Once we were pressured to acquire things and do more with our lives. Now, we’re being told to declutter our homes and diaries. What happened to just being ourselves?What brings you joy? It is a question that is hard to avoid these days, as joy seems to be the new buzzword. It is on the cover of two new books, The Joy of No (#Jono) by Debbie Chapman, published at the end of last year, and The Joy of Missing Out, by the philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann, published earlier this month. It is also on Netflix, in the show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, in which the decluttering guru and author tells us to discard any possessions that do not “spark joy”. Truly, a surfeit of joy!But joy is not the only idea linking these three approaches: Chapman, Brinkmann and Kondo all tap into the same zeitgeisty wish to clean up our cluttered lives. For Kondo, it is about household clutter; for Chapman and Brinkmann, it is life clutter. Continue reading...

Australian Academy of Science panel says urgent steps needed to restore flowsA scientific panel investigating the causes of three mass fish deaths at the Menindee lakes has pointed the finger squarely at those managing the Murray-Darling river system, saying the lack of flows was caused by a combination of drought and over-extraction, leading to the environmental disaster.Up to one million native fish, including hundreds of thousands of small bony bream, Murray cod, up to 20 years old, and silver perch were killed in the three events. While there had been other fish kills during droughts, these were on an unprecedented scale, the report found. Continue reading...

Birds’ eggs in High Arctic contain chemical additives used in plasticsScientists have warned about the impact of plastic pollution in the most pristine corners of the world after discovering chemical additives in birds’ eggs in the High Arctic.Eggs laid by northern fulmars on Prince Leopold Island in the Canadian Arctic tested positive for hormone-disrupting phthalates, a family of chemicals that are added to plastics to keep them flexible. It is the first time the additives have been found in Arctic birds’ eggs. Continue reading...

Conspiracy theories shown on video-sharing site persuade people to doubt Earth is roundResearchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year. Continue reading...

Fears of no-deal Brexit prompt 50 firms with UK operations to seek to use EU regulatorsThe threat of a no-deal Brexit has prompted a slew of chemicals companies to move regulatory approvals from the UK to the EU to protect their ability to do business legally.More than 50 British chemicals companies with operations in the UK have applied to use EU regulators for critical authorisations that will become worthless if there is no transition arrangement following 29 March, the planned date of Brexit, according to data provided to the Guardian by the European commission. Continue reading...

Scientists say roast meal can make household air dirtier than in sixth most polluted city

The philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned for heresy in 1600, has become a symbol of free expression and toleranceEvery year on 17 February, a crowd gathers in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori to place wreaths, poems and candles at the foot of the statue that glowers towards the Vatican from beneath its friar’s cowl. The man it memorialises, the Neapolitan philosopher Giordano Bruno, was burned alive by the Inquisition on that spot in 1600, for heresies including several books in which he advocated the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and argued that the universe was infinite and contained multiple other worlds.Related: Cosmos and Giordano Bruno: the problem with scientific heroes | Rebekah Higgitt Continue reading...

It has a sad and misunderstood history, but witchcraft still has a role to playOur fascination with witches has long surpassed witchcraft being a crime punishable by death. They are a cultural obsession, it seems, that is always with us in one guise or another. In recent weeks it’s been Netflix’s reboot of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Sky One’s A Discovery of Witches, as well as an episode of Doctor Who focusing on the Pendle witch trials. The only shift has been packaging witchcraft as a more grown-up take on women attempting to take control of their own destinies.As a teenager, my friends and I were self-subscribed members of Wicca, the “white witch” religion. Growing up in a rainy mill town in Lancashire, with little in the way of diversion, our cultural diet consisted of Heathers, The Craft and other moody 90s films. At sleepovers we did Ouija boards and whispered “light as a feather, stiff as a board” as one of us lay corpse-like on laced hands, her arms crossed over her chest. Later, I’d lie awake as the wind and rain battered down from the moor, thinking of the guns my friend’s father kept hanging in the hallway. Continue reading...

