icon, simply by donning a streaked blonde wig. Most of the show seems quaintly dated now, but one moment taps into a very 2019 pop anxiety. On The Other Side Of Me. a featherweight single from the programme’s soundtrack album, Cyrus sang: “I flip the script so many times I forget / Who’s on stage, who’s in the mirror.”Cyrus has shifted her image from foam-finger humper to wholesome cowgirl since, but her new acting role centres again on the self-searching theme of that forgotten 2006 pop classic. In the new season of Black Mirror, Cyrus plays Ashley, a tween-friendly pop star whose latest marketing gimmick is “Ashley Too,” a miniature talking robot toy that replicates both her Pepto-Bismol hairdo and platitude-spouting persona. The episode’s trailer ends with Ashley Too acquiring potty-mouthed sentience, screaming for her owner to “get this [USB] cable out of my ass! Holy Shit!” Specifics are under wraps, but the episode seems centred around a big, knotty question: if someone’s essence can be transplanted into a mechanised clone, where do we end and robots begin? Continue reading...

New research shows a single 19th century tree in southern Queensland gave rise to the world’s dominant plant varietyThe small Queensland town of Gympie has been identified as the origin of 70% of the world’s macadamia nuts.New research into the fatty seed has revealed the world’s dominant commercial cultivar – grown in Hawaii – originated from a single tree in southern Queensland from the 19th century. Continue reading...

Being older, male and having multiple health problems found to heighten risk factorsSepsis survivors are at a heightened risk of death in the years after their illness if it has been critical, research has shown.Of those discharged from hospital in England after a critical care admission, 15% died within 12 months, according to a study published in the journal Jama Network Open. Continue reading...

Male animal bias is unjustified and can lead to drugs that work less well for womenThe male mind is rational and orderly while the female one is complicated and hormonal. It is a stereotype that has skewed decades of neuroscience research towards using almost exclusively male mice and other laboratory animals, according to a new study.Scientists have typically justified excluding female animals from experiments – even when studying conditions that are more likely to affect women – on the basis that fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable. However, according to Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, in Boston, it is entirely unjustified by scientific evidence, which shows that, if anything, the hormones and behaviour of male rodents are less stable than those of females. Continue reading...

The education secretary wants to ‘toughen up’ pupils, but that means less structure, not moreDon’t tell the Conservative leadership candidates, but the education secretary, Damian Hinds, is holding a brainstorming session. He wants ideas on how we can toughen up British schoolchildren. Clearly he knows something we don’t about the future.“To truly prepare for adult life we need to make sure our young people build character and resilience,” he announced last week as he launched a new C&R initiative – as it will doubtless be shortened to in education circles. Yes, GCSEs and A-levels are important, Hinds said – but in 10 years’ time, exam results will be a “distant memory”. (Presumably Sats and Pisa rankings, too : the whole quasi-mathematical surveillance matrix that Hinds and his predecessors have painstakingly constructed for our children these past few decades?) Continue reading...

Scientists have genetically modified a fungus to make it produce the same lethal toxin as is found in the funnel web spiderA genetically modified fungus that kills malaria-carrying mosquitoes could provide a breakthrough in the fight against the disease, according to researchers.Trials in Burkina Faso found that a fungus, modified so that it produces spider toxin, quickly killed large numbers of mosquitos that carry malaria. Continue reading...

Science Weekly joins forces with our sister technology podcast, Chips with Everything, to look at the future of weather forecasting. Graihagh Jackson finds out how accurate predictions currently are, while Jordan Erica Webber discusses how street cameras and connected cars could improve the forecast further Continue reading...

From workplace food fights to disputes with the neighbours, the humble yellow sticky note comes into its ownIn Sydney and London, two communities are at war. Both alike in dignity – one, an office of journalists, the other a residential Brixton street – and bound together by the humble Post-it note.In Sydney, the offices of SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) have been torn apart by one person’s quest to protect their cheese. In London, the issue of communal flowers has sparked a passive-aggressive neighbourhood row. Continue reading...

