Science | The Guardian

In 5 billion years our dying sun will transform into a stunning planetary nebula visible for millions of light years around, scientists sayEnjoy the sun while it lasts: in 5 billion years’ time, our host star will burn out, rip itself apart and turn into a massive glowing ring of interstellar gas and dust, scientists say.Astronomers have long known that the sun will die when it runs out of fuel, but the precise nature of its death throes has been far from clear, even to the most morbid of the field’s practitioners. Continue reading...

In his final paper on the multiverse hypothesis, the world’s best-known atheist made a supernatural creator more plausibleScientists have discovered a surprising fact about our universe in the past 40 years: against incredible odds, the numbers in basic physics are exactly as they need to be to accommodate the possibility of life. If gravity had been slightly weaker, stars would not have exploded into supernovae, a crucial source of many of the heavier elements involved in life. Conversely, if gravity had been slightly stronger, stars would have lived for thousands rather than billions of years, not leaving enough time for biological evolution to take place. This is just one example – there are many others – of the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics for life.Related: Stephen Hawking's final theory sheds light on the multiverse Continue reading...

NSW coronial inquest examines how addictive painkillers prescribed and the dramatic increase in opiate-related overdoses in past decade• Sign up to receive the top stories every morningThe effectiveness of pill-testing at music festivals will be examined to see if it can help to prevent opiates deaths in New South Wales.A special coronial inquest examining the deaths of six people from opiate-related overdoses in May 2016 began in Sydney on Monday. The inquest, before deputy state coroner Harriet Grahame, is examining the way addictive painkillers such as fentanyl are prescribed in NSW and the dramatic increase in opiate-related overdose deaths in the past decade. Continue reading...

Keep calm and follow the arrowsUPDATE: Read the solution hereHi guzzlersToday’s puzzle is for escapologists. Continue reading...

Leading Australian researchers back world-first campaign for activity to be part of any treatment• Sign up to receive the top stories in Australia every day at noon

On Wednesday 9 May, the Sun, the Earth and Jupiter will all line up, with Earth in the middleThe giant gas planet Jupiter reaches its closest point to Earth this year on 9 May. A planet beyond Earth’s orbit, such as Jupiter, is known as a superior planet, and the closest approach of a superior planet is called opposition. This is because the sun is always 180° away from the planet at the moment of its closest approach. In effect, the sun, Earth and the planet in question all line up with Earth in the middle. Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and takes almost a dozen years to orbit the sun. Earth travels faster on its shorter orbit, catching up with Jupiter and creating an opposition every 399 days. On 9 May, Jupiter will be 5.4 times further from the sun than Earth, meaning it will be 6.6m kilometres (4m miles) away. At opposition, Jupiter is brighter than at any other time. This year, the planet will lie in the constellation of Libra. The chart shows its position at 00.00 BST on 9 May. Continue reading...

Antiquities ministry says radar scans give conclusive evidence there are no hidden roomsEgypt’s antiquities ministry has said new radar scans provide conclusive evidence that there are no hidden rooms inside King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber.

Is chronic fatigue syndrome physiological or psychological? The medical world remains divided – leaving millions unsure about the efficacy of the treatment they receiveThe point at which I realised just how confounding some illnesses – and the human beings that suffer them – are was when, three years into a mysterious illness, someone told me that I could beat it by eating a clove of garlic each morning.This person – not a medical professional, it is perhaps unnecessary to point out – swore by its efficacy. By this stage, I had tried all sorts of things to get better – yoga, meditation, kinesiology, hypnotherapy – none of which had worked. So I took the garlic suggestion with the pinch of salt it deserved and resumed my search for a cure elsewhere. Correspondingly, I began to sympathise with poor doctors. No wonder they have such a hard time treating people like me. Continue reading...