Researchers are working with Nasa to see if clowns help team cohesion on long space missionsWanted: smart, fit and unflappable applicants for humanity’s first mission to Mars. Must have: crazy wig, oversized boots and a big red nose.It is enough to make Neil Armstrong spin in his grave, but researchers have found that the success of a future mission to the red planet may depend on the ship having a class clown. Continue reading...

As a young doctor in rural South Africa (1975-76), my father, Julian Pratt, questioned the underlying cause of the diseases he was treating and identified how the grossly unequal distribution of land for agriculture was having a devastating effect. As a result, he became passionate about land reform and pursued this interest for the next 40 years.Julian, who has died aged 70, researched, proposed and campaigned for a radical approach to the market economy, replacing private ownership of land with a system he described as stewardship. He built on work by Thomas Paine and Henry George, and advocated that everyone should be entitled to an equal share of the wealth of the natural world. In a stewardship economy, “stewards” would pay a fee (a land tax) for the exclusive right to use land. The fee, gathered by government in place of conventional taxes, would be used to provide a universal basic income and fund public services. He outlined his ideas in a book, Stewardship Economy: Private Property Without Private Ownership (2011) and on his website, www.stewardship.ac. He described how the transition to a stewardship economy could be made, and last year contributed to a Liberal Democrat policy paper, Taxing Land, Not Investments (2018). Continue reading...

I’ve seen how OpenAI’s GPT2 system can produce a column in my style. We must heed Elon Musk’s warnings of AI doomElon Musk, recently busying himself with calling people “pedo” on Twitter and potentially violating US securities law with what was perhaps just a joke about weed – both perfectly normal activities – is now involved in a move to terrify us all. The non-profit he backs, OpenAI, has developed an AI system so good it had me quaking in my trainers when it was fed an article of mine and wrote an extension of it that was a perfect act of journalistic ventriloquism.Related: New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators Continue reading...

Across the country today, children left their classes to protest against climate change. This is my message to themThe Youth Strike 4 Climate gives me more hope than I have felt in 30 years of campaigning. Before this week, I believed it was all over. I thought, given the indifference and hostility of those who govern us, and the passivity of most of my generation, that climate breakdown and ecological collapse were inevitable. Now, for the first time in years, I think we can turn them around.Related: Schoolchildren take to streets in UK-wide climate strike - live Continue reading...

What do attempts to establish a human colony on Mars, a $9bn blood-test startup and the Fyre festival have in common? Sheer chutzpahIf you were hoping to escape Brexit Britain with a one-way ticket to Mars, I am afraid you’re out of luck. Mars One Ventures, the company that wanted to start a permanent human settlement on the red planet in the next few years, has gone bankrupt, although its not-for-profit sister company, the Mars One Foundation, continues to operate. No doubt you are as shocked by this as I am.A quick recap of the space saga: Mars One was launched in 2012, when the Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp decided that, instead of dealing with his midlife crisis by getting a motorcycle, he would colonise the fourth planet from the sun. How he planned to do this was questionable, as Mars One didn’t make any space technology. It was a bit like the Brexit ferry firm that didn’t own any ferries, but on an interplanetary scale. Also unclear was how he thought Mars One could start a space colony on a budget of just $6bn; Nasa has estimated that a manned mission to Mars would cost between $80bn and $100bn (£62bn and £78bn). Mind you, Nasa clearly wasn’t doing the sort of galaxy-brain thinking Lansdorp was: the entrepreneur had the brilliant idea of making a reality show out of the colonisation process to fund the endeavour. After all, who wouldn’t want to watch a space-based mashup of Love Island and Lord of the Flies? Continue reading...

