Guardian readers respond to Gary Greenberg’s essay on Trumpian psychoanalysisGary Greenberg’s beautifully written but flawed account of the first two years of the Trump presidency highlights the limitations of using psychoanalytic concepts to explain wider political and social developments (Analyse this, The long read, 12 October).Far from Trumpism representing the return of “our archaic heritage”, our deep instinctual need to “consume, to pillage, to destroy, to wall out our neighbours and to hate people living in shitholes”, it is rather, like Brexit, a response to 30 years of neoliberal inequality and increased exploitation, an era during which millions of people both here and in the US have seen their lives get worse and their dreams evaporate. Continue reading...

My father, Nick Foster, who has died aged 61 after suffering a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, was an agricultural engineer devoted to improving conditions for rural people in the developing world.He wanted to empower communities by encouraging participation and education, and established water-user groups that led to the sustainable management of irrigation schemes. Continue reading...

The Geological Society of London has announced the results of its 2018 Earth Science Week photography competition. Entrants were asked to submit images of geological sites in the UK and Ireland that meant something in their lives. These 12 winning images will feature in a calendar and be displayed at the Geological Society during Earth Science Week 2018 (13-21 October). Continue reading...

The biopic of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing has US patriots all fired up, but do Gosling and director Damien Chazelle achieve their objectives?Damien Chazelle’s film about the iron-jawed, ice-water-in-the-veins pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong is a rocket pointed directly at the distant planet known as Awards Season. It ought to do well there, as its thrilling set-pieces, strong performances, dramatic score and sweeping emotions achieve escape velocity from typical biopic trappings.You’d think a movie like First Man wouldn’t have too many surprises; most people know that Apollo 11 landed on the moon and safely returned. (Some, like my late grandmother, think it was a hoax, but there’s not much that can be done about that.) Yet there’s a lot to rummage through in all this lunar dust. Chazelle and company make a lot of unusual choices. One of those choices got a little blown out of proportion into a quasi-controversy when “alt-right” bozos such as renowned troglodyte Dinesh D’Souza, repeated the bad faith argument that First Man didn’t show the US flag. It’s complete poppycock (I saw the movie; I saw the flag) but it is true that there is no typical, shot-from-below moment of a flagpole penetrating the alien soil in Michael Bay-esque slow motion. It’s just there, in the background. Continue reading...

Cannabidiol, or CBD, is now available in the UK in everything from skin creams to beers. But don’t set your hopes too highThis has been the year medical cannabis hit the mainstream. The government has announced that it is relaxing laws on when cannabis medicines can be prescribed by doctors, following high-profile cases such as that of Billy Caldwell, the 13-year-old boy hospitalised by his epileptic seizures after he was denied legal access to the cannabis oil that helps control them. Meanwhile a new generation of cannabis medicines has shown great promise (both anecdotally and in early clinical trials) in treating a range of ills from anxiety, psychosis and epilepsy to pain, inflammation and acne. And you don’t have to get stoned to reap the health benefits.Caldwell’s medicine was illegal because it contained THC, the psychoactive compound that smoking weed socks you with. However, the new treatments under development use a less mind-bending cannabinoid known as CBD (or cannabidiol). Continue reading...

From a 50s sci-fi curio to Hollywood blockbusters, there have been giant leaps in films that reach for the moonFirst Man is in cinemas now, in all its crashing, whooshing, non-flag-waving glory, reminding audiences afresh that the space race has served Hollywood remarkably well over the years. Even at its most scientifically credible, there’s an eternal streak of fantasy to the business of launching human beings far beyond Earth: for most of us, the sheer unimaginability of such a mission lends even the most prosaic space-travel stories a tingle of fascination.Damien Chazelle’s gripping moon-landing drama can stand proudly upright in the astronaut canon, but it also left me hungry to revisit The Right Stuff (1983), which I, like many critics, had long regarded as Hollywood’s crowning achievement on the subject. Continue reading...

