Scientists have been surprised to find three new kinds of snailfish thriving deep in the Atacama trench

Rare, mummified animals discovered by gold miners in Yukon territoryThe Klondike region of Canada is famous for its gold, but now other remarkable ancient treasures have been unearthed from the melting permafrost.Two mummified ice age mammals – a wolf pup and a caribou calf – were discovered by gold miners in the area in 2016 and unveiled on Thursday at a ceremony in Dawson in Yukon territory. Continue reading...

Calls for a mass cull of wild boars to protect pork industry after disease is found in two animals in GaumeAn outbreak of African swine fever terrorising pig farmers in Europe has dramatically escalated with the confirmation that the deadly infectious disease has spread to Belgium.The discovery of the highly contagious disease in two wild boars found dead near the town of Étalle, in Gaume, has sparked calls for a mass cull of that species to protect western Europe’s pork industry. Continue reading...

Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Number of girls and women with the condition in UK may be vastly underestimated, leading neuroscientist saysHundreds of thousands of girls and women with autism are going undiagnosed due to it being viewed as a “male condition”, according to one of the UK’s leading neuroscientists.Prof Francesca Happé, director of the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London, warned that the failure to recognise autism in girls and women was taking a stark toll on their mental health. Continue reading...

Study reveals Britain acquired regions when struck by land bearing what is now FranceWith what can only be described as unfortunate timing, researchers have discovered that there is a corner of Britain that will forever belong to mainland Europe.Analysis of rock from deep beneath the ground reveals that the UK only acquired Cornwall and parts of south Devon when it was struck by the landmass bearing what is now France some hundreds of millions of years ago. Continue reading...

From making violins sound beautiful, to beer and bread, to creating life-saving medicine, fungi have an array of very useful attributes. This week, a report demonstrates just how little we know about this kingdom of life and what we are set to gain if we tap into fungi as a resource. Hannah Devlin investigates.Join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterThe more mycologists study fungi, the more they’re beginning to realise what an intriguing kingdom of life it is. Life-saving drugs like statins, penicillin and the immunosuppressants used in organ donation are all derived from fungi, as is the yeast used in bread and beer. Lesser known is that one researcher from Switzerland is making fungal-treated violins, and their sound is said to match that of a multimillion dollar Stradivarius. Hannah Devlin discusses why Stradivari’s violins are so hard to re-create and why fungi might help with Dr Francis Schwarze from the Swiss research institute, Empa. Continue reading...

Self-colonoscopies, useless instruction manuals, and kidney stones on rollercoasters also among subjects awardedNever mind the protests from health and safety. A research paper that describes how employees can overcome workplace injustice by torturing a voodoo doll that resembles their boss has landed one of the most coveted awards in academia: an Ig Nobel prize.The study, which sought to understand why disgruntled staff retaliate against bad superiors – despite the risk of making matters worse – found that tormenting a doll with pins and other implements helped restore their sense of fairness in the world. Continue reading...

Cultural touchstones and being treated with dignity can make all the difference when choosing an aged care facility

Nearly two-thirds of aged care residents are prescribed psychotropic drugs regularly. Questions that must be urgently asked

Briefing paper notes UK would no longer be part of EU space tracking programmeOne decidedly unexpected effect of a no-deal Brexit would be the UK potentially getting less warning about space debris plummeting towards Earth.The warning comes in a briefing paper on space and satellites, which notes the UK’s involvement in the EU space surveillance and tracking (EUSST) programme. Set up in 2014, it tracks orbiting debris that could pose a risk to satellites and issues “re-entry warnings”. Continue reading...

24-year-old who reduced her medication while swimming weekly in open water was drug-and symptom-free within four monthsA year ago, a 24-year-old woman with depression was given an unusual prescription by her doctor: a weekly swim in cold water.The patient, Sarah, was filmed as part of the BBC documentary series The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs, presented by Christoffer van Tulleken, a doctor and researcher at University College London. Continue reading...

From my office next door to the scanner, I heard how traumatic the procedure was. I found a solution in the latest technology

Those who take on the global industry that traps research behind paywalls are heroes, not thievesNever underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and big data, and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyan has done to the multibillion-dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Sci-Hub, her pirate web scraper service, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of publicly funded research that should belong to us all. Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry.The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell. He realised that, because scientists need to be informed about all significant developments in their field, every journal that publishes academic papers can establish a monopoly and charge outrageous fees for the transmission of knowledge. He called his discovery “a perpetual financing machine”. He also realised that he could capture other people’s labour and resources for nothing. Governments funded the research published by his company, Pergamon, while scientists wrote the articles, reviewed them and edited the journalsfor free. His business model relied on the enclosure of common and public resources. Or, to use the technical term, daylight robbery. Continue reading...