Simply telling people they are ignorant has failed. We need to find a better way to communicateAfter reading the news that cases of measles have soared by 50% in the last year, I recalled the first time I heard an anti-vaccination conspiracy theory. It wasn’t from a member of Donald Trump’s administration, or part of a frenetic, grammatically challenged Facebook post – it was from a classmate when I was at school. Her family wasn’t waging a crusade against medical science: they simply gave credence to disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield’s study that wrongly asserted a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Back then, the study had not yet been discredited.One only has to stray into anti-vaxxer internet forums for a few minutes to see that they’re stuffed with conspiracy theorists, opportunists, reactionaries, and – worst of all – hubristic idiots. This is the vanguard of the anti-vaxxer movement. But behind that vanguard are a lot of concerned parents who are being convinced of wild and dangerous ideas because we – and by we, I mean those of us who recognise the incontrovertible fact that vaccines are essential – aren’t talking to them properly. A number of the anti-vaxxer vanguard may have started life as concerned parents, but have gradually sunk into increasingly extreme positions because the only communication they’re getting from the other side is that they’re foolish and irresponsible. Almost every week the internet produces another diatribe against anti-vaxxers, or a listicle of their “horrifyingly stupid” social media posts. Continue reading...

Nicola Davis talks to the theoretical physicist Paul Davies, who has been trying to find the solution to one of humankind’s trickier questions – what is life?Paul joins Nicola in studio to talk about his new book The Demon in the Machine. In it, he looks at whether or not we have all of the tools necessary to come up with answer to what life actually is. He suggests we may need something fundamentally new – a field yet to be discovered – to answer this question.The pair discuss everything from Margaret Thatcher to dead mice. Continue reading...

Study says evidence ‘supports link’ between exposure to glyphosate and increased risk

Toronto researchers believe the drug can also help those with depression, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’sAn experimental drug that bolsters ailing brain cells has raised hopes of a treatment for memory loss, poor decision making and other mental impairments that often strike in old age.The drug could be taken as a daily pill by over-55s if clinical trials, which are expected to start within two years, show that the medicine is safe and effective at preventing memory lapses. Continue reading...

New research shows that gestures used by chimpanzees follow the same rules as human language. Are we really so different?It’s a bit garbled but you can definitely hear it in the mobile phone footage. As the chimpanzees arrange their branches into a makeshift ladder and one of them makes its daring escape from its Belfast zoo enclosure, some words ring out loud and clear: “Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla!” a child onlooker shouts from the crowd. And … POP … with that a tiny explosion goes off inside my head. Something knocks me back about this sentence. It’s a “kids-say-the-funniest things” kind of sentence, and in any other situation I’d offer a warm smile and a chuckle of approval. But not this time. This statement has brought out the pedant in me.Related: Chimps use branch as ladder to escape Belfast zoo enclosure Continue reading...

Winton mayor hopes discovery of rare sauropod tracks can help his struggling townGigantic dinosaur footprints preserved in an outback creek bed have been saved from the floods that have ravaged western Queensland.Hailed by paleontologists as the best-preserved sauropod track in Australia, the small town of Winton hopes the discovery will help secure its future. Continue reading...

I wish that as an oncologist I could see off quackery through good communication. Unfortunately that doesn’t work“Tell me why I should have your chemotherapy when I can be healed naturally!”His face is set, his arms defensively squared. His friend carries a pamphlet that features a suspiciously healthy woman with glamorous hair and a glowing complexion. This is the urgent appointment of the day, for whom other patients were hastily shuffled to make room. Continue reading...

Robot the size of a golf buggy has sent data to Earth for 15 years but fell silent eight months ago and Nasa says mission is completeNasa declared the 15-year mission of the veteran Mars rover Opportunity finally over on Wednesday, crediting the robot as having “transformed our understanding of our planet”.The golf buggy-sized vehicle last made contact with Earth eight months ago, after being caught in a global dust storm. Continue reading...

Reproductive tract’s shape lets only strong swimmers through to egg, research suggestsFor millions of sperm it is the end of the road. Scientists have found evidence that the female reproductive tract is shaped in such a way that stops poor swimmers from reaching their goal.Researchers used small-scale models and computer simulations to show that pinch points that behave like gates along the sperm’s arduous path from cervix to egg allow only the fastest ones through. Continue reading...

Study finds one in 14 cases in under-35s could be avoided if teenagers did not use the drugScientists believe they have identified about 60,000 cases of depression in adults under 35 in the UK, and more than 400,000 in the US, that could be avoided if adolescents did not smoke cannabis.An international team of scientists looked at 11 studies published from the mid-1990s onwards, involving a total of more than 23,000 people, they report in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. They explored the use of cannabis for non-medicinal purposes in under-18s. Participants were then followed into adulthood to see who developed clinical depression, anxiety or suicidal behaviour. No single study looked at all three mental health issues. Continue reading...