Renewed US interest could produce some fascinating hearings, but the focus should be on the quality not just the quantity of reported sightingsThere’s renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon and it’s coming from an unexpected source: the United States Congress.The Senate Armed Services Committee is looking into a 2004 incident where US Navy pilots flying with the USS Nimitz strike group encountered, chased and filmed fast-moving unidentified objects. Reliable sources say at least two of the military pilots involved have already been interviewed, and a radar operator was subsequently invited to get in touch. Continue reading...

The moon takes centre stage in this week’s planetary line-up – but Pluto is there too, invisible to the naked eyeThis week the waxing Moon glides between Saturn and Mars in the low southern sky. Mars is the brighter and redder of the two planets. The chart shows the sky at 20:00 BST on 16 October 2018 when the Moon is roughly halfway between the two visible planets. The Moon will be at first quarter phase, when half the illuminated surface will be visible from Earth. While Mars and Saturn are the planetary stars of this show, on the 16th the Moon is actually aligned most closely with the dwarf planet Pluto, which sits in the sky just to the right of the Moon, in the direction of Saturn. But the far-off world is invisible to the naked eye, being thousands of times too faint to trigger our retina. Pluto itself is just two-thirds the diameter of the Moon, meaning that its surface area is just larger than that of Russia. The planet Saturn is 9.5 times wider than Earth, but 21 times wider when measured from one side of its expansive ring system to another. Mars, on the other hand, is just over half the diameter of Earth. Continue reading...

‘We-talk’ – constantly referring to yourself and your partner in the plural – is annoying. But it is also a sign that your relationship is solid. What else has science got to teach us about staying together?It’s always we, we, we … have you noticed? We all know people who seem to have lost the capacity to talk about themselves as autonomous individuals the moment they couple up. “We’re doing well, thanks”; “We love spaghetti”; “We are thinking about buying an emotional support squirrel.”Irritatingly, it turns out that these people are not just semantically smug – they’re joyful. A study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside found that “we-talk”, as they term it, is associated with happier and healthier relationships. To quote the undecipherable academese seemingly beloved by social scientists trying to justify the fact they have spent months studying we-ing, they found “meta-analytic evidence that we-talk predicts relationship and personal functioning in romantic couples”. The study also found that hearing your partner use “we” frequently is more strongly linked to happiness than using we-talk yourself. Continue reading...

Physicist said genetic editing may create species that could destroy rest of humanityThe late physicist and author Prof Stephen Hawking has caused controversy by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their and their children’s DNA.Hawking, the author of A Brief History of Time, who died in March, made the predictions in a collection of articles and essays. Continue reading...

Scientists may soon be able to create human sperm and eggs using ordinary cells – a boon for those with fertility problems that raises troubling ethical questionsForty years ago, couples suffering from infertility were given hope by the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby”. But although millions of babies have now been born by IVF, the technique can offer no help to couples eager to have a child that is genetically theirs but who lack the eggs or sperm to make it: men whose testes produce no sperm, say, or women who have undergone surgery for ovarian cancer. Some opt for donor eggs or sperm, but an alternative may be on the way. Scientists are making steady progress towards creating human eggs and sperm – the so-called gametes that combine in fertilisation – artificially in a petri dish.The idea is to make them from the ordinary “somatic” cells of the body, such as skin. The feasibility of such an extraordinary transformation of our flesh has only been recognised for 11 years. But already it is revolutionising medicine and assisted reproductive technologies may eventually feel the benefits too. If gametes grown in vitro prove safe for reproduction, the possibilities are dramatic – but could also be disconcerting, and might go well beyond providing eggs and sperm for those who lack them. Instead of having to undergo a painful egg-production and extraction procedure involving doses of hormones with uncertain long-term effects, a woman could have an almost limitless supply of eggs made from a scrap of skin. Huge numbers of embryos could be created easily and painlessly. What might we do with such a choice? Continue reading...