Christina Patterson used to be ashamed about being single, but after hearing others’ stories, that feeling has goneFor most of my adult life, I have been ashamed of being single. At weddings, I have felt my smile crack. I once walked out of a friend’s book launch when he gave a speech about finding the love of his life. I felt sick with envy, physically sick. But when I got home, what I felt most of all was shame. I didn’t understand why my friends had managed to succeed in an area where I had so spectacularly failed.When I was a child, I thought it was easy. You fell in love, you got married in a lovely church, in a lovely dress, and then you had children. Probably three, but possibly just two. I had my parents’ example. They met on a hill in Heidelberg in Germany when my father was 21 and my mother was 18. It was, they always said, love at first sight. My father had just finished reading classics at Cambridge. My mother was just about to go and read languages at Lund University in Sweden. For the rest of their three-week German course, they wandered through the cobbled streets of the old town, quoted Goethe and talked about Kleist. Continue reading...

Speaking a foreign language is prone to pitfalls, but it’s a skill we should all haveThe French president, Emmanuel Macron, never ceases to surprise his audience, especially when he speaks in English. While some of his compatriots were shocked that he should address the US Congress in its native tongue, it pleased a large number of French people who appreciated how he engaged directly in version originale.A few days later, however, when President Macron thanked the Australian prime minister’s wife, Lucy Turnbull, for being “delicious” – conjuring up images of cannibalism and Hannibal Lecter – some commentators suddenly thought of Macron as creepy. It was hours before somebody thought to tell the Australians that the word “délicieuse” actually means delightful. Continue reading...

After five years of renovations the Temperate House has been restored to its full Victorian gloryIt would have been very difficult to find a more glorious corner of England than Kew Gardens on Saturday. Under a perfect blue sky that banished all memories of the sodden start to the year, pilgrims were paying homage at the botanists’ equivalent of Valhalla.They had returned to their gleaming cathedral to perform a very secular form of worship. After five years of renovations the Temperate House, home to more than 10,000 plants from the world’s “Goldilocks zones” where temperatures are not too hot or too cold, was open again. Continue reading...

The Mars InSight lander will take more than six months to travel the 300m miles to Mars where it will start geological excavations. It will dig deeper into Mars than ever before – about 5 metres – to record the planet’s temperature. It will also place a hi-tech seismometer on the surface of the planet to try to measure quakes• Nasa launches InSight spacecraft to explore the insides of Mars Continue reading...

Dutch twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis are showing their uncanny models in museums all over Europe. Adrie discusses how their creations are realised and the extreme reactions they can provokeIdentical twins with a combined age of 102, Adrie and Alfons Kennis are among Europe’s most sought-after – and controversial – hominid palaeo-artists: sculptors of lifesize reconstructions of early humans.Working from a studio in their home town of Arnhem in the Netherlands, the brothers bring a surplus of exuberance to their creations, which are richly animated, expressive and – how better to put it? – human, even when they aren’t quite human. “If we have to make a reconstruction,” says Adrie, “we always want it to be a fascinating one, not some dull white dummy that’s just come out of the shower.” Continue reading...

The author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics has written a vivid account of how we make time and other profound puzzles

How did Saladin, Darwin and Lenin die? And could we have saved them if they were struck by the same ailment today? Historical pathologists meet to find outWhether it is a mysterious fever or sudden incapacitation – even today, diagnosing quite what has carried someone off can leave doctors scratching their heads.But every year a group of academics gather to embrace an even tougher challenge: casting a verdict on how and why some of the most famous names in history died. Continue reading...

In his late teens, my father, David Doel, had a Damascene experience when he climbed Todmorden moor in West Yorkshire. Depressed, he lay down in the bracken, surrendered to his fate and, as he wrote in a later poem: “Love found me like water from a spring, not open to my grasp but flowing as a gift through arid ground, refurbishing and making new.”The course of his life changed. David, who has died aged 87, determined to become a minister of religion and rose to be a leading light in the Unitarian denomination. Continue reading...

Maverick biologist Aubrey de Grey has cracked the Hadwiger-Nelson problem which has flummoxed mathematicians worldwide since 1950An amateur mathematician has made the first breakthrough in more than 60 years towards solving a well-known maths problem.