Maxar wins $375m deal to build the Lunar Gateway’s power and propulsion elementNasa has contracted Maxar Technologies to develop the first element of its Lunar Gateway space station, an essential part of its plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.Astronauts arriving from Earth in the Orion crew capsule will dock at the gateway, which will be in orbit around the moon, before transferring to a lunar landing module and descending to the surface. It will also double as a research outpost for astronauts who do not become moonwalkers. Continue reading...

Magician John Nevil Maskelyne captured the moon passing in front of the sun while in the USThe first moving picture of a solar eclipse, captured by a British magician-turned-film-maker more than a century ago, has been rediscovered in the archive of the Royal Astronomical Society.The shaky footage, recorded by John Nevil Maskelyne using a specially-adapted camera, shows the moon passing in front of the sun while he was on a British Astronomical Association expedition to North Carolina in the United States. Continue reading...

Study aims to discover whether gut microbes play a part in development of the conditionScientists have induced the hallmarks of autism in mice by giving them faecal transplants from humans with the condition.The experiments were designed to test whether the communities of gut microbes found in people with autism have a role in their symptoms, an idea that is gaining ground among researchers. Continue reading...

New study confirms natural cycles play little role in global temperature trends and tackles discrepancies in previous modelsEmissions from fossil fuels and volcanoes can explain nearly all of the changes in Earth’s surface temperatures over the past 140 years, a new study has found.The research refutes the popular climate denial myth that recent global warming is merely a result of natural cycles. Continue reading...

The technology will be labeled and subject to stringent health and environment review in the EU, but not in the US, where produce could be radically changedSoon, soybeans will be bred to yield oil without dangerous trans fats. Lettuce will be grown to handle warmer, drier fields. Wheat to contain less gluten. And pigs bred to resist deadly viruses. Someday, maybe even strawberry plants whose delicate berries can be picked by machine instead of by hand.Ten years ago, such genetic changes would have been considered science fiction – or so far off into the future of breeding as to be almost unimaginable. But gene editing, particularly with a tool called Crispr-Cas9, has made it much easier and more efficient to tinker with the genomes of plants and animals. The first Crispr-edited products will begin reaching the market this year, and researchers believe it’s only a matter of time before US grocery shelves could be filled with gene-edited produce, grains and meat. Continue reading...

Human activity has transformed the Earth – but scientists are divided about whether this is really a turning point in geological history. By Nicola DavisonIt was February 2000 and the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen was sitting in a meeting room in Cuernavaca, Mexico, stewing quietly. Five years earlier, Crutzen and two colleagues had been awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for proving that the ozone layer, which shields the planet from ultraviolet light, was thinning at the poles because of rising concentrations of industrial gas. Now he was attending a meeting of scientists who studied the planet’s oceans, land surfaces and atmosphere. As the scientists presented their findings, most of which described dramatic planetary changes, Crutzen shifted in his seat. “You could see he was getting agitated. He wasn’t happy,” Will Steffen, a chemist who organised the meeting, told me recently.What finally tipped Crutzen over the edge was a presentation by a group of scientists that focused on the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,700 years ago and continues to the present day. After Crutzen heard the word Holocene for the umpteenth time, he lost it. “He stopped everybody and said: ‘Stop saying the Holocene! We’re not in the Holocene any more,’” Steffen recalled. But then Crutzen stalled. The outburst had not been premeditated, but now all eyes were on him. So he blurted out a name for a new epoch. A combination of anthropos, the Greek for “human”, and “-cene”, the suffix used in names of geological epochs, “Anthropocene” at least sounded academic. Steffen made a note. Continue reading...

Two major studies add to body of evidence against foods made with industrial ingredientsPeople who eat large amounts of heavily processed foods, from breakfast cereals and ready meals to muffins and ice-cream, have a greater risk of heart attack, stroke and early death, according to two major studies.The findings, from separate teams in France and Spain, add to a growing body of evidence that foods made in factories with industrial ingredients may have a hand in an array of medical disorders such as cancer, obesity and high blood pressure. Continue reading...

