Israeli ambassador Mark Regev, Sebastian Monblat, Hilary and Steven Rose, Naomi Wayne, Karl Sabbagh and Laurel Farrington respond to a Guardian editorial and an article by Simon Baron-CohenThe certainty with which your editorial (If one can kill with impunity then can one lie without consequence?, 23 January) labels the Gaza border violence “protests” is alarming, considering that they are orchestrated by a terror regime with the openly stated goal to “take down the border” with Israel and “tear out their [the Israelis] hearts”. This, while the same radical Islamist regime violently suppresses genuine protest against itself.In expressing concern for Gaza’s youth, you say nothing of the systematic brainwashing of young people to hate and murder, the proactive bussing of them to the border, and the financial incentives for them to storm the fence, though the regime knows full well that Israel must protect its frontier. Given the Guardian’s robust condemnation of terrorists and regimes using children “as combatants and in other roles” (Editorial, 16 January 2017), this omission is striking. Continue reading...

Scientists say rock must have been blasted to moon, buried then uncovered by asteroid impactsWhat may be one of the oldest known rocks from Earth has been found in the material that Apollo 14 astronauts brought home from the moon nearly 50 years ago.It is thought that the rock, made up of quartz, feldspar and zircon, crystallised deep beneath Earth’s surface about 4bn years ago and was catapulted towards the moon in a collision with an asteroid or comet soon afterwards. Continue reading...

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist, has told world leaders: 'I don't want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act.' In an impassioned warning to act now on climate change, Thunberg told her audience at Davos: 'Either we choose to go on as a civilisation or we don’t'

Technique could help speed up fluency training and make the effects more permanentPeople who stutter are being given electrical brain stimulation in a clinical trial aimed at improving fluency without the need for gruelling speech training.If shown to be effective, the technique – which involves passing an almost imperceptible current through the brain – could be routinely offered by speech therapists. Continue reading...

Remains of the first explorer to circumnavigate Australia rediscovered after 200 years by HS2 dig

The UK has a problem and it isn’t going to go away anytime soon. But what to do about it? This week Geoff Marsh explores plans to bury the UK’s nuclear waste deep undergroundThe UK was a pioneer of nuclear energy production but the waste that this innovation left behind is now spread across sites all over the country. Along with other nuclear nations, the UK has come to the conclusion that the safest way to deal with this nuclear waste is to bury it deep underground in what is called a geological disposal facility (GDF).This GDF would be filled with the current inventory plus any waste produced by future energy production, and then sealed shut for millennia. But will a community step forward and engage with the government and its proposal? Continue reading...

New Shepard reaches altitude of 67 miles before returning to make soft landing on Earth

Study suggests ‘genetic advantage’ keeps some people slim and healthy

Gentle rocking helps people to nod off and improves memory, say scientistsIf you have trouble getting to sleep, it might be worth investing in a hammock: scientists say a gentle rocking motion not only helps people to fall asleep more rapidly but also improves the quality of sleep and the memory of the sleeper.While parents have long employed rocking as a way to calm babies and send them to sleep, some studies have suggested it helps adults too. Now researchers say they have found evidence to back this up and discovered further benefits to boot. Continue reading...

Charity calls for tech firms to address spread of misleading information pushed by anti-vaxxersHalf of all parents with small children have been exposed to misinformation about vaccines on social media, according to a new report that finds the most common reason not to vaccinate is the fear of side-effects.Related: Is the anti-vaccine movement putting lives at risk? Podcast Continue reading...

We’ve seen off smallpox, polio and measles – so why does a truly reliable flu jab still elude us?

Health secretary Matt Hancock to announce plans at World Economic Forum in DavosThe UK government is promising to incentivise pharmaceutical companies to develop “urgently needed” drugs to fight antimicrobial resistant (AMR) superbugs, with the health secretary warning “we are on the cusp of a world where a simple graze could be deadly”.Under the plans, the inappropriate use of antibiotics would also be cut by 15%, reducing resistant infections and potentially saving thousands of lives in the UK. Continue reading...

Most of carbon and nitrogen that makes up our bodies probably came from passing planet, researchers believeThe cosmic collision that made the moon left a host of elements behind on Earth that were crucial for life to emerge, US scientists have claimed.The impact 4.4bn years ago is thought to have occurred when an itinerant planet the size of Mars slammed into the fledgling Earth, scattering a shower of rocks into space. The debris later coalesced into the moon. Continue reading...

