Many cases in Asia and Africa are being missed and leading to children ‘dying at home’Almost half of children with cancer are going undiagnosed and untreated, according to a new global study.The research suggests that the situation depends on location: while only 3% of childhood cancer cases in western Europe and north America are thought to have been missed in 2015, the proportion rose to an estimated 49% in south Asia and 57% in western Africa. Continue reading...

New drug-delivery system could also be used to treat brain tumours and strokesPeople with Parkinson’s disease have been fitted with an implant that can deliver drugs directly to the brain through a port in the side of their head, in a pioneering study.The device was used to send a naturally occurring protein, which it is hoped may help restore cells damaged by the disease, to an affected part of the brain. Continue reading...

Unseasonably balmy February days can be pleasant, but scientists are increasingly linking extremes of heat, storms and other meteorological events to global warmingOver thousands of years, like humans everywhere, we became used to thinking of the sun, rain and wind as the backdrop to our lives – external entities over which we had no dominion. In the 21st century, this has become a delusion. The unpredictability of weather in the UK, particularly during summers that many wish were drier and sunnier, is associated by many people with what it means to be British. It has big variations – temperatures in the north of Scotland can be up to 20C lower than in southern England – and is characteristically unsettled due to the jet stream.Its unreliability may have aided those wishing to avoid the truth about global warming. But the evidence of our senses, as well as what meteorologists and other scientists tell us, is becoming overwhelming. While many people are enjoying this week’s record-breaking temperatures – 20.3C in Wales on Monday, and 21.2C in London on Tuesday, the hottest winter days on record – many of the same people are also worried. Extreme or unusual weather in the UK is becoming widely recognised as an indication that the climate is changing, though this realisation has been a long time coming. Continue reading...

Answers to today’s kinship riddlesEarlier today I set you the following five puzzles.1) Anna’s father has four daughters. The names of the first three daughters are April, May and June. What’s the name of the fourth daughter? Continue reading...

Mystery shrouds ‘very faint’ planetary body that appears to be 140 times further from the sun than EarthA new object has been discovered in the distant reaches of our solar system and given the name FarFarOut, according to a prominent astronomer.At 140 times further away from the sun than our own planet is, the newly identified body – if its discovery is confirmed – will become the furthest known object in our solar system. Continue reading...

An exceptional, vibrant restoration of never-before-seen footage results in one of the most astounding films about space ever madeThe documentary Apollo 11 starts, as the famous mission did, in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Trucks ferry massive rocket props, machinery grinds as it would in any construction zone, the sky is a crystal blue. The scene is, in a word, vibrant — so startlingly alive that for the first few minutes, I wasn’t sure if I was watching footage from 1969 or a NASA promo shot from last year.Related: Greta review – Isabelle Huppert torments Chloë Grace Moretz in dim-witted thriller Continue reading...

Test your ken about kinshipUPDATE: Read the solutions hereFamily relationships have provided material for many classic puzzles since at least medieval times. They make for fun problems because they require no technical knowledge and often present entertaining or curious set-ups. Here are a selection of five of my favourites of the genre.1) Anna’s father has four daughters. The names of the first three daughters are April, May and June. What’s the name of the fourth daughter? Continue reading...

Venus and Jupiter dominate the south-eastern sky, but Saturn and the waning crescent moon augment the displayIt is definitely worth getting up early this week as an attractive string of bright planets sits in the south-eastern sky. The brightest will be Venus, appearing low and furthest to the east. Venus is the planet that comes closest to earth. It orbits closer to the sun than our planet, and its bright clouds reflect the sunlight, giving it an unmistakeable brilliance. Once you have located Venus, look south and the next brightest object you will see is Jupiter. It will be about twice the altitude of Venus. Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System. It too appears bright because its clouds are good reflectors of the sunlight. With these two planets as markers, Saturn can be located between them. It appears closer to Venus in the sky than Jupiter. In reality, Saturn is twice as far away as Jupiter from the sun, and this makes it appear considerably dimmer than the other two planets. On the 28th the trio are joined by a waning crescent moon. With just over 32% of its surface illuminated and the spreading light of dawn to the east, this will be a beautiful sight to see. The chart shows the view at 06:00GMT on 28 February. Continue reading...