Anti-abortion activists know that you don’t need to outlaw abortion outright if you can make getting a safe, legal one nearly impossibleBy the end of the week, women in Missouri may live in a state without a single abortion clinic. While restrictive laws in states like Alabama have made headlines, Missouri shows the other side of the anti-abortion strategy: steadily shave away at abortion rights. You don’t need to outlaw the procedure outright if you can make getting a safe, legal one nearly impossible.The reason there’s only one remaining clinic in Missouri in the first place is because the state has tried to regulate abortion out of existence. A series of unnecessary rules and regulations makes it harder both for women to access abortions and for medical professionals to provide them. Missouri’s misogynistic laws already don’t trust women to make their own decisions – they mandate that any woman seeking an abortion in the state has to come to a clinic, request the procedure, and then go home and think about it for three days before it can be legally proffered. They also require that young people under the age of 18 notify both parents and get the notarized consent of at least one parent before they can terminate a pregnancy – a serious hardship for girls who live with abuse, or who don’t have a good relationship with their parents, or who don’t want to be mothers but want to keep their medical decisions private. Continue reading...

You can outsource pretty much every aspect of irritation in your life. But you can’t outsource lonelinessUber has launched a quiet ride service in the US, which means that passengers can request that a driver refrain from talking to them during their trip. The quiet ride feature is available in Uber’s premium Black service.If you’re reading this thinking, “Great, now rich people have even less reason to talk to people outside their bubble of wealth,” then you’re not alone. Uber passengers will be exposed to even fewer diverse experiences, and will stop hearing stories that reach into their hearts and knock on the door of their empathy. Continue reading...

Conservative donors and fossil fuel companies have the most to lose from large-scale decarbonization – and they know it

Sherrie Silver, who was behind acclaimed video This is America, launches virtual dance ‘petition’ to promote investment in farmingShe made a name for herself as the choreographer behind one of the most controversial yet critically acclaimed music videos of last year.Now Sherrie Silver, the creative force behind the dance moves in Childish Gambino’s This Is America, is using her success to drive a social media campaign promoting investment in young people in rural Africa. Continue reading...

For years, the midlife crisis has been no more than a sitcom joke. But now some experts are insisting that’s because we don’t understand how it has changedI was sitting gingerly on the bonnet of a classic Mercedes when I thought: “Hang on a minute. I know why I have been asked to write about this academic’s argument that we should all stop trivialising the midlife crisis.”But I wouldn’t describe what happened to me as a midlife crisis. It’s true I was square in middle age – 42 – when I fell in love, fair and square, with a man who wasn’t my husband. I had to get divorced, and now I am, however you cut it, on my second marriage. There are as many people who would say to this, “Love is bullshit,” as would say, “The heart wants what it wants,” but if I know anything with certainty, it’s that you should never try to justify yourself to the first lot. Continue reading...

UK study covering 100,000 women finds ‘no overall link’ between cancer and night workNight shift work does not increase the risk of breast cancer, finds a UK study covering analysis of 102,869 women over 10 years.The Breast Cancer Now Generations study is the latest to examine the supposed link presented by experts for decades. Continue reading...

The awesome vastness of time and space is laid out in its full, jawdropping incomprehensibility by Prof Brian Cox, the Attenborough of outer spaceTowards the end of the opening episode of The Planets (BBC Two), the new solar system opus presented by Prof Brian Cox, I found myself questioning whether this was feelgood, or feelbad, television. Cox has already made headlines with his suggestion that the future of humanity may lie in stretching our living quarters from Earth to Mars, which, I suppose, is a feelgood idea, if adventures and Matt Damon are high on your particular list. The wonder of Cox’s arguments, which take in the staggering, incomprehensible vastness of time and space, provides the kind of television that made this particular viewer stop and say “whoa” every few seconds.And there is extreme joy, indeed, to be found in the miraculousness of life existing on Earth at all. When Cox dangles his hand in a rock pool on a volcano in the middle of the ocean, he marvels at all the chance events that took place over billions of years to produce these tiny creatures. Whoa, I thought, being due for another “whoa”. Continue reading...