The InSight lander will make contact on the Martian equator and dig deep down into the planet to examine its inner coreNasa’s latest mission to another planet is set to blast off on Saturday on a seven month voyage across the frigid depths of space to Mars, with the aim of mapping the planet’s interior for the first time.The InSight mission aims to drop a lander the size of a garden table on to Elysium Planitia, a broad, flat and largely rockless lava plain on the Martian equator, from where it will become the first robotic probe to survey the centre of the red planet. Continue reading...

Studies on young children have identified a genetic link for some such disorders, but environmental factors also have an effectHumans have succeeded as a species in large part because of our ability to cooperate and coordinate with each other. These skills are driven by a range of “moral emotions” such as guilt and empathy, which help us to navigate the nuance of social interactions appropriately.Those who lack moral emotions are classed as having “callous-unemotional” traits: persistent personality characteristics that make negotiating social situations difficult. The combination of callous-unemotional traits and antisocial behaviour in adolescents and adults is typically diagnosed as psychopathy. Continue reading...

Excavation proves early humans colonised the area hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believedThe discovery of a butchered rhino has led scientists to conclude early humans were in the Philippines as far back as 700,000 years ago.Dozens of human-made stone artefacts and tools, alongside the clearly bludgeoned and eaten remains of a rhino, were discovered in a clay bed in on Luzon, the largest and most northerly island in the Philippines. Continue reading...

Guest host Richard Lea reimagines time with theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. What is time, after all? Should we be thinking about it differently?Subscribe and review on Acast, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom and Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterTime is both deeply mysterious and perfectly obvious. Artists have attempted to capture it to explore its bewildering meanderings. Scientists have tried to measure it to explain its intricate workings. But does anyone really understand time? Continue reading...

Scientists hope latest mission will shed light on the similar processes believed to have formed both planets 4.5bn years agoNasa’s first lander to Mars since 2012 is set to launch on Saturday morning from Vandenberg air force base in California. The InSight spacecraft aims to listen for quakes and unravel the mystery of how rocky planets such as Earth form. If all goes as planned it should land on Mars on 26 November.Since the Earth and Mars were probably formed by similar processes 4.5bn years ago, the US space agency hopes the lander – officially known as Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) – will shed light on what made them so different. Continue reading...

Robert Gallo says prevalence in Indigenous communities is ‘extraordinary’ and if he lived in Australia he would be tested

Amazon CEO retrieves New Shepard rocket and capsule after suborbital flight piloting way to paying passengersBlue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has completed the eighth test flight of its New Shepard reusable rocket and unmanned crew capsule, blasting off from West Texas on 29 April.After a 10-minute flight, during which the hydrogen-fuelled vehicle reached a velocity of almost 2,200 miles an hour and altitude of 66 miles, the rocket made a controlled touch down on Earth and the ejected crew capsule parachuted back down too. Continue reading...

Britain has played a key role in the development of Europe’s satellite navigation system. Brexit should not be an excuse for ending this vital security cooperationThe European Union’s Galileo network of satellites is the latest in a series of global satellite navigation systems providing precision data from space. America has had one since 1978, in the shape of the familiar GPS system. Russia has had one since 1982, and China since 2000. Galileo’s satellites have been circulating overhead since 2011 and the network is scheduled to be fully functional by 2020. Britain has been deeply involved in Galileo since the start, providing 12% of the overall costs, currently estimated at €10bn, and receiving about 15% of the work on the project. Now Britain’s participation is at risk.Brexit is the cause of this, but for once Britain is not the only guilty party. The European commission and member states must share the blame for what is developing into an expensive squabble with very disturbing implications for post-Brexit relationships. The immediate argument is about Britain’s possible exclusion from the next phase of Galileo-related contracts. Already the Galileo back-up centre has been moved from Hampshire to Spain. Much more damagingly, the EU is proposing the UK’s long-term exclusion from the “public regulated service” part of the network. This is an encrypted service for the police, security and emergency services of EU member states. Britain has been deeply involved in its development and British agencies are anxious to participate in it when it is operational. Since January, however, the commission has argued that Britain should be excluded because the system’s integrity would be compromised if it were accessible to a non-EU state. Continue reading...

