Carbon dioxide supplies could take up to three weeks to return to normal with key gas producers on shutdownSupplies of carbon dioxide (CO) may not return to normal levels for another two to three weeks – triggering likely shortages of meat for UK shoppers – the processing industry has warned.The production of crumpets, beer, fizzy drinks, fresh chicken and pork have been affected by shortages of CO over the past two weeks, amid longer than expected shutdowns at ammonia and ethanol plants – key producers of the gas – in the UK and also across Europe. Continue reading...

Colin Salter’s new book is a selection of extraordinary electron microscopic images of the plant world around us, including seeds, pollen, fruiting bodies, trees and leaves, flowers, vegetables and fruit

Nascent planet seen carving a path through the disc of gas and dust surrounding the very young star PDS70It is a moment of birth that has previously proved elusive, but astronomers say they now have the first confirmed image of the formation of a planet.The startling snapshot shows a bright blob – the nascent planet – travelling through the dust and gas surrounding a young star, known as PDS70, thought to be about 370 light years from Earth.

10 problems about big numbersHi guzzlersWe use numbers every day to describe the world – distances, weights, speeds, debts, populations, and so on. Yet most of us struggle to have an intuitive sense of what these numbers mean. How big is big? How fast is fast? Continue reading...

Development could allow women to have children after fertility-damaging treatmentsDoctors have made an “artificial ovary” from human tissue and eggs in a bid to help women have children after cancer treatment and other therapies that can damage female fertility.The team in Copenhagen showed that a lab-made ovary could keep human eggs alive for weeks at a time, raising hopes that the approach could one day help women have families after harsh treatments such as chemo- and radiotherapy. Continue reading...

Researchers raise concern over white people misunderstanding their minority roots: ‘It has no consequences for them’People who use home genetic testing kits to unlock the mysteries of their ancestry tend to “cherry pick” the results, relying on preconceived biases to embrace some of the findings while disregarding others, new research suggests.Home genetic testing has become a multibillion-dollar industry that has seen millions of people around the world sign up for swab kits in hopes of uncovering the secrets hidden in their genomes. Continue reading...

Many ostensibly rural creatures are thriving in our towns and cities, while adapting to surviveLast week, researchers revealed that bumblebees fare better in urban rather than agricultural environments. City colonies produced more males and reached a larger size, had more food stores and survived longer. They concluded that urban environments provide longer-lived, more varied flowers than intensively farmed agricultural areas. Continue reading...

Stories behind Sheela Banerjee’s name go from Aryan invaders via sacred black stones to 70s dinner ladiesIt’s funny the little things that stick in your mind. I was in the back of a cab with my friend Denise, decades ago, when we were both young TV researchers. The driver was having a bit of a flirt, and asked us our names. “Sheela and Denise,” I replied with my London twang. He checked us out again in his mirror, as we sat there: two young Asian women, brown skin, black hair. My parents are Indian and my friend’s father was Sri Lankan. The driver thought we were having him on. How could we both be called such ridiculously English names?His incredulity stuck with me. I can see our younger, twentysomething selves now: confident in who we were, no longer ashamed of our colour and of our background. We had left behind the racism of our childhood (or so we thought) and were proud of being Asian, in quite a political way. The names we had been given spoke of another era, of our parents’ more nervous experience of trying to fit in as new immigrants in Britain. Continue reading...

Roger Oliver and Jef Pirie on the prospect of finding other life in the galaxyProfessor Jim Al-Khalili (Opinion, 27 June) says: “There are some who argue that life on Earth appeared pretty quickly after the right conditions emerged almost 4bn years ago, which was when our planet had cooled sufficiently for liquid water to exist. Doesn’t that mean it could easily appear elsewhere too? Actually, no. A statistical sample of one tells us nothing”.Well, actually, yes. If we had evolved on a planet circling a dying star and observed that although environment conditions for life on Earth had existed for many billions of years before finally getting started, then we might reasonably conclude that the emergence of life was a bit, well, tricky. Since we actually observe that life got started “pretty quickly” then we ought to conclude that it’s not particularly improbable. True, we only have one datum point, but it’s not nothing. Continue reading...

Elsevier - one of the largest and most notorious scholarly publishers - are monitoring Open Science in the EU on behalf of the European Commission. Jon Tennant argues that they cannot be trusted.