Scientists say computational periscopy program works out hidden scene in under a minuteScience may never tell us what lies round the next corner, but researchers have come up with the nearest thing: a computer program that turns a normal digital camera into a periscope.In a demonstration of “computational periscopy” a US team at Boston University showed they could see details of objects hidden from view by analysing shadows they cast on a nearby wall. Continue reading...

Controversial procedure has huge potential to combat diseases such as malariaA controversial procedure that can spread particular genes through an entire wild species has been demonstrated in mammals for the first time.Researchers in the US showed that a “gene drive” could rewrite the genetic makeup of mice so that the rodents carried DNA that had been designed by the scientists. Continue reading...

New research analysis has found that for some patients the risk from the drug of increased bleeding events outweighs its benefits in preventing heart attacks and strokes

It is thought some strains of bacteria may cause cancer or allow it to develop uncheckedBowel cancer patients will be given a groundbreaking form of treatment aimed at altering the makeup of their gut bacteria, in a trial due to launch this year.The phase one trial, backed by a £20m grant from Cancer Research UK, is led by an international team who are investigating whether gut bacteria play a role in triggering cancer and making the disease more resistant to treatment in some patients. Continue reading...

The boy will be treated at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust, the UK’s first dedicated centreA 15-year-old with a rare brain tumour is to undergo pioneering proton beam therapy at the UK’s first dedicated treatment centre.Mason Kettley, from Angmering in West Sussex, will receive the highly targeted therapy, which helps shrink tumours and cuts the risk of side-effects. Continue reading...

Comparison of samples from inmate Spandau #7 and Hess relative finds a matchA longstanding conspiracy theory that the Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess was replaced by a doppelganger in prison has been debunked.For years, there were rumours that the prisoner known as Spandau #7 at the Berlin jail was an impostor substituted in to take the place of the deputy Führer of the Third Reich. Continue reading...

The pace of ice loss has increased four-fold since 2003 as enormous glaciers are depositing ever larger chunks of ice into the Atlantic ocean, where it melts, causing sea levels to riseGreenland’s ice is melting faster than scientists previously thought, with the pace of ice loss increasing fourfold since 2003, new research has found.Enormous glaciers in Greenland are depositing ever larger chunks of ice into the Atlantic Ocean, where it melts. But scientists have found that the largest ice loss in the decade from 2003 actually occurred in the south-west region of the island, which is largely glacier-free. Continue reading...

Rule requiring destruction of eggs criticised as ‘arbitrary and arguably discriminatory’

I’ve spent my career studying empathy. It’s a vital first step in conflicts where both sides have dehumanised each otherEmpathy is all about imagining other minds, appreciating that different people have different perspectives, and responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. After a career studying autism and the nature of empathy, I see empathy as one of our most valuable natural resources. It has particular promise as an approach to conflict resolution, one that has advantages over viewing a problem through a chiefly military, economic or legal lens.We can see this if we look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, where both communities have different views of the same historic period, both claim the same piece of land and both have valid emotional reactions to the conflict that must be acknowledged. I am not an expert in that dispute nor so naive to believe that there is a single, simple solution to it. But I do believe empathy can help. Continue reading...

Police to investigate He Jiankui after last year’s claim to have altered the DNA of twin girlsA second woman became pregnant during the experiment to create the world’s first genetically edited babies, Chinese authorities have confirmed, as the researcher behind the claim faces a police investigation.He Jiankui shocked the scientific community last year after announcing he had successfully altered the genes of twin girls born in November to prevent them contracting HIV. Continue reading...

Discovery of slimy sea creature could help settle row over early evolution of vertebratesThe fossilised remains of a foot-long slimy sea creature dating from 100m years ago suggest that the last common ancestor of all vertebrates looked less like a squishy eel and more typically “fish-like”, researchers claim.They say the fossil, unearthed around eight years ago in Lebanon, is an early hagfish, a peculiar creature that has no jaws, eyes or true vertebrae but that boasts the ability, when threatened, to squirt out a mixture that turns into an expanse of slime. Continue reading...