The drive for genetic selection means cattle are increasingly vulnerable to deadly new epidemics that could emerge as the climate warmsKnown for their distinctive long horns, the Ankole cattle of western Uganda have evolved over millennia to withstand their harsh environment, with its lengthy dry spells and abundance of local maladies such as trypanosomiasis, a disease spread by the tsetse fly. But after flourishing for almost 10,000 years, the Ankole have begun to rapidly disappear.Farmland is dwindling in Uganda due to the expanding human population, and Ankole require vast areas to graze. Local herders have responded to the pressure by replacing them, cross-breeding Ankole cattle with industrial species such as the European Holstein. But while these hybrids gain favourable genetic traits from the Holstein, producing more milk and meat, and requiring less land to keep, there is a hidden cost. Continue reading...

We check our phones every 12 minutes, often just after waking up. Always-on behaviour is harmful to long-term mental health, and we need to learn to the hit the pause buttonIt is difficult to imagine life before our personal and professional worlds were so dominated and “switched on” via smartphones and the other devices that make us accessible and, crucially, so easily distractible and interruptible every second of the day. This constant fragmentation of our time and concentration has become the new normal, to which we have adapted with ease, but there is a downside: more and more experts are telling us that these interruptions and distractions have eroded our ability to concentrate.We have known for a long time that repeated interruptions affect concentration. In 2005, research carried out by Dr Glenn Wilson at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that persistent interruptions and distractions at work had a profound effect. Those distracted by emails and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ, twice that found in studies on the impact of smoking marijuana. More than half of the 1,100 participants said they always responded to an email immediately or as soon as possible, while 21% admitted they would interrupt a meeting to do so. Constant interruptions can have the same effect as the loss of a night’s sleep. Continue reading...

Damien Chazelle’s drama about Neil Armstrong and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing is a moving tale of loss and perilIn William Peter Blatty’s underrated 1980 mystery-thriller The Ninth Configuration, a grounded lunar astronaut played by Scott Wilson (who sadly died last week) delivers a heartbreaking soliloquy that perfectly encapsulates the existential crisis at the centre of much space-travel cinema. “See the stars, so cold, so far and so very lonely,” he says, plaintively. “What if I got there, got to the moon and couldn’t get back… I’m afraid to die alone, so far from home. And if there’s no God, then that’s really, really alone.”That sense of cosmic isolation reverberates throughout a range of space movies, from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (dubbed “the loneliest adventure of all”) and, more recently, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. Now it resurfaces in powerful form in First Man, Damien Chazelle’s sombre, real-life account of the 1969 moon landing, which turns a spectacular space-race adventure into a low-key study of grief. Continue reading...

Anyone can be taught anything if they are inspired enough to pay attention – the key to remembering it is firing up the imaginationI first encountered memory techniques just after leaving secondary school. I’d been struck down by an illness, and had to spend a few months in hospital. Needing a project to escape the boredom of the ward, I was unable to resist diving into memory techniques when a friend brought me a book called Learn to Remember by Dominic O’Brien (the “eight-time world memory champion”, I was reassured to learn).I still recall the delight at realising how simple and intuitive the ideas within it were. Enhancing your memory is first of all enhancing your imagination, O’Brien explained. You remember better by making things more memorable. Your memory – your capacity to learn, in other words – is, according to O’Brien, personal, improvable and much more interesting and colourful than education or traditional concepts of memory (such as it being akin to a warehouse or computer) might lead you to believe. Continue reading...

A new documentary recalls the extraordinary but largely forgotten Lucas Plan, which saw British workers attempt to make wind turbines instead of weaponsIt was 1974. A new Labour government had come to power on the promise of defence cuts. Swingeing job losses were soon to follow. Desperate workers at one Birmingham factory – Lucas Aerospace – fought to save their livelihoods, not by downing tools but by transforming from weapons-makers into one of Britain’s first eco-manufacturers, with early designs for wind turbines and hybrid cars.The extraordinary story of what became known as the “Lucas Plan” is now being told in a documentary, The Plan that Came from the Bottom Up, that screens for the first time this week at the BFI London film festival. Continue reading...