With smartphone cameras and digital message trails, ‘what actually happened’ is more available to us than it has ever been. So why is public life saturated in both illusion and delusion?

Nicola Davis explores Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical common ancestor of modern Indo-European languages and asks, where did it come from? How and why did it spread? And do languages evolve like genes?Subscribe and review on Acast, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom and Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterSwedish, Ukranian, Punjabi, and Italian. To many of us, these languages are as different and distinct as they come. But in the same way that dogs, sheep and pandas have a common ancestor, languages can also be traced back to a common tongue, linguists say. Continue reading...

Study finds birds have design templates in their minds and may pass them on to future generationsNew Caledonian crows use mental pictures to twist twigs into hooks and make other tools, according to a provocative study that suggests the notoriously clever birds pass on successful designs to future generations, a hallmark of culture.“We find evidence for a specific type of emulation we call mental template matching,” co-author Alex Taylor, director of the Language, Cognition and Culture Lab at the University of Auckland, told AFP. Continue reading...

New research suggests continuity and bond between patient and doctor not only improves level of care, but can also save lives

Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft plans to strike the asteroid creating a crater and dislodging rocks for analysisJapan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft has arrived at its target asteroid, Ryugu, after a journey of nearly 2bn miles (3.2bn km), which has taken three and a half years to accomplish. The spacecraft is now tracking the 900-metre-wide asteroid, from about 12 miles above its surface. Following analysis while in orbit, Hayabusa will begin a series of touchdowns on Ryugu this autumn.During these manoeuvres the spacecraft will collect surface samples. It will also release a German-French rover, the MASCOT, which will hop across the asteroid. Continue reading...

Study suggests that death rates level off at this age threshold, but fuels fierce debate whether humans are approaching upper lifespan limit

Animal iconography | Ladybirds’ absence | Measuring space gloop | Nat King Cole’s Route 66 | Morris mushrooms“I’m looking for the wombat in the altarpiece now,” says Heather Dalton, the historian who found a cockatoo in a 16th-century Italian altarpiece created long before Captain Cook washed up in Australia (Report, 27 June). She might enjoy the 17th-century painting of the Last Supper in Cuzco Cathedral in Peru, which shows a festive spread of wine, bread, fruit and, at the very centre of the painting, a roast guinea pig.

Dr Cristiana Pașca Palmer, UN assistant secretary general and executive secretary of the convention on biological diversity, discusses Half Earth, a future biodiversity agreement and where to find the money to save life on EarthDr. Cristiana Pașca Palmer has a big job ahead of her: planning the 2020 UN Biodiversity Convention in Beijing. As the Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Pașca Palmer is in charge of forming new goals with governments for the natural world post-2020. At the same time, a growing group of scientists are calling for a serious consideration of the Half Earth idea – where half the planet would be placed under various types of protection in a bid to prevent mass extinction.

Soon more English students will study Spanish than the tongue of Molière and MC Solaar. We lazy Britons think it’s easierPutain de bordel de merde. Ces rosbifs sont cons comme des bites. Pardon my French, but we must make the most of the obscenities while we can. English children are increasingly unwilling to learn the language of Molière and MC Solaar, according to the British Council, which reports that within a few years Spanish will overtake it as the most-studied foreign language. At A-level, takeup has already fallen to 8,300, from 21,300 in 1997, while Spanish has climbed to 7,600.Laziness seems to have a lot to do with it. As Vicky Gough, a schools adviser at the British Council, put it, “There is a perception of Spanish being easier to pick up than other languages, which may account in part for its popularity.” Which, one might say, confirms another perception: that the kids of today want everything handed to them on a plate, from chauffeur service to and from school, to first-class university degrees. When I was a boy, we had to walk to Dotheboys Hall in all weathers because it was “character-forming”, and even clever kids were happy with a 2ii. Continue reading...