For more than 20 years Robin Callard, who has died of motor neurone disease aged 73, was professor of immunobiology at University College London, attached to the Institute of Child Health (ICH), clinical partner of Great Ormond Street hospital.Born and raised in Hamilton, New Zealand, Robin was the eldest child of Eddie Callard, an entrepreneurial Australian photographer, and Vivienne (nee Wilson), who ran a fashion shop. A fourth generation Kiwi, Vivienne was also a descendant of Joseph Priestley, the eighteenth-century radical polymath and scientist widely credited with the discovery of oxygen. Continue reading...

Installation will transform cathedral floor to mark 50 years since Apollo 11 moon landingIt’s hard to imagine anything less like a lunar landscape than the medieval glories of Lichfield Cathedral. But this summer, an artist will transform its magnificent tiled floor into a representation of the moon’s surface to mark half a century since Neil Armstrong took “one small step for [a] man and one giant leap for mankind”.The three-spired cathedral in Staffordshire has commissioned the art installation as part of its annual summer show, which this year is called Space, God, the Universe and Everything. Peter Walker, the cathedral’s artist-in-residence, will also use light and sound installations inspired by space and the planets. Continue reading...

Yes, some people use the term vagina, but getting it right is vital to female sexual agencyWhen you find yourself mansplaining the term “mansplaining” to a worked-up faction of Twitter on a Sunday evening, you can assume you’re not getting the best out of your leisure time. And that’s not even the most foolish thing a man called Paul Bullen did over the weekend.On Saturday, the Guardian published an extract from an upcoming book, Womanhood: The Bare Reality by the photographer and writer Laura Dodsworth. Alongside photographs of external genitalia was first-person testimony from the subjects pictured. Titled “Me and my vulva: 100 women reveal all”, it was an arresting story. Bullen spotted the article on Sunday, and responded with a tweet that he probably (well, hopefully) now regrets: “The correct word is vagina.” Continue reading...

If you’re taking part in this week’s YouthStrike4Climate event in the UK, we’d like to hear from youOn 15 February students around the UK will be striking to protest against the government’s lack of action on the climate crisis. It’s the first YouthStrike4Climate event in the UK, following successful school strikes in Australia, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany.Related: Pupils’ climate change strike threat poses dilemma for heads Continue reading...

Kelly, 54, bids for Democratic nomination in election to determine who fills the last two years of John McCain’s termThe retired astronaut Mark Kelly announced on Tuesday he is running to finish John McCain’s final term in the Senate.Related: 'Inhuman' wall of razor wire on Arizona-Mexico border sparks outcry Continue reading...

New photos give fresh perspective on the cosmic body and raise questions about how it was formedThe faraway space snowman visited by Nasa last month has a surprisingly flat — not round — behind.New photos from the New Horizons spacecraft offer a new perspective on the small cosmic body 4bn miles (6.4bn km) away. The two-lobed object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, is actually flatter on the backside than originally thought, according to scientists. Continue reading...

Scientists say 2.1bn-year-old fossils may show evidence of self-propelled motion

Global warming and industrialised farming are damaging vital ecosystemsOne of the classic science-fiction treatments of the end of civilisation was The Death of Grass, by John Christopher, in which a mysterious sickness struck down all the grasses on which most of the world’s agriculture is based, from rice to wheat. In the end, politics among the survivors of plague, war and famine was reduced to a bitter fratricidal struggle over a defensible potato patch. Like most of the so-called “cosy catastrophe” novels, this could be criticised for optimism. Grim though a future of famine and the war of all against all might seem, the consequences were largely confined to humans.The threatened extinction of insect populations around the world raises the prospect of a much more general catastrophe, which would implicate plants, birds, fish, small mammals, and everything else that depends on insects. That’s just the start. Other species, and we ourselves, depend on the animals and plants that need insects. When they go, we go. This is not just a greater catastrophe. It’s a much more plausible one. The most recent study concluded that insect biomass is decreasing around the world at a rate of 2.5% a year. At that rate, half the insects in the world will be gone in 50 years’ time, and all of them in a century – although no one will be keeping track of centuries then. Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s puzzlesEarlier today I set you the following puzzles.The challenge is to divide each of the following outlines into the number of pieces indicated. In the first two rows, the pieces in each image have the same shape, size and orientation. In the third and fourth rows, the pieces have the same shape and size but one may be flipped over. Click here for a printable version. Continue reading...