When a heterosexual couple marries, who’s likely to get bored of sex first? The answer might surprise you…What do you know about female sexuality? Whatever it is, chances are, says Wednesday Martin, it’s all wrong. “Most of what we’ve been taught by science about female sexuality is untrue,” she says. “Starting with two basic assertions: that men have a stronger libido than women, and that men struggle with monogamy more than women do.”Martin pulls no punches. Her bestselling memoir Primates of Park Avenue cast her as an anthropologist observing the habits of her Upper East Side neighbours. She claimed among other shockers that privileged stay-at-home mothers were sometimes given a financial “wife bonus” based on their domestic and social performance. The book caused a furore, and is currently being developed as a TV series, with Martin as exec producer. Her new book, out this week, should be equally provocative. Entitled Untrue, it questions much that we thought we knew about women’s sexuality. Continue reading...

Lifestyle habits matter when it comes to brain health, and the rewards of increased mental stimulation can be seen in a very short space of timeSharon, a 46-year-old single mother of three teenagers, came to see me about her increasing forgetfulness. Working full-time and managing her household was becoming overwhelming for her, and she was misplacing lunchboxes, missing appointments and having trouble focusing her attention. She was worried because her grandmother got Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 79, and Sharon felt she might be getting it too – just a lot younger. I said it was highly unlikely that Sharon was suffering from early-onset dementia, but I agreed to evaluate her.Whenever I consult with people about their middle-aged pauses, I first check for physical conditions or medication side-effects that might be affecting their brain health. Left untreated, high cholesterol, hypertension and other age-related illnesses can worsen memory, increase the risk of dementia, and shorten life expectancy. I also review their daily lifestyle habits to see if there are any areas they can improve to boost their brain health. Continue reading...

Taking time over a book cuts stress, improves comprehension and promotes empathyTen years ago, I typed the phrase “slow reading” into a web search engine. I found reports about dyslexia and eye disorders. In these cases, slow reading is understandably a problem and interventions can be helpful. Often, though, slowness in the pace of reading and thinking is desirable. Try the same web search today and it will yield more positive results. You will learn how slow reading cuts stress, improves comprehension, and increases empathy.The last decade was a time of transformation for readers. Beyond the explosive growth of the web, Amazon introduced its first Kindle ebook reader. Ebook sales soared, outpacing print sales. Book stores closed or supplemented their book sales with gifts and electronics. Intellectuals debated the merits of e-reading and the adverse impact on our brains and social lives. Continue reading...

The human brain is made of food, so what we eat and drink affects our ability to keep a healthy, alert and active mindWe all intuitively appreciate that the foods we eat shape our thoughts, actions, emotions and behaviour. When you are feeling low, you reach for chocolate; when you are tired, you crave coffee. We all use food to soothe our moods and clear our heads without seeming to think much about it.Yet the focus of most diets is on the way we look rather than the way we think. This is in part due to western society’s fascination with appearance, and medicine’s bias towards drugs and surgery. In fact, contemporary medicine often disregards the ways that our diet helps shape our cognitive health. Medical students are not trained in nutrition. And, for what it is worth, neither are scientists. Continue reading...

Even the smartest people sometimes struggle to stay in the zone. What tricks do they use to get back on track?Most of the essentials of my job come down to concentration and focus. It is not a matter of memory, but of how best to use and deploy what one has remembered. That is true if, for example, you are marking a student’s essay. It is not a question of seeing what they get wrong or right (my subject isn’t really about that, others may be). It is about seeing what the student was trying to argue, and how they could make it better and more convincing. That sounds simple, but it requires a hell of a lot of thought. The same is true of lecturing, or writing the chapter of a book. It is all about how you can use what you know to make the most powerful case, to engage people’s interest, or to show why what you want to say is important. Continue reading...

Ellen Stofan made history this summer when she became the first female director of the third-most-visited museum in the worldOn the red carpet beneath an Apollo lunar module and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, actors Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy mingled with astronauts, Nasa engineers and members of the US Congress. Washington was staging the national premiere of a Neil Armstrong biopic. But before it saw First Man, it heard from the first woman.Related: First Man review: Ryan Gosling shoots for the moon in Neil Armstrong biopic Continue reading...