Last year’s expedition in Papua New Guinea ended in him falling ill, being rescued by the newspaper and facing accusations of imperialism. What drives him to seek out yet more adventures?Benedict Allen arrives dressed like an explorer: all in green, multi-pocketed jacket, sturdy trousers, a bag that could carry accessories in the Amazon. It is a somewhat anachronistic get-up for a meeting in central London, at the Savoy hotel, but very useful given that we want a picture of him in the gardens next to the Embankment, which, for our purposes, will double as a jungle.He takes the artifice like a trouper, pushing aside the ferns as if he was yomping to a lost city in Amazonia, but proves less adept once we are seated in the hotel, having difficulty making clear just how large a pot of tea he wants and turning away the nuts and olives because he doesn’t realise they are complimentary. “Sorry, I’m not your usual class of guest,” he says to the bemused waitress. After spending so much of his life in wildernesses, he admits he finds it difficult adapting to this more refined jungle, but it may also be a natural trait: tall, gangly and prone to gesticulating wildly to express himself, he was not made for sipping tea in hotel bars. He was made for a life of adventure. Continue reading...

Diggers laying groundwork for a new windfarm discover previously unknown site of international significanceAs diggers began to strip the daisies and buttercups and carve down through the parched clay of a field near Woodbridge in Suffolk that sloped down to a riverbank, with archaeologists watching over the pretty but apparently featureless site, something extraordinary began to emerge. Clear spring water came bubbling from the ground, and with it came massive timbers preserved so perfectly that tool marks were still visible and stake posts were sharply pointed.The archaeologists first thought the timbers must be medieval or even Victorian, and were puzzled to find them so deeply buried. But as 30 metres of timber track were exposed, alongside other unexpected objects too, such as the massive horns and skull of an aurochs, an extinct breed of giant cattle, they realised they were dealing with something far more ancient. The timbers were 4,300 years old, according to the first carbon-14 tests, and underlying ones may be much older. Continue reading...

Spokesman says no safety risk but there are fears patients could face delays in cancer diagnosisPatients in hospitals around Australia may face delays in cancer diagnosis after production of the most commonly used isotope in nuclear medicine was halted at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney’s south.The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) usually produces about 10,000 doses a week of Technetium-99m (Tc-99m), which is used to diagnose a variety of heart, lung and musculoskeletal conditions, as well as cancers. Continue reading...

Nasa probe detected complex organic molecules in plumes of water and ice as it flew over EnceladusBlasts of ocean spray that erupt from a moon of Saturn contain complex organic molecules, making it the only place beyond Earth known to harbour crucial constituents for life as we know it.Astronomers detected the compounds in plumes of water and ice that shoot from huge fractures in the south pole of Enceladus, a 300-mile-wide ice ball that orbits Saturn along with 52 other moons. Enceladus stands out among the planet’s natural satellites because it hosts a global water ocean beneath its frozen crust. Continue reading...

Visitor from another solar system is actually a comet in disguise, say researchersIt isn’t a bird, and it isn’t a plane. But quite what the cigar-shaped interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is has remained something of a mystery. Now research suggests it is a comet in disguise.Named after the Hawaiian for messenger or scout – a nod to the fact it was initially spotted by researchers working at the Pan-Starrs telescope in Hawaii in October – ‘Oumuamua was quickly revealed to be a visitor from another solar system, making it the first known interstellar object to swing through our neighbourhood.

Research to calculate amount of ‘space grease’ in the Milky Way found enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butterIt looks cold, dark and empty, but astronomers have revealed that interstellar space is permeated with a fine mist of grease-like molecules.The study provides the most precise estimate yet of the amount of “space grease” in the Milky Way, by recreating the carbon-based compounds in the laboratory. The Australian-Turkish team discovered more than expected: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter. Continue reading...

Invention can make an object appear to have the same temperature as its backgroundScientists have developed a thin, lightweight and flexible film that can outfox infrared cameras, allowing hot bodies to appear cool and cold items to appear warm. The invention can also help camouflage an object by making it appear the same temperature as its background.The design was inspired by the colour-shifting capabilities of cuttlefish, says Coskun Kocabas, a co-author of the research from the University of Manchester.

Could the secret to healing a riven politics lie in a Difficult Conversations Laboratory?This is an edited version of a longer piece that you can find hereIn a hard-to-find windowless room deep inside a New York university, some difficult conversations are taking place. But this is not unusual, because this is a Difficult Conversations Laboratory.Though it does not physically resemble a dungeon, it probably should. Researchers conducting experiments here routinely generate the kind of excruciating discomfort that most of us spend every family gathering trying to avoid. Continue reading...