After five years, 10,000 plants uprooted and replanted, 15,000 panes of glass replaced, 69,000 sections of metal, stone and timber repaired or replaced, enough scaffolding to stretch the length of the M25, and £41m spent, the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world is ready to open its doors again. The Temperate House in Kew Gardens is once again, as Sir David Attenborough describes it, ‘a breathtakingly beautiful space’ Continue reading...

US survey finds two-fifths of people between 65 and 80 report being sexually active, but topic is rarely discussedSex is not only a pursuit of the young and carefree but also a key part of life for adults in their later years, a new poll has revealed – putting paid to the trope that action stops as pensions loom.A US survey has found that 40% of those aged between 65 and 80 report being sexually active, with more than half of those who have a partner saying they still engage in steamy moments.

Five-year project involved moving 10,000 plants and replacing 15,000 panes of glassAfter five years, 10,000 plants uprooted and replanted, 15,000 panes of glass replaced, 69,000 sections of metal, stone and timber repaired or replaced, enough scaffolding to stretch the length of the M25, and £41m spent, the largest Victorian glasshouse in the world is ready to open its doors again. The Temperate House in Kew Gardens is once again, as the naturalist Sir David Attenborough describes it, “a breathtakingly beautiful space”.The great glass and iron doors to this botanical cathedral, first opened in 1863, closed in 2013 for the most complex restoration project in the history of Kew Gardens, and will reopen to the public on Saturday. Continue reading...

So many claim to know the secret of happiness. But what if there’s no such thing?Hello.Are you happy? Continue reading...

Money will be given to agency as ‘seed funding’ with most long-term funding expected to come from private sectorThe government will set aside $50m to fund Australia’s first dedicated space agency, according to senior insiders.The ABC on Thursday reported that funding for the space agency was guaranteed in the budget on Tuesday. It is understood $50m will be given to the fledgling agency as “seed funding”, with the intention that the majority of the agency’s funding will come from the private sector. Continue reading...

Test predicts likelihood of pregnant women developing the condition, which can be fatalA world-first blood test that can help predict the potentially deadly pregnancy condition pre-eclampsia is being introduced at Melbourne’s Royal Women’s hospital.The hospital helped develop the blood test, which predicts the likelihood of pregnant women developing the condition. Continue reading...

In the 1950s and 60s, a Montreal hospital subjected psychiatric patients to electroshocks, drug-induced sleep and huge doses of LSD. Families are still grappling with the effectsSarah Anne Johnson had always known the broad strokes of her maternal grandmother’s story. In 1956, Velma Orlikow checked herself into a renowned Canadian psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, hoping for help with postpartum depression.She was in and out of the clinic for three years, but instead of improving, her condition deteriorated – and her personality underwent jarring changes. Continue reading...

Scientists says blood test could avoid costly, stressful, food tests for confirming allergyA new blood test could make it much easier and cheaper to identify children with peanut allergies, say scientists.The test, which looks for biomarkers released by mast cells, or white blood cells forming part of the immune system, made a correct diagnosis 98% of the time in a study involving 174 children. Continue reading...

Scientists studying corn seedlings believe that they send signals under the soil, advising each other of the proximity of other plantsPlants use their roots to “listen in” on their neighbours, according to research that adds to evidence that plants have their own unique forms of communication.The study found that plants in a crowded environment secrete chemicals into the soil that prompt their neighbours to grow more aggressively, presumably to avoid being left in the shade. Continue reading...

Scientists have reconstructed the skull of an Ichthyornis dispar, a very early bird species that still had the sharp teeth of a dinosaurIt was one of the fossils Darwin hailed as evidence of evolution. Now scientists have unveiled four skulls of an ancient toothed seabird in a study experts say reveals the face of early birds.Thought to have lived between 66 and 100m years ago the gull-like bird, known as Ichthyornis dispar, was first written about in the 19th century by American palaeontologist Othniel Marsh after fossil remains were unearthed in the US.