Maybe the ancients saw a parallel between the stars and planets and the bluestones, writes Neil HornsbyProf Colin Richards fears that we may never know why the bluestones of Preseli warranted such reverence as to be transported from south-west Wales to Stonehenge (Report, 20 February). In fact the answer may well be staring us in the face. Stonehenge itself was clearly intended to connect with the heavens: the sun, the moon and perhaps particularly the stars. Maybe the ancients saw a parallel between the firmament and the bluestones? The bluestones comprise a range of igneous rocks, metamorphosed spotted dolerite being among the principal ones. This dolerite comprises a dark blue/green mass of small crystals in which are set larger, white and broadly round, but jagged-edged crystals of pyroxene – uncannily not dissimilar to stars, set in a fiery firmament. Heaven on Earth?

Why asking whether your brain is male or female is the wrong questionYou receive an invitation, emblazoned with a question: “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?” The question is your teaser for the “gender reveal party” to which you are being invited by an expectant mother who, at more than 20 weeks into her pregnancy, knows what you don’t: the sex of her child. After you arrive, explains cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon in her riveting new book, The Gendered Brain, the big reveal will be hidden within some novelty item, such as a white iced cake, and will be colour-coded. Cut the cake and you’ll see either blue or pink filling. If it is blue, it is a…Yes, you’ve guessed it. Whatever its sex, this baby’s future is predetermined by the entrenched belief that males and females do all kinds of things differently, better or worse, because they have different brains. Continue reading...

Shame on those scientists who are unwilling to embrace the importance of philosophersLast week it was revealed that Edinburgh University’s David Purdie had discovered a letter from Albert Einstein in which the great scientist notes the importance of 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume in developing his theory of special relativity.Without having reading Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Einstein wrote: “I cannot say that the solution would have come.” Continue reading...

Pioneering methods are being developed to find traces of tumours quickly in small blood samplesAbout seven years ago, researchers at the US DNA sequencing company Illumina started to notice something odd. A new blood test it ran on 125,000 expectant mothers looking for genetic abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome in their foetuses returned some extremely unexpected signals in 10 cases. Chillingly, it dawned on them that the abnormal DNA they were seeing wasn’t from the foetuses but was, rather, undiagnosed cancer in the mothers. Cancers of different types were later confirmed in all 10. “This was not a test developed for cancer screening,” says Alex Aravanis, then Illumina’s senior R&D director. “But it was evidence that it might be possible.”In 2016, Illumina created Silicon Valley-based spin-off company Grail, with Aravanis as chief scientific officer. Backed by more than $1.5bn in funding, including money from Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Grail is on a quest to detect multiple types of cancer before symptoms, via a single, simple blood test. The test looks at cell-free plasma to find fragments of so-called circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) sloughed off by cancer cells. Continue reading...

Scientists demand controls on private sales as celebrities help push cost of relics into the millionsLeading US palaeontologists are calling for a worldwide halt to the sale of vertebrate dinosaur fossils. The booming market for specimens, driven by their popularity with wealthy private collectors, including Hollywood stars, is pushing up prices and putting them out of reach of museums and scientists, they say.While the art market is organised around brand-name artists, dinosaur sales are all about celebrity species, with a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton fetching up to $10m, although the velociraptor is the most prized. The price tag for a triceratops’s skull is $170,000 to $400,000, and a diplodocus is $570,000 to $1.1m. Last year a complete egg of an aepyornis maximus, otherwise known as an elephant bird, sold for $130,000 – roughly five times what it would have gone for a decade earlier. Continue reading...