So, research shows narcissists do life better. The meek among us must keep them in check with our conventional social moralityAccording to new research from Queen’s University Belfast, narcissists are some of the most successful people in the world. If you spend your life marauding around with a bellyful of unearned self-worth, it’s claimed, you’ll soon develop a mental toughness that will drive you to beat your more humble peers in education, work and romance.This is depressing news, but not entirely surprising. Everywhere you look, it’s perfectly clear that the narcissists won long ago. Social media drips with wrongheaded opinion masquerading as violent certainty. The buzziest television programme of the day, Love Island, is essentially just a petri dish of obnoxious self-adoration. Untalented colleagues get promoted above you because they are unafraid to gelatinously network. The world’s sole remaining superpower, for crying out loud, is run by a man who looks like the cartoon you’d draw for a monkey to make it understand the basic concept of narcissism. It’s everywhere. We’re drowning in it. Continue reading...

Every day millions of people ask Google life’s most difficult questions. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

Historic England is funding the excavation of a stone monument in Isley MarshA team of archaeologists is braving horse flies, spiky vegetation and murky ditches to hunt for mysterious standing stones lost beneath a West Country salt marsh.The Yelland stone row at Isley Marsh disappeared beneath a thick blanket of silt after the closure of a power station changed the flow of sediment in the Taw and Torridge estuary in north Devon in the 1980s. Continue reading...

A new study suggests that we could well be on our own in the universe. Yet loneliness might have its advantagesIn 1950 Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born American Nobel prize-winning physicist, posed a very simple question with profound implications for one of the most important scientific puzzles: whether or not life exists beyond Earth. The story goes that during a lunchtime chat with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the issue of flying saucers came up. The conversation was lighthearted, and it doesn’t appear that any of the scientists at that particular gathering believed in aliens. But Fermi merely wanted to know: “Where is everybody?”Related: The most likely cradles for life inside our solar system Continue reading...

Urban bumblebees have better access to food, allowing them to produce more offspringBumblebee colonies fare better in villages and cities than in fields, research has revealed.Bumblebees are important pollinators, but face threats including habitat loss, climate change, pesticide and fungicide use and parasites. Now researchers say that bumblebee colonies in urban areas not only produce more offspring than those on agricultural land, but have more food stores, fewer invasions from parasitic “cuckoo” bumblebees, and survive for longer. Continue reading...

Ambrosia beetles feed on the alcoholic fungus they cultivate on dead trees so finding a gratis pint in the garden is a bonusThose enjoying a cool beer in the garden this summer, at least in the southern half of England, may find an ambrosia beetle swimming about in it. These 6mm beetles, also known as oak pinhole borers, have a remarkable trick of cultivating ambrosia fungi, which produces alcohol, hence their liking for beer.The beetles, Platypus cylindrus, carry spores of the ambrosia fungi about with them so that when colonising dead or dying trees they can start growing the fungus on which they and their offspring feed. One of the benefits for them in farming this particular fungus is that alcohol is toxic to many competing beetles and fungi so they carve out a patch untroubled by competition. Continue reading...

RoboCup brings together some of the finest minds in technology from around the world. Established in 1997, its mission is to create a team of robots capable of beating the human World Cup champions by 2050. Judging by this footage, they still have some way to go. Continue reading...

Mireille Silcoff reports from the other World Cup – the one in Montreal where 5,000 robots from 35 countries compete for gloryIf you’d like to know how things are going in the world of robotics, you would do well to attend RoboCup — the world cup of robot football — and not spend too long looking at the field.Robots are terrible soccer players. They can’t run, they can’t jump, they sometimes wander off the pitch in a stupor, and after kicking the ball they often fall over like toddlers hitting a wall at the end of a Smarties binge. In the pantheon of computer-driven non-human sporting accomplishment, if Kasparov v Deep Blue is a 10 and sending a Black & Decker Toast-R-Oven down a slope tied to a snowboard is a one, then robot football might rate a five. The novelty of a yellow-carded beep-boop-beep-boop from some deeply funded German university’s tech lab wears off pretty quickly. Continue reading...

Research team successfully administers insulin to rats in capsule form, raising hopes that a version for humans could be developedAn insulin pill for people with diabetes could be in the offing, say researchers, providing hope that a daily regime of injections might one day become a thing of the past.Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition in which an individual’s pancreas does not produce insulin – a hormone that is crucial for regulating blood sugar levels. Continue reading...