Puzzles that will leave you in (identical) piecesUPDATE: Read the solutions hereToday’s puzzles come from Alain Nicolas, a Frenchman who has been called the world’s finest artist of Escher-style tilings. (That’s to say, tilings with no gaps or overlaps in which each tile is in the shape of a living creature, as pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s by the Dutch artist MC Escher).In each puzzle, you will be presented with an outline, such as the one below left. The challenge is to draw a line that divides it into a certain number of pieces of identical size and shape. In this case, the solution, with two pieces, is below right. Continue reading...

Project aims to boost pupils’ confidence and tackle gender imbalance in Stem professions“I used to think boys were just better at maths,” said Linah. “But now, it’s like, we go to the same school, we do the same subjects – so if you can do it, I can do it.”There’s a reason for the renewed confidence in the 15-year-old from Dagenham and it’s sitting next to her in a swanky office in the City of London. Elaine McLoughlin is a business control manager for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. She is also a volunteer tutor on a programme to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds and get more girls studying sciences at top universities. Continue reading...

It’s not easy to find the asterism containing some of the brightest stars in the sky, but this week the moon is acting as a guideBack in the summer, we looked out for the summer triangle. Now it is time to locate the winter hexagon. This week the moon helps as, on the nights of 14-16 February, it travels through the body of this large star pattern. Like its summer counterpart, the winter hexagon is not a recognised constellation but rather it is an asterism – a pattern of bright stars from other constellations. Begin the search on 13 February, when the moon is just outside the circle, near Aldebaran, the red giant star that marks the eye of Taurus. Three nights later, the moon will be approaching Pollux, the bright yellow star in Gemini, on the other side of the circle. To trace the circle’s circumference, start from Aldebaran, and look downwards to Rigel, the brilliant blue star in Orion; then across to Sirius in Canis Major, the brightest star in the sky. Turn diagonally upwards to locate Procyon in Canis Minor, and then almost vertically upwards to Pollux in Gemini. It is a short hop to Castor, also in Gemini; and then over to yellow-tinged Capella in Auriga, which represents the top of the circle. From there, look back down to the starting point of Aldebaran. Continue reading...

Raise a glass, though only one, to the selfless German students and Swedish sailors who have offered up their livers to scienceAs a recent scientific paper points out, “acute alcohol-induced hangover constitutes a significant, yet understudied, global hazard and a large burden to society”. There can be few readers wholly unaware of this, yet the authors go on to point out that acute hangover-associated symptoms give rise to “reduced productivity, impaired professional performance (eg falling asleep at work), workplace absenteeism, and academic underperformance”. Never on Mondays, of course.So it is naturally a proper subject for research, especially as there are folk traditions claiming that the order in which one mixes drinks has a bearing on the subsequent hangover. Perhaps these might yield a cure that could be refined in the laboratory, much as the folk wisdom of indigenous peoples is mined by multinational drug companies for pharmacologically active compounds. So research into hangovers turns out to be a thriving subfield of medical science. A trawl through the literature shows that Swedish sailors, Swiss mice, Dutch students and, of course, uncounted American college students have all offered up their livers to bring back knowledge of this scourge. And how they have suffered! The list of symptoms measured by one of the recognised hangover severity scales includes “fatigue, clumsiness, dizziness, apathy, sweating, shivering, nausea, heart pounding, confusion, stomach pain, concentration problems, and thirst”. This is all very much more scientific than the traditional measures employed by such researchers as Chandler (1943), whose PI found a subject explaining that he has “a hangover like seven Swedes”. Continue reading...