The cream of the new breed of craft heading for the moon and beyondLaunched on Friday by its operators Israel Aerospace Industries and SpaceIL, Beresheet is the first privately funded lunar landing mission. It will demonstrate a new landing technique of “hopping”, using its rocket engine, to a secondary landing spot. The rover will have a short lifetime of a few days, with plans to transmit imagery and measurements of the moon’s magnetic field, as well as depositing a “time capsule” celebrating Israeli art, music and history. Continue reading...

New techniques will help customs officers identify and seize wood that came from endangered speciesThe wooden blinds that lie crumpled in Peter Gasson’s laboratory in Kew Gardens are chipped and forlorn-looking. Their manufacturers had claimed they were made of pine but customs officers were wary. And their suspicions were well-founded. Gasson, Kew’s research leader on wood and timber, found the blinds were not made of pine but ramin.“All ramin trees, which grow in south-east Asia, are endangered and trade in their wood is illegal,” said Gasson. “On this occasion, we got lucky and stopped people profiting from this trade.” Continue reading...

The director general of Cern talks about discovering the Higgs boson, women in science and the next generation of collidersAn Italian particle physicist, Fabiola Gianotti, 58, has been the director general of Cern since January 2016. Previously she led a collaboration of around 3,000 physicists from 38 countries which co-discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. Last month Cern published plans for a €20bn successor to the Large Hadron Collider.What’s up with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?

How absorbing your concentration in needlework relieves inner turmoilI grew up in post-war Britain when, saved from German invasion – men returned from war, children from evacuation, families were reunited – the comfort of the home became paramount. Its importance was marked out in sewn domestic niceties: embroidered tray cloths, cheval sets and tea cosies. My home had a sewing machine in the corner, an ever-ready sewing workbox by my mother’s chair and a box that brimmed with buttons for us children to rifle through by way of entertainment. This was my material world.Living in industrial Glasgow, a city grimed with soot, smog and smoke, my landscape was monochrome until the day, when I was about six years old, my mother took me to an Aladdin’s cave in the city centre. There she bought me linen cloths already stamped with floral flourishes, packets of gold-tipped needles and silver scissors with handles shaped like a bird’s wings – and she let me choose loops of embroidery threads from a carousel of colours that dazzled me. Continue reading...

Exclusive: a fifth of 13- to 15-year-olds ‘spend five hours or more a day on social media’Teenagers in Britain may be putting their health and education at risk by spending too much time on social media at bedtime, according to a major study into adolescent sleep habits.More than a third of teenagers spent at least three hours a day on social media, with a fifth devoting at least five hours to the activity, researchers found. Those who were on social media for three hours or more daily were most likely to get to sleep late. Continue reading...

As a teacher, how do I show my pupils the right values when they see so little of it from their adult ‘role models’?The children’s climate strike has become another lightning rod in the never-ending culture war. Those on the left applauded them for their brave moral stand. Jonathan Freedland – not without basis – pointed to the strike as evidence that children were acting more like adults than the adults. But on the right the focus seemed to be on chiding them and telling them to get back to school – from the prime minister’s spokesperson to Toby Young, who saw the children’s behaviour as an argument for raising the voting age to 21.So far, so predictable. And then came the waves of abusive comments and tweets in response. Teachers who “support this strike should have their assets confiscated and [be] sent to work down the salt mines”. “Oh do shut up you total fucking arse” the actor James Purefoy tweeted at Young to his 107,000 followers. Continue reading...

With the Large Hadron Collider reaching its upper limits, scientists around the world are drawing up plans for a new generation of super colliders. Ian Sample weighs up whether or not the potential new discoveries a collider may make will justify the cost of building them.Cern recently announced a proposal to build a machine that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider.It could cost around $12bn. But Cern isn’t the only lab looking at building such a monster machine.