After Russian-American crew made emergency landing, chief of US space agency predicts return to flight by DecemberNasa’s chief has praised the Russian space programme and said that he expected a new crew to go to the International Space Station in December, despite a rocket failure.Jim Bridenstine spoke to reporters at the US embassy in Moscow a day after a Soyuz rocket failure forced Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague to make an emergency landing shortly after takeoff in Kazakhstan. The pair escaped unharmed. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Public Health England has not acted on early findings of report warning of potential carcinogensToxins that may have long-term health implications for the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, and thousands of people who live and work nearby, have been identified in the preliminary findings of a study led by one of the world’s leading toxicology experts, the Guardian can reveal.Early results of the study by Prof Anna Stec prompted her to privately urge Public Health England (PHE), the Department of Health, the police and Kensington and Chelsea council to organise a range of tests to ensure any potential health risks can be properly assessed. Continue reading...

With market predicted to be worth $50bn by 2025, is women’s health no longer being overlooked by tech?Digital contraceptive techniques have been on the receiving end of bad press recently after Swedish company Natural Cycles was described as “misleading” by the UK’s advertising body, and a number of women complained about becoming pregnant while relying on the app.But that hasn’t stopped the industry from thriving, with the launch of Moody Month, which tracks hormones and menstrual cycles , and Flo Health, an ovulation calculator, being valued at $200m in the same week, suggesting there is still massive demand among women for products which are invariably described as femtech. Continue reading...

The former president of Ireland has a new raison d’être: saving the planet. Yet, despite the dire warnings of this week’s IPCC report, she is surprisingly upbeatOn the morning that the world’s leading climate scientists warn that the planet has until 2030 to avert a global warming catastrophe, Mary Robinson appears suitably sombre. She wears black shoes, black trousers and a black sweater and perches at the end of a long table at her climate justice foundation, headquartered in an austere, imposing Georgian building opposite Trinity College Dublin. The only dash of brightness is a multicoloured brooch on her lapel. “It symbolises the sustainable development goals,” she says. “It’s the one good emblem that the United Nations has produced, so I like to wear it.”There seems little reason for cheer on this Monday. The landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just warned that urgent, unprecedented changes are needed to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C; even half a degree beyond this will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. Donald Trump, rejecter of the Paris climate agreement, is riding high on the back of Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the US supreme court. Britain and the EU are consumed by Brexit. Brazil is on course to elect a president who wants to open the Amazon to agribusiness. Closer to home, the Irish government is flunking its climate policy goals. Now, climate scientists warn that the clock ticks ever closer to midnight. Continue reading...

Four people with paraplegia were recently implanted with electrodes in their lower backs. They all regained movement below their injuries, and two walked again. This week Nicola Davis investigates this technique – epidural stimulation – and other approaches for treating spinal cord injuriesJeff Marquis was spending his day off work on his bike on a mountain trail in Montana. After he landed a jump badly, he realised he could no longer move his legs. He was eventually diagnosed with a spinal cord injury, and doctors told him that he would never walk again.Fast-forward to 2018, and Marquis is now taking steps for himself again thanks to a groundbreaking trial that implanted an array of electrodes in his lower back. Marquis and three other participants underwent rigorous physiotherapy to relearn how to command their legs to walk. So does this technique, known as epidural stimulation, spell the beginning of the end for paralysis? And what are the other avenues of research that scientists believe might get people back on their feet? Continue reading...

As a psychotherapist, here’s what I’ve learned in the two years since Donald Trump moved into the White House.

In some countries more than half of births now involve the procedure, experts sayThe use of caesarean sections to deliver babies has reached epidemic proportions, say experts, with the procedure growing in use at an “alarming” rate.While caesarean sections can be a crucial intervention for the safety of the mother and child, for example if the baby is showing distress or if the mother is bleeding before birth, experts say the procedure would account for about 10-15% of births if only used when medically necessary. Continue reading...