Human activity has created a new era yet climate change can be stopped, says naturalistSir David Attenborough has warned that “the Garden of Eden is no more”, as he urged political and business leaders from around the world to make a renewed push to tackle climate change before the damage is irreparable.Speaking at the start of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, the 92-year-old naturalist and broadcaster warned that human activity has taken the world into a new era, threatening to undermine civilisation. Continue reading...

The biologist’s task is more than just learning facts they must attempt to understand the messy, complex web of life, writes Andy LloydI disagree with your correspondent (Letters, 19 January) who thinks biology is preoccupied with memorising facts. I have heard this tired assertion many times in staff rooms during a career as a biologist who also taught physics and chemistry. Biology does indeed have elegance, with the theory of evolution and the structure of DNA giving an overarching understanding of the subject. Yet together they have produced a messy, ad hoc, complex and confusingly tangled web of life.Lucky the chemists and physicists. Atoms with consistent structures obeying laws that seem to hold throughout the universe so that the inner workings of stars in distant galaxies are as explicable as the working of our own sun. The unfortunate biologist is stuck with attempting to unravel the twists and turns of processes within living organisms created without a designer or overall plan yet arguably the most complex entities in the universe.

Changes in levels of a protein might reveal onset of disease long before symptoms appearChanges in levels of a protein in the blood could help shed light on damage in the brain more than a decade before symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease develop, researchers have revealed.While there is no drug to stop the progression of Alzheimer’s, or cure it, the researchers said the study findings could be used by doctors to help anticipate when patients might start to show symptoms of the disease. Continue reading...

Survival rates for 13- to 24-year-olds are rising. Yet poorer patients fare less well, and vital post-cancer care is still lackingWhen I was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2013, aged 22, I was shocked to find out how little survival rates had improved among young people with cancer in recent decades. Research had left us “forgotten in the middle” between children and older adults, as one study put it, with improvements in outcomes among teens and twentysomethings lagging behind the dramatic advances seen among the general population.Related: Cancer’s long-term prognosis: as an oncologist I’ve never been so hopeful | Ranjana Srivastava Continue reading...

Archaeologists were studying site until former farm owner came forwardA stone circle thought to be thousands of years old has turned out to be a lot more modern after a former farm owner admitted building it in the 1990s.The “recumbent stone circle” in the parish of Leochel-Cushnie, Aberdeenshire, was reported by the site’s current farm and was considered unusual for its small diameter and relatively small stones. Continue reading...

Study finds stool transplants from some donors are far more effective than othersResearchers looking into the success of faecal transplants believe they have identified why the poo of certain donors produces better results than others – so called “super-donors”.A team at the University of Auckland examined results from previous studies on faecal transplants – when faeces, and the microbes it contains, are taken from a healthy gut and used to “re-set” the gut of the recipient – to understand why poo from certain donors resulted in a better success rate in treating certain conditions. Continue reading...

Stargazers across the globe have braved sub-zero temperatures to catch a glimpse of the lunar phenomenon known as a super blood wolf moon

Thousands endure sub-zero temperatures in US and Europe to see rare event

Successful Chang’e 4 mission reveals nation’s ambitious attempts to thwart its rivalsAs Apollo 11 sailed above the moon, mission control in Houston suggested the astronauts should keep an eye out for a “beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-o”, who, according to legend, had ascended to the moon thousands of years previously, taking along a large rabbit as a companion.“I’ll look out for the bunny girl then,” Buzz Aldrin joked in reply, shortly ahead of his and Neil Armstrong’s historic touchdown at the lunar surface. Continue reading...

We got out alive, and my life has been transformed. This is nothing but a great opportunity to help other peopleIt was 4am. I awoke. I had already decided I wouldn’t walk this morning. After hours spent traipsing around Northland the previous night trying to complete last-minute Christmas shopping with my eldest daughter, I needed rest. But I couldn’t settle.I got up quietly, trying not to disturb my sleeping wife, and went through to the living room. I sat at the dining table and started watching YouTube on my laptop. Normally I would wear my headphones, but this morning I simply turned the volume down low. If I hadn’t made that decision, I might not have heard the noises outside. Continue reading...