BBC Two’s science show says in age of Netflix and Amazon it should not be taken for grantedThe BBC has “supersized the scale” of the experiments in its veteran science show Horizon to help attract new audiences to the programme, which is in danger of being “taken for granted”.Thought to be television’s longest-running strand, the 54-year-old Horizon is experiencing a new dawn with “the scaling up” of some of its scientific trials and its most diverse lineup of presenters, according to the BBC’s science and natural history head Tom McDonald. Continue reading...

US states, cities and businesses forge ahead with strategies to cut carbon emissions to 24% below 2005 levels by 2025 despite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accordAmerica’s governors, mayors and CEOs are forging ahead with climate change initiatives despite the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and commitment to reviving the coal industry. But a report published today sets out a roadmap that could quicken that pace and cut carbon emissions to 24% below 2005 levels by 2025 in the absence of federal leadership.Related: Climate change activists defy Trump’s inaction with their own summit Continue reading...

Researchers believe the pattern on the fragment of rock is 73,000 years old, but are perplexed as to what it might representIt lacks the grace of Leonardo and has none of the warmth of Rubens, but the criss-crossed pattern on the chunk of rock is remarkable all the same. According to researchers who unearthed the piece, it is the earliest known drawing in the world.Archaeologists found the marked stone fragment as they sifted through spear points and other material excavated at Blombos cave in South Africa. It has taken seven years of tests to conclude that a human made the lines with an ochre crayon 73,000 years ago. Continue reading...

International Agency for Research on Cancer says a third of new cases are likely to be caused by smoking and obesityOne in five men and one in six women around the world develop cancer during their lifetime, according to the latest figures from the from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). One in eight men and one in 11 women die from the disease.The rising toll of cancer is clear from the latest global estimates which predict there will be 18.1 million new cases this year and 9.6 million deaths. Four years ago, when the IARC last did the same exercise, there were 14.1 million cases and 8.2 million deaths. Continue reading...

Key tenet of UK’s Brexit plan dismissed along with proposals for rival to Galileo satelliteJean-Claude Juncker has ruled out the central plank of Theresa May’s Chequers proposals and scorned the British government’s plans to build a rival to the EU’s Galileo satellite project, in a downcast reading of the Brexit negotiations in his annual state of the union speech.The European commission president said Brussels would not let the UK enjoy the benefits of an internal market on goods, and that if negotiators failed to find an agreement on a deal it would not be the fault of the commission. Continue reading...

Age at time of freezing is key to whether fertility treatment will succeed, says UK regulatorFor women intending to undergo IVF treatment using frozen eggs, the younger they are when they are frozen the greater the chance of a successful pregnancy, according to a report by the UK’s independent fertility regulator.Most IVF treatment cycles use fresh eggs, but a very small number use eggs that have been frozen and thawed. It can, for example, be especially beneficial for cancer patients who decide to freeze their eggs before undergoing chemotherapy. Continue reading...

Fungi are vital to life on Earth but little studied – new species of mould were found on baby-carrier backpack and an oil paintingNew species of porcini, chanterelle and portobello mushrooms were among 2,000 new species of fungi discovered in 2017, which scientists say shows how little is known about the organisms.More than £30bn of edible fungi are sold each year, according to the State of the World’s Fungi report published on Wednesday by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in the UK. But the lifeforms are even more vital to plants – 90% rely on fungi to thrive – and many human medicines such as penicillin derive from fungi. Continue reading...

Smart trousers could dramatically change lives of people with mobility problemsSmart trousers with artificial muscles have the potential to improve the lives of people with mobility problems, say researchers.Inspired by the Wallace and Gromit clay animation The Wrong Trousers, the garb has been dubbed “the right trousers”. Continue reading...

Works featuring in this year’s Design Museum show tackle some of today’s biggest issuesFrom the first plastic-free shopping aisle to a library made from ice-cream containers and gender-fluid clothes, designers are coming up with increasingly innovative responses to today’s biggest issues, say the curators of the Beazley Designs of the Year awards.The Design Museum in London announced 87 nominees for the 11th annual exhibition and awards on Tuesday. Continue reading...