The unmanned robotic capsule, called Beresheet, will land on the moon in mid-AprilAn Israeli spacecraft aboard a SpaceX rocket has launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, beginning a two-month journey to land on the Moon.If successful, Israel, a state with fewer than 9 million citizens, will join Russia, the US and China as the only countries to have made a controlled landing on the surface of earth’s nearest neighbour. Continue reading...

The probe was due to fire a pellet into the surface of the asteroid to try to capture dustA Japanese spacecraft has successfully touched down on a speeding asteroid 300 million kilometres from the Earth as it attempts an audacious manoeuvre to collect samples and bring them back for scientists to study.The Hayabusa 2 probe touched down on the asteroid Ryugu at around 11:30pm GMT on Thursday. Data from the probe showed changes in speed and direction, indicating it had reached the asteroid’s surface, according to officials from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Continue reading...

Cambridge University launches free digital archive of aerial photos going back to 1945A “historical Google Earth” featuring aerial photographs of Britain going back to 1945 has been made freely available by Cambridge University.The vast archive captures 70 years of change across urban and rural landscapes, from the bomb-scarred postwar period to the emergence of motorways and skyscrapers. Continue reading...

Comprehensive mission known as SPHEREx will collect data on more than 300m galaxiesNasa has approved a new sky survey mission that will explore the origins of the universe and its galaxies and of water in planetary systems.This comprehensive mission is known as SPHEREx (the spectro-photometer for the history of the universe, epoch of reionization and ices explorer). It will survey the sky in 96 different colour bands that span the optical and near-infrared wavelengths of light. Continue reading...

Saatchi Gallery to host exhibition of 150 artefacts before their permanent return to EgyptThe largest number of King Tutankhamun treasures ever to leave Egypt are heading to London for an exhibition which organisers say will never happen again. It was announced on Thursday that the Saatchi Gallery in London will be the only UK venue for a world tour of 150 original artefacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb, 60 of which have never left Egypt before.The tour marks the upcoming centenary of the sensational discovery of the boy pharaoh’s tomb by British explorer Howard Carter in 1922. Continue reading...

Biologists discover single female Wallace’s giant bee inside a termites’ nest in a treeAs long as an adult thumb, with jaws like a stag beetle and four times larger than a honeybee, Wallace’s giant bee is not exactly inconspicuous.But after going missing, feared extinct, for 38 years, the world’s largest bee has been rediscovered alive on the Indonesian islands of the North Moluccas. Continue reading...

Swede, 16, says EU cannot just ‘wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge’The EU should double its climate change reduction targets to do its fair share in keeping the planet below a dangerous level of global warming, the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has told political and business leaders in Brussels.Flanked by students from the Belgian and German school strike movements, the Swedish teenager said it was not enough to hope that young people were going to save the world. Continue reading...

The first of a series of films called 'Five minute masterminds' starts with Prof Martin Rees, the astronomer royal. He asks how the future of space exploration will transform how we think of humanity and if we can rely on mass emigration to Mars to save us from the Earth's problems Continue reading...

Spacecraft will shoot pellet at more than 650mph into Ryugu’s surface to kick up dustA Japanese spacecraft is to attempt an audacious smash-and-grab manoeuvre on a speeding asteroid in an attempt to collect samples and return them to Earth.The Hayabusa 2 probe is due to touch down on the asteroid Ryugu at 11pm GMT on Thursday. It will then fire a tantalum pellet into the surface to kick up dust and grains that it will try to capture. Continue reading...

William Happer, a physicist who has suggested higher levels of carbon dioxide are beneficial, would be on committee

Astronomers confirm orbit of tiny moon Hippocamp via multiple images from HubbleA miniature moon that whizzes around Neptune at breakneck speed has been tracked by astronomers working from the US.The speck of a moon, no more than 21 miles across, hurtles around the distant gas giant at about 20,000 miles an hour, 10 times faster than our own moon circles Earth, scientists said. Continue reading...