Taurus is prominent in the southern sky for northern hemisphere starwatchers, with two open clusters and the red giant AldebaranThe winter skies of January are a great time for northern hemisphere viewers to search out the constellation Taurus, the Bull. The chart shows the view looking south at 20:00 GMT on 21 January 2019. Of all the constellations that humans have named, this is the oldest. It was recognised across the world’s early cultures as a bull. Before that, in prehistoric times, it was possibly depicted on the 17,000-year-old paintings in the Lascaux caves, France. The constellation is not the brightest, but the face of the bull is well marked by a V-shaped collection of stars called the Hyades. The red giant star Aldebaran represents the eye of the bull. It is not a member of the Hyades but sits in front of it. At 65 light years away, it is roughly half way between the Sun and the Hyades. Above the shoulder of the bull is another famous star cluster: the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. It is a tight knot of stars, and is the only obvious star cluster that can be recognised by the naked eye. In mythology, Taurus is often challenging Orion, the hunter. Continue reading...

Last blood moon for two years will combine with a supermoon to create the unusual celestial phenomenonLatest – Super blood wolf moon: lunar eclipse stargazers battle cold and cloudsAn unusual set of circumstances will combine in the early hours of Monday morning resulting in a phenomenon called a super blood wolf moon.A total lunar eclipse will give an apparent reddish colour to the lunar surface – known as a blood moon. At the same time, the moon will be slighty closer to Earth than normal and appear slightly bigger and brighter than usual – a phenomenon called a supermoon. Continue reading...

Haemin Sunim is the Buddhist monk whose hugely successful self-care advice books have made him a celebrityWhen a smart café opened in his neighbourhood in New York, where he used to live, Buddhist monk and bestselling author Haemin Sunim went along to sample the delicious-looking cake. Hearing the prices, however, he balked and ordered just tea instead – but that cake stayed in his mind all afternoon. The next day, he was still thinking about it, and the day after that until, finally, he had to go back and treat himself. The verdict? “It was delicious but not extraordinarily delicious,” he writes in his new book, Love for Imperfect Things. “This must be the kind of feeling people have after winning the Nobel prize or becoming president.”This small, wry slice of everyday life – and let-down – is one of many in Sunim’s latest self-care tome, the follow-up to his first book, the wildly successful Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, published in 2012. Continue reading...

The Belgian biologist fears for the future of the pioneering UK Dementia Research Institute after BrexitBart De Strooper is clear about his decision to accept the post of running Britain’s massive pioneering research project on dementia. “I would have not gone for it had I known what I know now,” the 59-year-old Belgian biologist told the Observer last week.The cause of his dismay is simple: Brexit has blighted the nation and distorted its attitude to international science, said De Strooper. As a result, his UK Dementia Research Institute, set up in 2016 at a cost of £250m with the aim of turning the UK into a world leader in dementia research, now faces serious funding and recruitment problems. Continue reading...

Matthew Bishop was told there was no treatment that could save his vision. But now scientific breakthroughs in gene therapy have given him, and others, hopeIn his office in Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital, Prof Robert MacLaren sits upright, his back as straight as a soldier’s, and tells me about the lowest point in his 20-year career. It was the rejection, many years ago, of his grant application for a project investigating how gene therapy might treat conditions causing blindness. “It was completely panned by the reviewers,” he says. “We were told ‘There’s no way it’s ever going to happen – it’s a complete waste of time funding such a ridiculously stupid project’.”In October last year, MacLaren successfully completed the world’s first gene therapy trial for one such condition, called choroideremia, as part of the largest late-stage trial ever for any genetic disease. It marks an extraordinary breakthrough in the quest of scientists and clinicians to understand why and how our own genes can make us ill, and the apparently miraculous possibility of rewriting our genetic code. But MacLaren is understated about this victory: “It’s really satisfying, when you’re given such a rebuttal, to then prove the reviewers wrong. I’d love to go back to them and say: Look what’s going on now.” Continue reading...

Whether it be a hijack, kidnap or siege situation, negotiation is an art. Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn take noteWestminster is in deadlock. The progress of Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement has stalled in parliament, where a majority of MPs are opposed to it. Jeremy Corbyn has refused to enter talks with the prime minister until she rules out a no-deal Brexit, a demand she describes as “an impossible condition”. So how do our political representatives get themselves out of this impasse?“Negotiation is an art, not a science,” says Dr J Simon Rofe, a reader in diplomatic and international studies at Soas, University of London, who teaches a course called “the art of negotiation”. Continue reading...