Scientists say surge of radiation led to lightning causing forest fires, making adaptation vitalIt was the evolutionary leap that defined the species: while other apes ambled around on all fours, the ancestors of humans rose up on two legs and, from that lofty position, went on to conquer the world.The benefits of standing tall in the African savannah are broadly nailed down, but what prompted our distant forebears to walk upright is far from clear. Now, in a radical proposal, US scientists point to a cosmic intervention: protohumans had a helping hand from a flurry of exploding stars, they say. Continue reading...

Overgrown and weathered, many historical monuments are disappearing as public funds for culture fail to match modern Italy’s inheritanceLegend has it that the grotto hidden among the craggy cliffs on San Marco hill in Sutera in the heart of Sicily holds a treasure chest full of gold coins. In order to find it, three men must dream simultaneously about the precise place to dig.Treasure or no treasure, the grotto itself is an archaeological gem, its walls adorned with a multi-coloured Byzantine-esque 16th-century fresco depicting Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Saints Paulinus, Luke, Mark and Matthew. Continue reading...

Should Prof Paul Dolan’s pronouncements change the way we think about life? Er …Some of my best friends are in a subgroup: “unmarried and childless women”. Its members, according to a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, are the “happiest subgroup in the population”. Paul Dolan, in a talk at the Hay festival, told the audience that the latest evidence, including longitudinal studies, shows that the markers conventionally used to measure success – marriage and children – do not correlate with happiness. Well, knock me down with a Fetherlight condom. Who knew? Except the many women who actually have quite nice lives?We are told that marriage, usually of the heterosexual, monogamous kind, is the key to intimacy, if not ecstasy, and that it is somehow good for our health. It is good for men because their wives nag them to see the doctor and, possibly, to eat better. For women, this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, as most women have children and work, life can be pretty tough. Continue reading...

The small constellation, named for Orpheus’s lyre, boasts one of the sky’s brightest starsLyra is a small, rather faint constellation in the northern hemisphere, saved from obscurity by the beautiful star Vega. Shining with a brilliant white light, Vega is the fifth brightest star in the sky and lies just 25 light years away from Earth. It is unmistakable in the northern sky at this time of year. The chart shows its position at midnight tonight. To find Vega, look high in the east, just over halfway between the horizon and the zenith; it will be unmistakable. The constellation itself hangs below the star and should be easy to pick out as it traces the shape of a parallelogram. It represents a lyre, the musical instrument of Orpheus, who played the instrument ceaselessly for comfort following the death of his wife Eurydice. Upon Orpheus’s death, Zeus placed the instrument in the stars, while Orpheus’s bones were buried by the muses. Although the constellation is often seen as a musical instrument, not all cultures imagine this. In Indigenous Australian astronomy, the constellation represents a Malleefowl bird. Continue reading...

Focus on your breathing, stay still – and keep your eyes on the horizonDon’t travel on small planes, which tend to be worse than larger jets. If you are on a boat, keep towards the centre, where there is less movement. In a car, being the driver helps; the worst place to sit is in the back seat, because it is harder to see out the window. Unfortunately, this is where children typically sit – and people are most susceptible to travel sickness from the age of eight to about 12, says John Golding, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Westminster. Adults who suffer migraines are also more susceptible. Continue reading...

The utopian vision of humans colonising the red planet to solve our energy and population crises is a misguided fantasyWho said this? “I’ve been having to say everywhere I go that there is no planet B, there is no escape hatch, there is no second Earth; this is the only planet we have.” If you’re a science fiction fan the answer might surprise you: it was the writer Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars trilogy is an ultimately utopian series of tales that describe the terraforming of Mars – planetary engineering to give it an Earth-like environment – over the course of several centuries after the Earth perishes from overpopulation and ecosystem collapse.Robinson’s pessimism about planetary settlement seems out of step with the spirit of the times. Unveiling his Blue Moon project two weeks ago – a robotic lunar lander to deliver the infrastructure for a crewed moon base – Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, portrayed it as the bold first step towards human colonisation of the solar system. Continue reading...