Pattern seems to confuse flies, researchers who dressed horses up as zebras findThe mystery of how the zebra got its stripes might have been solved: researchers say the pattern appears to confuse flies, discouraging them from touching down for a quick bite.The study, published in the journal Plos One, involved horses, zebras, and horses dressed as zebras. The team said the research not only supported previous work suggesting stripes might act as an insect deterrent, but helped unpick why, revealing the patterns only produced an effect when the flies got close. Continue reading...

Molecular geneticist who was a leading contributor to the Human Genome ProjectIn 2003 the Human Genome Project (HGP) published the complete sequence of human DNA. Sue Povey, who has died aged 76, contributed greatly to this international collaborative project with her team at University College London, her work as a molecular geneticist having started much earlier, in the late 1960s. She was motivated throughout by a strong interest in people and disease.At the outset she exploited newly developed enzyme detection systems that revealed differences between individuals and among species, allowing her to solve a number of longstanding puzzles. One was mapping the chromosomal location of human genes, initially by family studies, which use inheritance patterns across the generations, like Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work, to identify closely linked genes. Later mapping used human-mouse hybrid cell culture. In this approach, genes are assigned to specific human chromosomes by observing their coordinated presence or absence. Continue reading...

After endless guides to self-help, a new wave of books spearheaded by The Little Book of Bad Moods is switching the focus to more realistic hopesAlthough Finnish doesn’t have a direct equivalent of English’s “mustn’t grumble”, Lotta Sonninen admits, it has a few equivalents. “Vali vali” comes from “valittaminen”, meaning complaining: but there is also “marina”, “kitinä” and “jupina” (to complain under your breath or through gritted teeth); “urputtaminen” (to complain to someone about something they did); “nillittäminen” (to complain at length); and “avautuminen” (to complain at length with unnecessary frankness). Sonninen is familiar with them all; she has spent years working in the Finnish publishing industry, poring over positivity handbooks designed to get her countrymen through the long dark winters.“The type of books that crossed my path ask you to find the joy in the little things of life and turn up the silver lining or the bright side,” Sonninen says. “Although one at a time they’re really cute, when there were several of them it started looking a bit comical. So I ended up imagining an antidote.” Continue reading...

‘Centres of decision making’ will be targeted if west deploys new missiles in EuropeVladimir Putin has said that Russia will develop new weapons and aim them at western “centres of decision-making” if the west deploys new short and medium-range missiles in Europe.The threat, which appears to describe Washington and other western capitals, came after the United States and then Russia suspended compliance with the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. Continue reading...

Attempt to become fourth country to send spacecraft to the surface blasts off this weekA team of Israeli scientists is to launch what will be the first privately funded mission to land on the moon this week, sending a spacecraft to collect data from the lunar surface.Named Beresheet, the Hebrew word for Genesis, the 585kg (1,290lb) robotic lander will blast off from Florida at 01.45 GMT on Friday, propelled by one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. Once it touches down, in several weeks, it will measure the magnetic field of the moon to help understand how it formed. Continue reading...

If we want to make progress with FGM, we need to first tackle our outdated, misogynistic views on sexThe first UK conviction for female genital mutilation (FGM) this month was a milestone in the fight for the basic human rights of women and girls. But one of the things that stands out from the news reports of that case is how oddly furtive they were about communicating the key facts – in particular their avoidance of the C-word: clitoris.In reporting such a prominent case, are readers unable to be shown the correct medical terminology? Why do the media carefully avoid mentioning what occurred, using highly generalised anatomical terms before quickly moving on? If this lack of detail was to spare the victim the indignity of having such a personal matter discussed so publicly, I would have sympathy, however I do not think that this is the case here. What I think is at play, is a deep-rooted fear of the clitoris. Continue reading...

Millions of cases could be prevented with high HPV vaccine and screening coverageCervical cancer could be effectively eliminated in most countries around the world by the end of the 21st century, according to research.The HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccine, which protects against the virus that causes most cases, has dramatically reduced incidences of cervical cancer wherever uptake has been high. There are hopes that the jab given to young girls, together with occasional HPV screening, could end the scourge of a disease that kills more than 300,000 women globally every year. Continue reading...