Specialists put 21.3-metre skeleton back together in Kelvingrove MuseumExperts have been piecing together Dippy the dinosaur before he goes on public display on the only Scottish stop of his UK tour.The Natural History Museum London’s 21.3-metre replica diplodocus skeleton arrived at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow this month after sailing across the Irish Sea. Continue reading...

Scientists surprised by haul of crustaceans and tardigrades in undisturbed subglacial lakeScientists have found the remains of tiny, ancient animals in an Antarctic lake that has lain undisturbed for thousands of years beneath a kilometre-thick slab of ice.The surprise haul of dead crustaceans and tardigrades, also known as “water bears” or “moss piglets”, was made by US researchers on a rare mission to drill into the Mercer subglacial lake which lies nearly 400 miles from the south pole. Continue reading...

Before we point the finger at others, maybe it’s time to take a closer look at our own behaviourYou’ll recall, I assume, the ancient riddle about the father and son rushed to casualty after a car crash, where the surgeon, taking one look at the boy, declares, “I can’t operate on him, he’s my son!” As a way of making a point about sexism, this doesn’t really work any more: the twist or “solution” to the riddle (how is this possible?) is meant to be that the surgeon is his mother – but as many a smart aleck has noted, why not his other father?Still, there are echoes of that puzzle in a new study from researchers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, involving scenarios in which people were asked to guess the sex of someone described as a surgeon. The upshot: when participants heard about some third party, “Person X”, jumping to the conclusion that a surgeon must be male, they judged them to be a sexist bigot. But when presented with a similar question themselves, they did exactly the same. Continue reading...

In our latest collaboration, Ian Sample teams up with Jordan Erica Webber of Chips with Everything to look at why artwork produced using artificial intelligence is forcing us to look at how we define creativityIn October 2018 the British auction house Christie’s became the first to sell a work of art created by an algorithm.The painting, Portrait of Edmond Belamy, was sold for $432,500, which was much more than anyone had been expecting. This groundbreaking sale created some controversy, not least in the AI art world itself. Continue reading...

Planet and moon have been hit by more asteroids in the past 290m years than at any time in previous billionThe rate at which asteroids are slamming into Earth has nearly tripled since the dinosaurs first roamed, according to a survey of the scars left behind.Researchers worked out the rate of asteroid strikes on the moon and the Earth and found that in the past 290m years the number of collisions had increased dramatically. Continue reading...

Chart appears to date from 1885, and was found under lecture hall during clean-outA crumbling roll of canvas-backed paper discovered underneath a lecture theatre in Scotland may be the world’s oldest surviving periodic table chart, experts have said.The chart was found during a clean-out at the University of St Andrews in 2014 and appears to date from 1885 – 16 years after the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his method of showing the relationships between the elements in 1869. Continue reading...

Study calls for rules to be tightened over disclosure of money received from drug makersMost patient groups involved in the appraisal of drugs or medical devices for use in the NHS have received money from the manufacturers that they have not declared, research has found.Patient groups are asked to give their views when the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) is deciding whether to approve a drug for use in the NHS in England. However, the researchers said Nice did not have stringent enough rules on the disclosure of any and all funds that patient organisations receive from companies. Continue reading...

Trump likely to present Pentagon findings about changing threat as justification for his planned ‘space force’Donald Trump will unveil a plan on Thursday for a major expansion in US missile defence that will rely on a new generation of space-based sensors.The administration’s long-delayed missile defence review, which the president will present at the Pentagon, will call for the expansion of the US network of sensors and interceptors designed to identify and shoot down incoming projectiles from “rogue states” such as Iran and North Korea. Continue reading...

Research shows a 16% rise in emotional problems and 8% rise in conduct disordersParental separation is more likely to harm the mental health of children if they are aged at least seven when the split occurs, but appears to have no effect on the risks of them getting ill if they are younger, research has found.The research, involving 6,245 children and young people in the UK, is the first British study to explore the links between couple separation or divorce and the impact on the mental wellbeing of children. Family break-up was already known to be one of several childhood experiences that can lead to young people developing mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. Continue reading...

Moving more and strong motor skills seem to help cognitive prowess, results showMoving more might help to keep people’s brains sharp as they age – even in the face of dementia, researchers have said.Scientists have found older adults fared better when it came to cognitive tasks if they clocked up higher levels of daily activity on a wrist-based tracker – something the researchers said picked up everything from exercising to mundane tasks like chopping onions. Continue reading...