Fast-spreading Xylella fastidiosa is devastating species from citrus to oak trees, but can now be detected from the airA devastating and fast-spreading infection killing olive trees and grapevines around the world can now be detected from the air, long before symptoms are visible to the human eye.The new technique offers hope in the battle against one of the world’s most dangerous plant pathogens, which can infect some 350 different species, including citrus and almond trees, as well as oaks, elms and sycamores. Special “hyperspectral” cameras provide an early warning system by detecting subtle changes in leaf colour. Continue reading...

Museum’s director on how its epic anthropology collection fulfils its founder’s brief to “bring the world to Forest Hill”The Horniman Museum’s new director is surrounded by more than 3,000 objects collected over a century ago to show the English how fascinating, different and frankly weird the rest of the world was, but the object he loves most was made in the past year.The “eco-warrior’s helmet”, covered in spikes of sea shells, was created by the New Zealand artist Chris Charteris as an emblem of the resourcefulness of the Kiribati nation, whose archipelago homes are imminently threatened by climate change and rising sea levels.

Cutting-edge telescope makes Greenwich a working observatory for the first time in 60 yearsPull on the right ropes and the dome at the Altazimuth pavilion at the Royal Observatory Greenwich swings around and opens up to reveal a thick band of London sky. The Victorian building is about to emerge from a major refurbishment and inside the dome sits the main attraction: a cutting-edge telescope that will make Greenwich a working observatory for the first time in 60 years.The installation of the Annie Maunder Astrographic Telescope (Amat) has staff at Greenwich palpably excited. Over the obligatory banging of builders at work, Brendan Owens and Tom Kerss, both astronomers at the site, admit that they have been working late, very late, to put the kit through its paces. If they are tired from being up all hours, they do not let it show. “It’s a little bit addictive,” Owens says.

Killer viruses can ravage countries, but now a new project hopes to spot diseases likely to jump from animals to humansFor several months, health workers have been battling to contain an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A total of 60 cases, 28 of them fatal, have been reported around the town of Mbandaka, though authorities say the outbreak is now under control.Politicians, nevertheless, remain nervous. Thousands died in the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 after the virus – which probably spread from infected animals, such as fruit bats – triggered widespread cases of severe, sometimes fatal, internal bleeding. Continue reading...

The maverick inventor, ex-Microsoft executive and ‘patent troll’ is battling Nasa on its asteroid data and exploring pizza scienceNathan Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, founder of the controversial patent asset company Intellectual Ventures and the main author of the six-volume, 2,300-page Modernist Cuisine cookbook, which explores the science of cooking. Currently, he is taking on Nasa over its measurement of asteroid sizes.For the past couple of years, you’ve been fighting with Nasa about its analysis of near-Earth asteroid size. You’ve just published a 33-page scientific paper criticising the methods used by its Neowise project team to estimate the size and other properties of approximately 164,000 asteroids. You have also published a long blog post explaining the problem. Where did Nasa go wrong and is it over or underestimating size?

Withdrawing from the European Union could leave us far from technology’s cutting edgeIt’s funny the things that geeks notice. I’ve been a keen photographer since I was a teenager and so one of the fascinating aspects for me about the Apollo programme was the cameras that the astronauts used on their missions. On Apollo 11, the first moon landing, for example, they had three Hasselblad 500ELs.Why is this interesting? Well, in those days, Hasselbads were – and remain– ferociously expensive devices. But the final straw came with Apollo 17, the final moon landing, when the commander, Eugene Cernan, left his Hass behind on the lunar surface, where it remains to this day. Even in the context of a space mission that was fabulously expensive, the casual abandonment of such a beautiful, precision-engineered instrument looked – to those of us who thought about these things – like a criminal act. Continue reading...

Despite its potential to battle disease and hunger, genetically engineered food is still controversialLast week, scientists from the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute announced they had deleted the section of DNA that leaves pigs vulnerable to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, which is estimated to cost European farmers £1.5bn a year in loss of livestock and decreased productivity. Genetically modified animals are banned from the EU food chain, but since this is a new and different technique it’s possible they’ll be appearing in bacon sandwiches in a few years. Continue reading...