Shortly before he died the eminent physicist completed his final theory of the cosmos, and it’s simpler than we thoughtReality may be made up of multiple universes, but each one may not be so different to our own, according to Stephen Hawking’s final theory of the cosmos.The work, completed only weeks before the physicist’s death in March, paints a simpler picture of the past 13.8 billion years than many previous theories have proposed.

Carmen Tarleton was so badly beaten and burned by her ex-husband that she needed 38 operations and a face transplant. Yet she found a path back to happiness. What helps her – and others like her – retain their essential optimism?On 10 June 2007, Carmen Tarleton, then 38, was at home with her young daughters in Thetford, Vermont in the US, when her estranged husband broke into the house. Herbert Rogers was looking for a man he supposed she was seeing, but finding no man there, he attacked Carmen. “I just lost it,” he told police later. He beat Carmen with a baseball bat so violently that he broke her arm and eye socket. Then he doused her in industrial-strength lye – a sodium hydroxide solution used in cleaning. One ear, her eyelids and much of her face was burned away. She suffered burns on 80% of her body.I met Bohdan Pomohač, one of her surgeons, at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “In terms of injuries inflicted by another human being, it’s certainly one of the worst I’ve ever seen,” he told me. Her face was almost completely destroyed; her family were able to recognise it was Carmen only by her teeth. Continue reading...

As curator of the Geological Museum in London in the 1970s and 80s, Fred Dunning, who has died aged 89, was responsible for moving that institution away from orderly display cases of rocks, minerals and fossils and towards something much more engaging.Fred became curator of the museum in 1970 and immediately showed that he was eager to share the magic and mystery of geology not just with existing museum-goers but with a whole new audience. He wanted to make geological research accessible to visitors by using eye-catching displays, and so appointed the designer James Gardner to help him in his mission. Continue reading...

Michael Marshall attended the UK’s annual gathering of people who share the unshakeable belief that the Earth is flatThere was the three-hour presentation which contended that the universe is a giant egg. There was the Manchester musician who posited that the Earth is the shape of a diamond. And another who believes that the moon is a projection.Welcome to the Flat Earth UK Convention, a raucous departure from scientific norms where people are free to believe literally anything. Continue reading...

We all recognise the names of some time periods such as Jurassic or Devonian - but how many us of actually understand how geologists divide up the earth’s past?I’m sure you all remember where you were when you found out that the statistical correlation of magneto-biostratigraphic calcareous nannofossils with M-sequence magnetic anomalies approximated new boundaries for Tethyan Kimmeridgian of Sardinia (Muttoni et al. 2018). I was on my laptop at the time.I’ll confess, I struggle to even begin to understand what this new paper is about, beyond the broad principle that a chunk of the rock record as it relates to geological time is being slightly tweaked. Continue reading...

The idea that intelligence can differ between populations has made headlines again, but the rules of evolution make it implausibleThe idea that there may be genetic differences in intelligence between one population and another has resurfaced recently, notably in the form of a New York Times op-ed by the Harvard geneticist David Reich. In the article, Reich emphasises the arbitrary nature of traditional racial groupings, but still argues that long periods of ancestry on separate continents have left their genetic marks on modern populations. These are most evident for physical traits like skin and hair colour, where genetic causation is entirely uncontroversial. However, Reich asserts that all genetic traits, including those that affect behaviour and cognition, are expected to differ between populations or races.

Research suggests MDMA could reduce symptoms when combined with talking therapiesMDMA, the main ingredient of the party drug ecstasy, could help reduce symptoms among those living with post-traumatic stress disorder, research suggests.Post-traumatic stress disorder is commonly treated with drugs, psychotherapies or both. However, some find little benefit, with certain talking therapies linked to high dropout rates. Continue reading...