Problem with Soyuz’s thrusters must be identified before space flights can resume, say expertsThe Russian Soyuz rocket that launches astronauts to the International Space Station will be grounded for months after two crew members were forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan.American Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin from Russia were aboard the Soyuz rocket when it developed a thruster problem nearly two minutes after takeoff and were forced to make an emergency landing in their capsule. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced an immediate investigation into the incident. Continue reading...

Findings show barriers to same-sex reproduction in humans can technically be overcome – but not yetHealthy mice with two mothers have been born for the first time in a study that pushes the boundaries of reproductive science.Mice with two fathers were also born, but only survived a couple of days, the Chinese team behind the work reported. There is no imminent prospect of the techniques being used clinically in people, but the findings demonstrate that the biological barriers to same-sex reproduction can, technically, be overcome. Continue reading...

A Russian-American space crew have been forced to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan after their Soyuz rocket suffered a failure shortly after launching from Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in one of the most serious space incidents in recent years

US and Russian crew of Soyuz spacecraft reported safe after emergency landing

Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair was completed in the days before the physicist’s death in March• Black holes and soft hair: why Stephen Hawking’s final work is importantStephen Hawking’s final scientific paper has been released by physicists who worked with the late cosmologist on his career-long effort to understand what happens to information when objects fall into black holes.The work, which tackles what theoretical physicists call “the information paradox”, was completed in the days before Hawking’s death in March. It has now been written up by his colleagues at Cambridge and Harvard universities and posted online. Continue reading...

Malcolm Perry, who worked with Hawking on his final paper, explains how it improves our understanding of one of universe’s enduring mysteries

Humans can memorise thousands of faces, say scientists. But that only makes the social awkwardness of not being able to place an acquaintance even worse. Here’s how to brazen it outScientists from the University of York have claimed that humans can recognise and memorise 5,000 faces – making those occasions where you can’t quite place or name someone even more excruciating. Here is the modern etiquette for navigating this social nightmare: Continue reading...

Studies by the Climate Impact Lab have found that higher temperatures increase suicide ratesOne of the biggest hubs of real-time climate research is a lab hundreds of miles from the rising seas and melting ice caps. There are no test tubes or beakers. Instead young scientists and economists hunch over computers analyzing the newest data.A group of them are currently reviewing a study that considers whether crime levels are connected to monsoon seasons. The findings are a tiny part of a big question: how much is climate change costing society, and who’s paying? Continue reading...

The government’s plans are an improvement, but still fatally flawed. We need a proper agriculture debateI’m a remainer, but there’s one result of Brexit I can’t wait to see: leaving the EU’s common agricultural policy. This is the farm subsidy system that spends €50bn (£44bn) a year on achieving none of its objectives. It is among the most powerful drivers of environmental destruction in the northern hemisphere. Because payments are made only for land that’s in “agricultural condition”, the system creates a perverse incentive to clear wildlife habitats, even in places unsuitable for farming, to produce the empty ground that qualifies for public money. These payments have led to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of hectares of magnificent wild places across Europe.It is also arguably the most regressive transfer of public money in the modern world. Farmers are paid by the hectare for owning or using land; so the more you have, the more you get. While in the UK benefits for poor people are capped at £20,000 (outside London), these benefits for the rich are uncapped. Some landowners receive £1m or more. You don’t even have to live in the EU to take this money: you just have to own land here. Among the benefit tourists sucking up public funds in the age of austerity are Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes and Texas oil barons. Continue reading...

University of York says first evidence-based study nails down facial-recognition abilityThe next time an old friend meets your greeting with a quizzical who-are-you stare, you’re right to take offence: new research suggests the average person can recognise 5,000 different faces.Psychologists at the University of York embarked on the study after realising that for all the work scientists have done on faces, they had never nailed down, even roughly, the number of faces the average human knows. They say it is the first evidence-based estimate of this figure. Continue reading...

Research in Taiwan has show a link between very high levels of air pollution and oral cancerHigh levels of air pollution are linked to an increased risk of mouth cancer, new research has revealed.Scientists have previously linked high air pollution to a host of health problems, from an increased risk of dementia to asthma and even changes in the structure of the heart, with recent research suggesting there is no “safe level” of air pollution. Continue reading...