Before her mother died, she handed over a shopping bag of private and personal letters sent long ago between her and her father. But what would Sabine Durrant learn about the man who died shortly after she was born?My father died just after I was born and I knew very little about him until I was in my 30s. I was a journalist then, and I approached it like an investigation, writing a memoir about what I discovered – his unhappy childhood, his life as a pilot in the navy, and his disappearance one November night during practice manoeuvres off the Dorset coast. The memoir was published in a book and serialised in a newspaper. After it appeared, my mother talked to me about him; not much but enough. She told me he had been a great love, and she told me in heart-rending detail about the night he didn’t come back. We both cried, which was good, because I had got used to thinking she had forgotten him. We had met for lunch, and when we had finished eating she rummaged in her shopper and brought out a plastic bundle, a small Ottakar’s bag containing a thick pile of letters. “You can read these,” she said. “If you like.”I took the letters home, and I was going to read them that night. In some ways, it felt like victory. The teenage me, the one who in secret trawled for evidence, who had raged against her silence – would have drunk them in. I liked to think I had bypassed her in my search, because I hadn’t wanted to upset her. She was long remarried, with a life of her own. But if I am honest it had also been a way of snatching my father from her, of having him to myself. And maybe their letters were too much of a rebuke of this, provided too concrete a proof that he had been a lover, a husband, hardly a father at all. Or perhaps their existence was just too personal – that squeamish resistance all children feel towards parental intimacy. I put the Ottakar’s bag on the table in the hall, and at one point it was moved on top of the piano, and then it graduated into a space on the bookshelves behind. I stopped thinking about it. The bag, with its green logo and arc of orange, wasn’t sealed, the top with the handles just folded over, but it gave the impression of being bound in Sellotape and masking tape, of being as impenetrable as a cage. Continue reading...

Study finds fragile marine ecosystems cannot grow fast enough to keep pace with sea levelsScientists have uncovered a new threat to the world’s endangered coral reefs. They have found that most are incapable of growing quickly enough to compensate for rising sea levels triggered by global warming.The study suggests that reefs – which are already suffering serious degradation because the world’s seas are warming and becoming more acidic – could also become overwhelmed by rising oceans. Continue reading...

It’s daft to see too much meaning in the show. Just lie back and enjoy it, like the contestants...On Friday, an evicted Love Island contestant appeared on Daily Politics alongside Nigel Farage and Alastair Campbell to talk about Brexit. Hayley Hughes, from Liverpool, has achieved fame and notoriety beyond the show’s traditional audience for not knowing what Brexit means, before asking on the reality TV series whether it will lead to fewer trees in the UK. But her appearance on Daily Politics had more to do with the fact that, for those in Westminster not preoccupied with the World Cup, a not insignificant proportion of the political class is obsessed with another summer knockout tournament: the grafting, coupling up and mugging off of a group of suntanned under-30s in a villa in Mallorca.This obsession is not confined to Westminster: this year’s Love Island is bringing in record audiences for ITV2. Its opening programme was watched by a peak of 3.4 million viewers, surpassing the audience for last year’s final by a million and making it the highest-ever for the channel. It is becoming such a hit that people are starting to look for hidden meanings behind its popularity. Love Island has turned into a Rorschach test, revealing to the viewer what they want to see, only maybe with a splodge of Fake Bake fake tan instead of an inkblot. Continue reading...

Skeleton of Charles Byrne, who had gigantism, could now be buried at sea in accordance with his final wishesThe “Irish giant”, a centrepiece of the Hunterian anatomical museum in London, could be released to allow the remains to be given a respectful burial after more than two centuries on display.The skeleton is that of Charles Byrne, an 18th-century man who had a genetic form of gigantism that caused him to grow to more than 2.31 metres (7ft 7in) tall. Continue reading...

Years of DIY-testing the dubious stashes of festival-goers have convinced me that urgent reform is needed to keep people safeWhile discussion of drugs and drug policy often revolve around facts, figures and complex science, perhaps it’s worth reflecting on what I have witnessed at British music festivals over the past four years.Summer after summer, I arrive in fields across the UK on a mission to shine a light on how we take drugs. One year, I traipsed across campsites with DIY testing kits – helping revellers understand how pure their stashes were, and what they were cut with. Continue reading...