Do whole grains prevent diabetes? Is moderate drinking good or bad for you? Nutritional studies are more complex than you are told

John Glen given 2018 Lasker award for discovery of propofol, now used in 90 countries, enabling millions of surgical operations every yearA British veterinarian has won America’s top biomedical research prize for his discovery of a new way to knock people out. Continue reading...

Words matter. The spluttering over Chuku Umunna’s use of a common phrase shows what happens when we detach language from meaningIt is raining cats and dogs. Fat cats and aggressive dogs; filthy capitalists and canine lackeys on the left. There are dog whistles and righteously offended people who, when Chuka Umunna calls on Jeremy Corbyn to “call off the dogs”, point out that Labour members are not actual dogs. Who knew? On the right, Borisconi spews forth about suicide vests, offending people who have seen the results of suicide bombings in Helmand and Manchester.The great metaphor war of 2018 reeks of “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It is terrifying. That language is now so untethered from meaning is a consequence of our crumbling polity. If we cannot agree that “call off the dogs” is a common idiom, then we are falling off a cliff into a void where language becomes inflexible. Continue reading...

Sergey Prokopyev posts video on social media of repaired leak to ‘dispel rumours’A cosmonaut showed off a hole in the International Space Station on Monday that caused loss of oxygen, after Russia suggested the leak could have been caused deliberately.Sergey Prokopyev posted a video on social media where he revealed the small sealed hole in the wall of a Russian-made Soyuz space capsule docked onto the ISS. Continue reading...

The solution to today’s puzzleEarlier today I asked you the following puzzle:You’re single and looking for love. In front of you are three doors. Behind each door is a prospective partner. Your mission is to couple up with your best possible match. Continue reading...

I enrolled in University of California, Berkeley’s online Science of Happiness course. This is what I learnedLast autumn, I enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley’s massive open online Science of Happiness course to see if I might goose my felicity quotient through an understanding of the edicts dispensed almost daily by the US’s happiness industrial complex. The course is free. It’s Berkeley. And its instructors, Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Dacher Keltner, have been teaching the material for years. (Keltner created UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center in 2001; the online program debuted in 2014. Other online happiness courses, as far I can tell, are derivative.) Continue reading...

Find your perfect matchUPDATE: Click here for the solutionHi guzzlers,Today’s puzzle is about dating strategy. Continue reading...

Make the effort to visit a rural area with dark skies – and admire the haunting, fragile beauty of zodiacal lightEarly autumn is one of the best times to see the zodiacal light. This is a glow in the sky caused by sunlight scattering off dust in our solar system. The dust comes from the tails of comets and the occasional collision between asteroids; some may even date to the formation of the solar system, when Earth was taking shape. It lies in the same plane as the planets, which is known as the ecliptic. In the autumn, the ecliptic climbs upwards from the eastern horizon, making the zodiacal light easier to see before dawn. The chart shows the eastern sky at 05:00 BST on 10 September. The zodiacal light will appear as a roughly triangular shaped wedge of milky light that climbs into the sky along the ecliptic. Continue reading...

The scientist and prize-winning author on miracle materials, the real problem with plastics and the ‘naughty’ nature of liquidsMaterials scientist Mark Miodownik’s first book, Stuff Matters, won the 2014 Royal Society book prize. His second, Liquid: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives, has been shortlisted for the 2018 award. He has presented science programmes for the BBC, the most recent of which was the Radio 4 series Plastic Fantastic. He also delivered the prestigious Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 2010 and was appointed an MBE in the 2018 New Year honours list.You say “liquids are the alter ego of dependable solid stuff”. Did that make them a natural topic for the sequel to your previous book, Stuff Matters?

The pandemic wiped out up to 100 million lives, but scientists still struggle to explain what caused it. The answers could ensure that it never strikes againOne hundred years ago this month, just as the first world war was drawing to a fitful close, an influenza virus unlike any before or since swept across the British Isles, felling soldiers and civilians alike. One of the first casualties was the British prime minister and war leader, David Lloyd George.On 11 September 1918, Lloyd George, riding high on news of recent Allied successes, arrived in Manchester to be presented with the keys to the city. Female munitions workers and soldiers home on furlough cheered his passage from Piccadilly train station to Albert Square. But later that evening, he developed a sore throat and fever and collapsed. Continue reading...