On Ada Lovelace Day, let’s rethink how we ensure scientists from diverse backgrounds can contribute to our understanding of the worldIn recognition of the fact that their obituary pages had been dominated by white men, in 2018 the New York Times published an obituary of the Countess Ada Lovelace. Alongside Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson, Lovelace has become an icon for women in technology. So much so that the second Tuesday in October is recognised internationally as Ada Lovelace Day. But what would a modern-day Lovelace make of the situation for women working in science today?Lovelace was from a wealthy background; her father was the poet Lord Byron and her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, the “princess of parallelograms”, was a keen mathematician and social reformer. Social scientists of today would describe Lovelace as having high “science capital” – her well-connected parents meant her mentors and advisers were members of the British scientific elite, including the polymaths Mary Somerville and Charles Babbage. Her extraordinary insight was the product of an interdisciplinary and inspiring education from world-renowned experts, and she would have been appalled at how modern Britain has rejected expert advice. Her childhood allowed her to recognise the poetry in mathematics and the beauty of computation. The poetical scientific learning of Lovelace gave her immense clarity and forward thought. She might have been surprised to find out that 170 years later, the government has cut funding to arts education to such an extent that it is the preserve of the elite. I’m pretty sure that she wouldn’t be happy that we force young people to specialise in one subject at the age of 18. Continue reading...

Richard Branson commits to SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity flight beyond Earth’s atmosphereVirgin Galactic will take its first trip into space within weeks according to Richard Branson, the firm’s billionaire chief and founder.The feat would mark a milestone for the company which is in a race against Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX to offer space flights to wealthy would-be astronauts. Continue reading...

Dutch scientists say they can create swarms of bee-like drones to take over if the insects die outIntensive modern farming methods and the unravelling consequences of global climate change are said to have put the future of the common bee under threat like never before.But in Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands a group of scientists working on long-term solutions to some of the world’s thorniest problems have developed a solution that could have come straight from a sci-fi novel: robotic bees. Continue reading...

Inequality isn’t just changing the way we deal with economics – it’s perversely altering how we see ourselves and what we valueMichael was a fortysomething middle manager at a mid-sized tech company who every day felt like a failure.Even though he was wealthy enough to send his two kids to private school, he was always anxious about his status. He frequently snapped at his wife and after working long hours, often retreated from his family with a “headache” so he didn’t have to deal with anyone’s noise or demands. Continue reading...

First ground landing of reusable booster rocket on west coast of America hailed a success Continue reading...

Social media has created a world in which everyone seems ecstatic – apart from us. Is there any way for people to curb their resentment?One night about five years ago, just before bed, I saw a tweet from a friend announcing how delighted he was to have been shortlisted for a journalism award. I felt my stomach lurch and my head spin, my teeth clench and my chest tighten. I did not sleep until the morning.Another five years or so before that, when I was at university, I was scrolling through the Facebook photos of someone on my course whom I vaguely knew. As I clicked on the pictures of her out clubbing with friends, drunkenly laughing, I felt my mood sink so fast I had to sit back in my chair. I seemed to stop breathing. Continue reading...

Ageing device cannot make observations after backup gyroscope failed tooThe Hubble space telescope has been sidelined after a gyroscope failed, leaving it unable to point in the right direction during observations.The device had been expected to fail at some point this year, but the surprise came when a backup did not kick in properly after Friday’s failure, said Nasa on Monday. Continue reading...

More research is needed to understand new problems that may arise out of internet use, experts sayThe internet could be fuelling a rise in new conditions such as cyberchondria and cyberhoarding, experts have warned.While researchers say most internet use is benign, it can lead some people to develop problems. Now experts are calling for more research to understand the range of problems that exist, who might be at risk, and how individuals can be helped. Continue reading...

Genomic Risk Score test is cheap enough to allow population-wide screening of children, researchers believe

The solutions to today’s puzzlesIn my puzzle column earlier today I set you the following two self-referential logic list problemsONE Continue reading...