The campaign to legalise LSD in Britain is gathering pace. The force behind the movement is an English countess for whom lobbying – and experimenting – has been a life’s workIf you were to close your eyes and conjure the headquarters of a 50-year campaign to legalise and license psychedelic drugs, you might well see “Brainblood Hall”. A Tudor hunting lodge, surrounded by three concentric moats and formal boxwood topiary, it appears, as you approach along its winding drive on a wintry afternoon, to be ready to whisper all kinds of curious stories. There are plenty from which to choose. The Black Prince used to hunt from a house on this site. Lewis Carroll based the chessboard landscape of Alice Through the Looking-Glass on the watery Oxfordshire moorland that extends in all directions. And Aldous Huxley set his first novel, Crome Yellow, here after visiting for tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1921.Amanda Feilding, who grew up here and returned to live in the manor after the death of her parents, is the natural heir to all of those associations. She is an eye-bright woman of 76, a spirited talker and an attentive listener, with that ingrained aristocratic habit of passing off wild and whirling eccentricity as mundane routine. For the past half century, she has led an indefatigable – and mostly frustrated – campaign to relax the prohibition on research into psychedelic compounds, particularly LSD. What long seemed a hopeless quest, a one-woman battle against the massed artillery of the “war on drugs”, has recently begun to turn in her favour. Feilding has lately been dubbed the “Queen of Consciousness” by the New Scientist. I have arranged to meet her to talk about the ways in which her half century of lobbying seems finally to be paying off. Continue reading...

Salad plants are already being grown in old bomb shelters but floating dairy farms and 16-storey food towers could be nextOnly the Northern line tube trains rumbling through tunnels overhead provide any clue that Growing Underground is not a standard farm.The rows of fennel, purple radish and wasabi shoots could be in almost any polytunnel, but these plants are 100 feet below Clapham High Street and show that urban agriculture is, in some cases at least, not a fad. Continue reading...

Ranting about what’s wrong in the world can be cathartic – and an antidote to pressure to be upbeatLotta Sonninen was working on her third book in quick succession on positivity, when she suddenly realised her own positivity had drained clean away. “All those invitations to perk up, smile, find the happiness in everything were getting on my nerves,” she says. “I thought, hang on a minute. I’m sick and tired of finding the good in everything. What if we started to play with the opposite of all this – our negative emotions, the feelings we all have inside us that we’re not being encouraged to share? I thought, I wonder what’s happening to these emotions – and could we do something with them more useful than burying them?”She started making lists that were the antidote to the mindfulness and positivity books she was translating: so instead of listing what she had to be grateful for, or what was lucky in her life, she turned to all the negative stuff in her life. All the angst and agony; all the silent anger and pent-up frustrations. How about a list of all those acquaintances and celebrities who’d obviously had it far too easy? And next, what about naming all those arrogant folk who thought oh-so-much of themselves? And those people who seemed not to have clocked that you really need to think before you open your mouth? And how about writing down the names of all those infuriating people who were clearly far less talented than her, but somehow way more successful? Continue reading...

The brand that championed coffee colonics and jade vagina eggs is coming to our TV screens. Is there no escaping Gwyneth Paltrow’s woo?Are you wary of experts? Do you enjoy a fact-free lifestyle? Are you itching to splurge on non-toxic skin creams and 24-carat-gold sex toys? Well, I’ve got brilliant news. Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s controversial lifestyle brand, has signed a deal with Netflix. Soon we will all be able to stream Paltrow’s glamorous strain of woo on demand.Keeping with the general theme of Goop, facts about the new Netflix project are hard to come by. All we know so far is that the docuseries’ 30-minute episodes will be hosted by Paltrow and Elise Loehnen, Goop’s chief content officer. Loehnen has also said the series “seeks to dial up the aesthetics and quality of storytelling surrounding issues like mental, physical and sexual health”. Which, again keeping with the general theme of Goop, sounds lovely but means little. Continue reading...