When police injured his beloved sister, triggering race riots, Tony Young’s ‘rebirth’ as Mooji beganIt was 6.30am on a Saturday when Tony Young’s phone rang and a voice told him his sister Cherry had been shot. It made no sense – “I said, ‘What are you speaking about?’” – but the caller just told him to get himself down to Cherry’s house in Brixton as quickly as possible.The date was 28 September 1985 and, over the next few hours and days, Brixton was to erupt in violence between the local Afro-Caribbean community and the police, in the wake of Cherry’s shooting. She was 37 years old, a mother of six, and she had been shot by a police officer in her own home. They’d been looking for her son, who wasn’t in at the time. In the TV footage from those days, Tony is impressively, eerily calm. He could almost be a doctor, so clearly and precisely does he describe the injuries Cherry sustained – injuries so severe that she would be paralysed for the rest of her life. Continue reading...

The person is believed to have contracted the rare viral infection in NigeriaThe first ever case of monkeypox has been recorded in the UK. The rare viral infection was recorded on Friday in a Nigerian national staying at a naval base in Cornwall, Public Health England said.The patient was transferred to the infectious disease unit at the Royal Free hospital in London on Saturday morning. They are believed to have contracted the infection in Nigeria before travelling to the UK. Continue reading...

Patricia Clarkson is drawn into a black hole of murder, murk and existential angst in this adaptation of Martin Amis’s Night TrainCarol Morley’s Out of Blue is an intriguing and perplexing creation, starting with that title, from which the word “the” seems to have been removed, making what’s on offer sound like an impressionist painting or a classic jazz album, or some slangily described phenomenon of theoretical physics. It’s a lugubrious quasi-noir mystery set in modern-day New Orleans, starring a charismatic Patricia Clarkson as Detective Mike Hoolihan; a movie that sometimes seems papier-mâchéd together with layers of mannerism and pastiche, floating along like a two-hour dream sequence.Morley has adapted Martin Amis’s 1997 novel Night Train, a hardboiled genre homage about a careworn female police officer tackling a homicide case so uniquely disturbing that it brings her to the edge of a breakdown. Amis had researched its exotically unusual tough-cop forms of speech (“I am a police”) from the writings of David Simon, creator of The Wire, although John Updike rather crushingly pulled rank on the British novelist in his review, dismissing “a number of American locutions new to this native speaker”. Continue reading...

Defence minister says Russia’s Luch-Olymp craft got ‘so close’ to French military satellite last yearThe French defence minister has accused Russia of attempting to intercept France’s satellite communications, calling it an act of espionage.Florence Parly said Russia tried to intercept transmissions and spy on a satellite providing secure communications for the French military last year. Continue reading...

As well as being a brilliant physicist, the winner of the Breakthrough prize is a generous, inspirational role modelIt was not a surprise to read that Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has said she will donate the money she has just won as recipient of the £2.3m Breakthrough prize to help students underrepresented in physics to study the subject she loves.As a research student in the 1960s, Bell Burnell noticed a mysterious pulsing signal in data from a radio telescope. In time, and after much painstaking observation on her part, this was revealed to be a new type of star: a pulsar. She was the first scientist ever to have detected one – but in the end the Nobel prize recognising the discovery went to her male PhD supervisor. Continue reading...

We can see only 4% of the observable universe – the rest is made up of invisible ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’. Now scientists are looking for a postulated force of nature that could open a door to the dark side. Ian Sample investigatesJoin the discussion on Facebook and Twitter.We can see only 4% of the observable universe – the rest is made up of invisible ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’. Scientists have been trying to understand this hidden realm for decades but are none the wiser. Continue reading...

Nasa aims to re-connect with its adventurous solar-driven spacecraft silenced in June by a planet-wide dust stormNasa is preparing to contact its Mars rover, Opportunity, again, a spacecraft that has been silent for almost three months. Launched in July 2003 the rover was designed for a 90-day mission on the surface of the planet. Now, almost 15 years later, the mission has been more of a success than anyone could have imagined.The rover had been originally expected to travel just 1,000 yards on Mars, but has clocked up more than 28 miles. Its last transmission was received on 10 June as a dust storm was engulfing the planet. The dust cut visibility in the atmosphere so the rover’s solar panels could not generate enough power to keep the craft functioning. By the end of June the dust storm had encircled the entire planet. Continue reading...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s triumph reminds us that a commitment to inclusivity is not at odds with excellence – it is about ensuring itThree instincts mingled in the delight which greeted the award of the Breakthrough science prize to Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell this week. The first was a kind of renewed awe at her landmark achievement: the dramatic discovery of pulsars in the 1970s. The second was a sense of justice served, given that she was notoriously overlooked for a Nobel. The third was admiration at her generosity. Already known for encouraging and promoting women in academia, she is donating her $3m (£2.3m) prize to fund PhD studentships for female, black and minority ethnic and refugee researchers. Her gift recognises the obstacles they face – but also the contribution they can make: her own discovery happened in part because of her minority status, she suggests.The benefits of being an outsider are far from obvious in her case. At Glasgow, she was the only woman studying physics; the men catcalled and banged on their desks each time she walked into the room. She came from Northern Ireland, and at Cambridge was surrounded by English southerners. Her extraordinary breakthrough was at first dismissed by her supervisor. Yet later, he won the Nobel for the discovery; she did not. When media did cover her work, she was quizzed about boyfriends and asked to undo buttons for photographs. Continue reading...