My mother’s sister had a terrifyingly good memory. Who will now recall our childhood sweethearts – or her mother’s lover?The loss of an aunt isn’t one of the big deaths. I told myself that last week. My cousin had emailed with news that her mother, my aunt, had died unexpectedly in the week. She was my mother’s younger sister and lived far away in suburban Johannesburg. I hadn’t spoken to her since November, when I’d called on my birthday. Nothing structural in my life had changed.Related: We need to talk about death: I was not prepared for how lonely grief would be | Vanessa Billy Continue reading...

Geneticist Steve Jones, formerly a sceptic, says case for doing so is overwhelmingOne of Britain’s leading scientists has urged people to take vitamin D supplements, particularly children, who spend an hour less outside than they did 10 years ago.The geneticist Steve Jones told the Hay literary festival in Wales the health case for taking them was now overwhelming. “I never thought I would be a person who would take vitamin supplements, I always thought it was absolute nonsense, it’s homeopathy. I now take vitamin D every day,” he said. Continue reading...

Could Tesla owners one day farm out their cars as self-driving taxis?You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to wonder if Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, is off his rocker. I mean to say, how many leaders of US public companies get into trouble with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for falsely claiming that they have secured funding to take their company private at $420 a share – and then get sued and fined $40m? Or can you imagine another CEO who deals with Wall Street analysts by swatting away questions about his company’s capital requirements as if they were flies. “Excuse me. Next. Next,” he replied to one guy who was pressing him on the subject. “Boring, bonehead questions are not cool. Next?”The view from Wall Street is that Musk is too volatile to be in charge of a big and potentially important public company. The charitable view is less judgemental: it is that, while he may have a short fuse, he’s also a gifted, visionary disrupter. But even those who take this tolerant view were taken aback when he declared at a recent public event that he could see “one million robo-taxis on the roads by 2020”. Continue reading...

Does Zolgensma, a revolutionary one-off treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, really need to cost so much?How much is a life worth? $2.15m? That’s the staggering price of a drug produced by the pharmaceutical giant Novartis that has just come on the market. Zolgensma is a one-off gene therapy treatment for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare degenerative disorder. Infants with the most severe form usually die within two years. For parents of babies born with SMA, any price is worth paying to save the child’s life. Novartis argues that spread across a lifetime, $2.15m is “cost-effective”.It points out, too, the expense of developing such innovative drugs. In this case, though, Novartis did not develop Zolgensma but bought up, for £8.7bn, AveXis Inc, the company that did. The Wall Street Journal described the acquisition as a “bet”. The price of Zolgensma is the return necessary for that gamble to be successful. Continue reading...

The decision to let Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon was controversial – especially with his colleague Buzz AldrinIt was 1969. The last year for President Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the moon and return him safely “before this decade is out”. Nasa was not sure it could be done in time. There were, perhaps, going to be only three opportunities before the deadline expired.On 6 January the head of the astronaut office at Nasa, Deke Slayton, called the crew of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins – into his office in Houston, Texas, and told them that their mission, set for July, might involve a lunar landing. A few weeks earlier, Apollo 8 had taken the first crewed voyage around the moon, and the tasks of the forthcoming Apollos 9 and 10 were set. Apollo 9 was to test the lunar landing spacecraft in Earth orbit and Apollo 10 was a full rehearsal at the moon – everything except the landing itself. Continue reading...

She has 17m followers, a figure set to double this year. So how has Susan Miller made the ancient pseudo-science of fortune-telling a world-wide phenomenon?If you’re not one of the 17 million readers of astrologyzone.com or one of the users of the app of the same name, you may not have heard of Susan Miller – yet. But for any astrology-obsessed millennial, she is the queen of fortune telling, single-handedly responsible for fuelling their obsession with all things celestial. Somehow she has managed to turn the mystical, ancient pseudo-science of astrology into a world-wide phenomenon – her website enjoyed more than 310m page views in 2018 and this year traffic looks set to double.Miller’s readers come from every country in the world, she’s written 11 bestselling books, and currently writes for magazines in eight countries. She also has a monthly TV show and regularly gives personal readings. She has a devoted celebrity following, including Cameron Diaz, who allegedly consulted her for advice before buying a house, Justin Theroux, Pharrell Williams and Alexa Chung. Continue reading...

Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan says traditional markers of success no longer applyWe may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children. Continue reading...

US approves the one-time treatment for deadly spinal muscular atrophy in infantsSwiss drugmaker Novartis has received US approval for its spinal muscular atrophy gene therapy Zolgensma – pricing the one-time treatment at a record $2.125m.The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved Zolgensma for children under the age of two with SMA, including those not yet showing symptoms. The approval covers babies with the deadliest form of the inherited disease as well as those with types where debilitating symptoms may set in later. Continue reading...

Got a question for the Swedish 16-year-old who started a youth climate revolution? Here’s your chance to ask her...On 20 August 2018, Greta Thunberg, then aged 15, did not attend her first day back at school after the summer holidays. Instead, she made a sign that read “School strike for climate change” and stood in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm, demanding the government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris climate agreement.Her protest sparked the international movement Fridays for Future, in which schoolchildren around the world skip class to insist their governments take urgent action to halt the ongoing climate crisis. Since then, Thunberg has given a TED talk on the subject, been named one of the world’s most influential teens by Time magazine, and been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. After she addressed the Houses of Parliament in April, MPs endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s call to declare a climate emergency, aiming to “set off a wave of action from parliaments and governments around the globe”. Continue reading...

We’re calling for a global strike on 20 September. Disrupting our normal lives is the only way to secure our futureOn 20 September, at the request of the young people who have been staging school strikes around the world, we’re walking out of our workplaces and homes to spend the day demanding action on the climate crisis, the greatest existential threat that all of us face. It’s a one-day climate strike, if you will – and it will not be the last. This is going to be the beginning of a week of action all over the world. And we hope to make it a turning point in history.Related: A manifesto for tackling the climate change crisis | UK Student Climate Network Continue reading...

British specialist among those aiming to develop ‘next generation’ treatment that could help millions of victims each yearScientists in five countries, including the UK, hope to find a universal cure for snakebite using the same technology that discovered HIV antibodies.A new consortium of venom specialists in India, Kenya, Nigeria, Britain and the US will locate and develop antibodies to treat critical illness from snakebites, which harm nearly 3 million people worldwide each year. Continue reading...

Authority finds science show breached impartiality standards in its portrayal of the beef industry as harmful to the environmentThe media watchdog has found the ABC science program Catalyst breached editorial standards for impartiality in its presentation of the beef industry as harmful to the environment.Meat & Livestock Australia complained to the ABC last year that the program was unfair to the beef industry and insects were promoted as an alternative source to cattle. But an internal investigation found the program met editorial standards. Continue reading...

A recent study that tested both men and dogs added to concerns that chemicals in the environment are damaging the quality and quantity of sperm• Help us reach our $150,000 goal to fund this series. Make a contributionSurprising new research into dog sperm has reproductive biologists concerned about the fate of their own species. In a March study, scientists at Nottingham University found that two chemicals common in home environments damage the quality of sperm in both men and dogs.The culprits implicated are diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), used to make new plastics more pliable, and polychlorinated biphenyl 153 (PCB153), found in older plastics and electrical equipment. Companies stopped producing PCBs in the late 1970s due to their health risks – including a possible increased risk of cancer, hormone disruption, liver damage and behavioral or cognitive deficits in children exposed to the chemical in utero – but the chemical persists in the environment. Continue reading...

Interaction that could signal new gold deposits ‘had to be seen to be believed’, CSIRO researcher saysFungi that draws gold from its surroundings has been discovered in Western Australia, stunning scientists who say it could signal new deposits.Found near Boddington, south of Perth, the strain of the Fusarium oxysporum fungus attaches gold to its strands by dissolving and precipitating particles from the environment. Continue reading...