Hailing ‘next step’, president accepts plans to create organization on a lesser scale than he had hopedDonald Trump on Tuesday directed the Pentagon to develop plans to create a new space force within the air force, accepting less than the full-fledged department he’d wanted.Before signing a document instructing the defense secretary to draft proposed legislation, Trump said space was the “future” and the “next step”. Continue reading...

The February Snow Moon is the biggest and brightest super-moon of the year, lighting up the night skies across the planet giving stargazers a celestial treat. It appears brighter and bigger than other full moons because it is close to its perigee, the closest point in its orbit to Earth Continue reading...

FDA warning is blow to anti-age treatment fad that claims it could improve strength and memory and even combat Alzheimer’sThe US government has warned that older people should not be paying to have their veins filled with the blood of young people, in a blow for what was becoming a fad anti-aging treatment.In a statement on Tuesday the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said infusions of plasma from young donors into older clients “should not be assumed to be safe or effective”, and said it was “concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors” charging thousands of dollars for transfusions. Continue reading...

Frontal bone initially believed to be pottery shard to be shown at Museum of LondonThe oldest skull ever found on the banks of the River Thames – dating from about 5,600 years ago – will go on display at the Museum of London.Related: Mega lift? Stonehenge pillars were carried 230km over land – research Continue reading...

Criminals now make more money from these counterfeits than they do from illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaineSome crimes are just worse than others. When I tell people I research the market for fake and substandard medicines, their most common reaction is: “Fake cancer medicines? That’s horrible. Why would anyone do that?”Related: Revealed: UK patients stockpile drugs in fear of no-deal Brexit Continue reading...

US professor raised early alarms about climate change and popularised term ‘global warming’A pioneering scientist who raised early alarms about climate change and popularised the term “global warming” has died aged 87.Wallace Smith Broecker, a Columbia University professor and researcher died on Monday at a hospital in New York City, according to a spokesman for the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He had reportedly been ill in recent months. Continue reading...

Archaeologists say up to 80 two-ton blocks may have been dragged from Preseli hillsThey are among the most famous and most enigmatic mysteries in all of archaeology: how did neolithic builders, using only stone, wooden and bone tools, carve Stonehenge’s bluestone pillars from the hilltops of western Wales – and how on earth did they transport them more than 230km (143 miles) to Salisbury plain?Now, an excavation has found intriguing new evidence of the method by which the huge stones were chiselled out of the rock face at two craggy outcrops of the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire. Continue reading...

Sir Ranulph Fiennes keeps his fingertips in a jar and Aron Ralston cut off his arm to escape death. Is this the ultimate in heroism?

Doctors could use Crispr tool to inject benign virus into foetus’s brain to ‘switch on’ key genesScientists are developing a radical form of gene therapy that could cure a devastating medical disorder by mending mutations in the brains of foetuses in the womb.The treatment, which has never been attempted before, would involve doctors injecting the feotus’s brain with a harmless virus that infects the neurons and delivers a suite of molecules that correct the genetic faults. Continue reading...

As Airbus’s cancelled superjumbo shows, technological progress is not compulsory – we can choose to call a halt

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific conceptsIf the galaxies have been accelerating outwards since the big bang, does this mean any aliens out there are getting further and further away from us, so that it becomes ever less likely that we will meet them?James Simpson, Manchester Continue reading...

Analysis of community where 73% of residents contracted Zika in 2015 offers new clues about epidemicScientists studying the 2015 Zika outbreak in Brazil have discovered that people previously exposed to dengue may have been protected from the virus.Three-quarters of the inhabitants of a favela in the country’s north-east caught the mosquito-borne Zika virus during the epidemic. The outbreak left more than 3,000 babies across Brazil with microcephaly, a birth defect caused by mothers catching the virus during pregnancy. Continue reading...