Medical director says chain’s staff should look out for people with unrealistic expectationsThe NHS has urged Superdrug to screen customers before providing Botox and fillers in order to protect vulnerable people.The retailer announced last month that it would offer the anti-wrinkle and skin rejuvenation treatments on the high street to customers over the age of 25. Continue reading...

The moon-landing movie has sparked a furore for failing to show the planting of a US flag. But Hollywood has a long, complicated relationship with the final frontierA giant leap for mankind or purely an American achievement? Nobody much cared at the time, but half a century later the moon landings have unexpectedly become a political litmus test. Blame the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, directed by Damien Chazelle and starring Ryan Gosling – in particular, the moment when (spoiler alert), after a lifetime’s training and tragedy, Armstrong finally sets foot on the moon. We see him descending the lunar lander, we see the astronaut roaming the lunar surface, we see him turn to look back at Earth, but what we don’t see is the precise moment when Armstrong planted the US flag. Many have decided, even without having seen the movie, that this is one small step too far.“This is total lunacy,” tweeted the Republican senator Marco Rubio. “The American people paid for that mission, on rockets built by Americans, with American technology & carrying American astronauts. It wasn’t a UN mission.” Continue reading...

Research finds probiotics caused ‘very severe disturbance’ in gut when taken in conjunction with antibioticsProbiotics, hailed by some as a cure for all kinds of digestive ailments and recommended by many GPs alongside antibiotics, may not be as universally beneficial for gut health as previously thought.The gut microbiome is the sum total of all the micro-organisms living in a person’s gut, and has been shown to play a huge role in human health. New research has found probiotics – usually taken as supplements or in foods such as yoghurt, kimchi or kefir – can hinder a patient’s gut microbiome from returning to normal after a course of antibiotics, and that different people respond to probiotics in dramatically different ways. Continue reading...

Without greater transparency AI’s full potential may not be realised, warns British Science Association’s incoming presidentArtificial intelligence promises an even bigger revolution than the internet yet could be stifled in the UK by a fear-driven public backlash, according to a leading scientist and broadcaster.Prof Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist and the incoming president of the British Science Association, warns that without greater transparency and public engagement the full potential of AI may not be realised. Continue reading...

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell will donate the money to help students underrepresented in physicsA British astrophysicist who was passed over for the Nobel prize for her discovery of exotic cosmic objects that light up the heavens has won the most lucrative award in modern science.Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a visiting professor at Oxford University, was chosen by a panel of leading scientists to receive the $3m (£2.3m) special Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics for her landmark work on pulsars and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community. Continue reading...

Researchers trick wound cells in mice into becoming healing surface skin cellsScientists have discovered a new way of treating skin wounds in mice by tricking the cells in the wound into becoming healing surface skin cells.The findings raise the prospect of being able to develop simple, non-surgical treatments for human wounds in the future. Continue reading...

‘Several attempts at drilling’ were made by a ‘wavering hand’ either on Earth or in orbit, in what could be accident or sabotageAn air leak on the International Space Station might have been sabotage, according to the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, and an investigation is under way.

60% of the bonnethead shark’s diet is made up of seagrass, which they happily graze upon as well as eating fish, crabs, snails and shrimpIt is one of the most radical rebrandings in history: contrary to their bloodthirsty image, some sharks are not irrepressible meat eaters, but are happy to munch on vegetation too.According to US researchers, one of the most common sharks in the world, a relative of the hammerhead which patrols the shores of the Americas, is the first variety of shark to be outed as a bona fide omnivore. Continue reading...

Sally Davies fears medical advances like transplants are at risk from resistant bacteriaThe advances of modern medicine will be lost and the transplanting of organs abandoned if countries fail to tackle the rise in antibiotic resistance, Britain’s most senior medical adviser has warned.Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, told MPs on the health and social care committee on Tuesday that drug-resistant infections should now be recorded on death certificates to boost public awareness of the problem. Continue reading...