Earth’s north magnetic pole wandering so quickly in recent decades that this week, scientists decided to update the World Magnetic Model, which underlies navigation for ships and planes today. Ian Sample looks at our relationship with the magnetic north.The north magnetic pole is moving, fast. So quickly in fact, that scientists decided to release an update of where magnetic north really is, nearly a year ahead of their usual five-year schedule.This week, Ian Sample talks to Dr Ciaran Beggan of the British Geological Survey about why he and a team of scientists track the north magnetic pole and what its rapidly changing trajectory is telling us. He then welcomes Dr John Blake to talk us through the history of how humans through the ages navigated on the seas. Continue reading...

University to assess how much its staff knew about Chinese scientist’s plans to use Crispr to modify genesStanford University has begun an investigation following claims some of its staff knew long ago of Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s plans to create the world’s first gene-edited babies.A university official said a review was under way of interactions some faculty members had with He, who was educated at Stanford. Several professors including He’s former research adviser have said they knew or strongly suspected He wanted to try gene editing on embryos intended for pregnancy. Continue reading...

Research into old saying about alcohol consumption shows you get a hangover either wayBeer before wine, or wine before beer; whatever the order, you’ll feel queer. That, at least, is the updated aphorism drinkers will have to embrace now scientists have proved that drink order has no effect on the magnitude of one’s hangover.Under carefully-controlled lab conditions, British and German researchers plied 90 volunteers with beer and wine to find out once and for all whether hangovers are worsened by the order in which drinks are necked. Continue reading...

Gender bias concern as analysis shows differences in how sexes respond to drugs overlookedNearly three-quarters of biomedical studies fail to report whether outcomes differ for men and women, according to a study which raises concerns about gender bias.Analysis of more than 11.5m medical research papers published between 1980 and 2016 found a majority overlooked the role of sex differences in genetics, physiology and the way the body responds to drugs. Continue reading...

Dome will protect instrument from temperature fluctuations of up to 94C over Martian dayNasa’s InSight Mars lander has placed a domed shield over its seismometer, completing that instrument’s deployment.The seismometer will look for evidence of ongoing seismic activity on the red planet to provide data about the deep interior of Mars. Continue reading...

Wrasse passes intelligence test in disputed study, challenging ‘vacant’ reputation of fishThey are often said to have a three-second memory, but the brain power of fish has been considerably underestimated, according to scientists who found some fish can recognise themselves in the mirror.Related: Talking animals: we aren’t the only species capable of speech … Continue reading...

Capsule shape based on domed shell ensures insulin needle within aims at stomach wallScientists have developed a “needle pill” that could allow diabetics to take insulin without the need for daily injections.The pea-sized capsule contains a small needle made of solid, compressed insulin, which is injected into the stomach wall after the capsule has been swallowed. Continue reading...

A Belgian minister has resigned after falsely claiming that demonstrators were directed by hidden forces. She should have focused on their messageWhen confronted by child protesters, politicians and other adults often reach for the age-based putdown, rather than engage with the substance of whatever it is they are protesting about. Often, the suggestion is that someone older has put them up to it. Flemish environment minister Joke Schauvliege took the patronising tactic much too far when she said that recent school strikes across Belgium were a “set-up”, and that security services knew who was really “behind this movement”. On Tuesday, after Belgian security services issued a rare denial, Ms Schauvliege resigned. On Thursday, the youth-led demonstrations spread to the Netherlands, as thousands of people marched in The Hague. Similar protests are scheduled to take place across the world in the coming weeks.They show that, in fact, young people are able to influence their elders. When a journalist asked Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg who was pulling the strings behind her school strike last summer, she replied: “Some people claim that my parents have brainwashed me, but it was the opposite: I brainwashed my parents. I convinced them not to fly and to stop eating meat.” Continue reading...

Ignoring all concerns, the health service seems determined to jump on the dubious ‘personalised medicine’ bandwagonGenomics England’s plans to move into paid-for genome sequencing of healthy people has done more than raise eyebrows in the scientific world. Last week a parade of the genomics great and good – who had clearly not been informed of the plans announced last week by Matt Hancock, the health secretary – wrote to the Times saying this would “create two-tier access to services, where people who can pay are able to access services that are denied to those who cannot”.Others have pointed out that the plans will create extra pressure on GPs, who will have to deal with a flood of “worried well” patients coming to them with DNA test results. Continue reading...