Philip Nitschke says Perth doctors believe Goodall ‘a danger to himself and not fit to travel’• Sign up to receive the top stories every morning

German scientists propose using basalt and dunite to soak up carbon from the atmosphereThey might seem solid, but rocks gradually erode. Wind, rain, ice and snow all contribute to weathering; nibbling away at mountains, sea cliffs, limestone pavements and even solid granite tors.Freshly exposed rock surfaces react with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to make bicarbonate ions, which flow down to the ocean (hitching a ride on rivulets of rainwater) and are used by ocean critters to make limestone. This natural process helps to keep the Earth cool by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it up in rocks underground for a few million years. Continue reading...

The sum is part of a £25m boost in funding by Cancer Research UK for brain cancer over the next five yearsBrain tumour research is to get an £18 million injection of funding to aid projects ranging from exploring how such cancers begin to developing new ways to treat them.More than 250,000 people worldwide, including 11,400 people in the UK alone, are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year and often the prognosis is bleak. According to Cancer Research UK figures, just 14% of those diagnosed survive for 10 years or more, while less than 1% of brain tumours are preventable.

Amazon employees sit in silence – while Tesla boss Elon Musk advocates walking out if you aren’t adding value. But how can you stop wasting your life in pointless meetings? Here’s an expert guideSome human inventions flash into being, get a little polish and then are pretty much left alone, their users generally satisfied, or at least not so dissatisfied that they attempt to come up with an alternative. No one tries to build a better hankie, a more comforting cuddle or a dinner plate “that really works”. Yet the search for the perfect business meeting seems never-ending. The caravan instead of the boardroom, the rubber chicken that bestows the right to speak: you name it, it has been tried and generally found to suck. Now Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, has had a go, creating what he calls “the weirdest meeting culture you will ever encounter”.Weird? Maybe, though other words that spring to mind include “anal” and “stultifying”. As Bezos told the audience at the George W Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, he has banned the PowerPoint presentations that dominate most commercial meetings. Instead, some poor devil must spend a week or more preparing “a six-page, narratively structured memo” full of “real sentences” rather than bullet points. Everyone else must then spend the first half-hour of the meeting silently – and publicly – pondering it, before moving on to a debate. Bezos calls this “a kind of study hall”. Continue reading...

The new home secretary was the latest politician to strike a power pose on Monday. But what does the science say about this odd stance?Standing like Wonder Woman doesn’t get you any actual superpowers, but various members of the British government are doing it anyway. The latest politician to join the ranks of the power stance team is Sajid Javid, whose promotion to home secretary was accompanied by a photo call in which he stood with his legs so far apart he practically reinvented manspreading. His colleagues have also been pictured doing this stance, which is known in lifestyle and management coaching circles as the “power pose”. It’s known to me, however, as “a bit of nonsense”.The power pose was popularised by a 2012 TED talk (which to date has 46m views, making it one of the most popular on the site) in which social psychologist Amy Cuddy claims standing like you’re showing off a golden codpiece (my words, not hers) could “significantly change the way your life unfolds”. Continue reading...

Fragment linked to pope martyred almost 2,000 years ago found after rubbish collection run in central LondonA small leather case containing a fragment of bone claimed to be a relic of St Clement, a pope who was martyred almost 2,000 years ago, has been found in rubbish collected from central London.The waste disposal firm is now appealing for suggestions from the public for a more suitable final resting place for a saint than a bin.

The internet is full of content championing introverts, but extroverts are getting a bad rep by extension. In this ‘us versus them’ mentality, nobody winsWhen Carl Jung first introduced the concepts of introversion and extroversion as human personality traits back in the 1920s, he probably never thought that nearly 100 years later his theory would form the basis of a very quiet – but nonetheless persistent – battle of wills.Type “being an introvert/extrovert” into Google and you get a plethora of emotive and divisive article headlines: listicles, op-eds, motivational blog posts – even scientific journals – all waxing lyrical about the benefits or downfalls of being one or the other. It’s true that Jung’s theories are pretty old by now and certainly not without their criticisms and weaknesses, but they’re essentially the basis around which this introvert v extrovert narrative has formed. Continue reading...