Guardian readers share their tributes and memories of the physicist and author of A Brief History of Time

An 84-year-old man admitted to hospital in Northern Ireland was found to have a huge, air-filled cavity in his right frontal lobeAn elderly man who turned up in an emergency department in Northern Ireland after a series of falls has stunned doctors who found a huge air-filled cavity where part of his brain should have been.The 84-year-old was referred to A&E by his doctor after several months of feeling unsteady on his feet and experiencing falls, and three days of weakness in his left arm and leg. Continue reading...

Belinda Parmar was a passionate advocate of the digital revolution – but has started keeping her family’s smartphones and laptops locked away to protect her loved ones. Is she right to be so worried?In Belinda Parmar’s bedroom there is a wardrobe, and inside that wardrobe there is a safe. Inside that safe is not jewellery or cash or personal documents, but devices: mobile phones, a laptop, an iPod, chargers and remote controls. Seven years ago, Parmar was the high priestess of tech empowerment. Founder of the consultancy Lady Geek, she saw it as her mission both to make tech work better for girls and women and to get more girls and women working for tech. Now she wants to talk about the damage it can cause to our mental health, to family life and to children, including her son Jedd, 11, and daughter Rocca, 10.Parmar made her living and lived her life through these devices, so what happened to make her lock them up? Why did this tech evangelist lose her faith? Continue reading...

Researchers find levels of plastic fibres in popular bottled water brands could be twice as high as those found in tap waterThe World Health Organisation (WHO) has announced a review into the potential risks of plastic in drinking water after a new analysis of some of the world’s most popular bottled water brands found that more than 90% contained tiny pieces of plastic. A previous study also found high levels of microplastics in tap water.In the new study, analysis of 259 bottles from 19 locations in nine countries across 11 different brands found an average of 325 plastic particles for every litre of water being sold. Continue reading...

Maggie Aderin-Pocock on how the late physicist got people across the world talking and thinking about complex scienceTo my mind, Stephen Hawking’s legacy is twofold: he was both a brilliant scientist who came up with some of the most revolutionary ideas of our time and a great communicator who managed to carry the world with him on a remarkable scientific journey. He got people across the world talking and thinking about complex science.Some of his early work was linked to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which takes space and time and squashes them together to make what we call a spacetime. If you look at the universe this way you see all sorts of strange phenomena, including black holes. Before Stephen’s work it was thought that nothing could escape a black hole, but his theoretical work led to the theory of Hawking radiation, which allows some radiation to leak from a black hole, enabling them to slowly decay and eventually evaporate. Continue reading...

Federal agency calls disgraced firm, which allegedly deceived investors of $700m, ‘an important lesson for Silicon Valley’

The death of a brilliant and complex scientist will mean we are all poorer because his mind will no longer roam the multiversesStephen Hawking was a brilliant, complex man and scientist. Diagnosed at 21 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, he had been expected to live a few more years. Hawking lasted another 55. He made his name as a young Cambridge cosmologist with breakthroughs as awesome as anything religion offers: proving that big bang theory must hold true and elucidating the link between gravity and quantum mechanics. From his wheelchair, Hawking’s mind roamed the multiverses. It was his 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time, about advances in cosmology, that made him a pop icon. It kindled Hawking’s showmanship: when asked what his book was about, he replied “the mind of God”. Despite his brilliance, Hawking never won a Nobel prize, as they are not awarded for theory unsupported by observation. Humankind’s new-found ability to generate mini-black holes may mean he will be proved right. Hawking stood out in an age remarkable for secular triumphs. He was proof that more than beliefs were required to win arguments – defending feminism, the EU and the NHS and warning against demagogues in a familiar American-accented voice. Hawking was a way for the cosmos to know itself. His death will mean we know a little less about ourselves. Continue reading...

The late physicist was a genius and a visionary but it is hard to imagine those qualities thriving with cuts to disability support and the NHS under attack

Genetic determinism | Stephen Hawking | Mnemonics | Empty nestersBrian and Deborah Charlesworth, and Anthony Gordon (Letters, 12 March), correctly clarify that geneticists have for many years avoided the stronger claims of genetic determinism. But they are missing the point regarding the origins of “race science”. The issue is not whether DNA interacts with the environment in individuals, it is whether DNA is the sole transmitter of inheritance. There is abundant evidence that it is not. It is the relevant sense of determinism or non-determinism that is in question. The word “determinism” in isolation doesn’t mean very much.

Professors and students at college where he was a fellow praise his achievementsAt the University of Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius College, where Stephen Hawking was a fellow for more than half a century, the college flag was flying at half-mast on Wednesday.It had been lowered in acknowledgement of the death of the internationally renowned scientist, who was also one of the college’s most beloved figures. “Stephen’s loss is a great one for the college,” said its master, Prof Sir Alan Fersht, who first met Hawking in 1965 as a student. “Caius is Stephen – they have been intertwined for over 50 years.”

Scientist was defender of health service and attacked Jeremy Hunt for privatisation plans

To mark the 75th birthday of the late Prof Stephen Hawking, Ian Sample talked to family, friends and colleagues about his incredible contribution to scienceSubscribe and review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud and Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter

Growing up disabled, I had few role models. But this brilliant, witty scientist helped shift the negative stereotypes many faceAs with most of the famous figures whose passing now hits us via a news alert on our phones, I never met Stephen Hawking. In the vastness of the entire universe, you could say I was one speck and he was another. And yet I thought of him as a continual presence in my life, who – perhaps paradoxically, in the light of his illness, not to mention of his work on time – would always be there, somehow.Related: Stephen Hawking: a scientist who never forgot the value of the NHS | Jonathan Freedland Continue reading...

The physicist and author of A Brief History of Time has died at his home in Cambridge. His children said: ‘We will miss him for ever’

We are far more than just stored memories. To come back as an artificial being bereft of family and friends seems meaninglessAre you longing for your brain and all its memories to be preserved for ever? That once fanciful idea seems creepily closer now that a complete pig’s brain has been successfully treated, frozen, rewarmed and found to have its neural connections still intact. This achievement, by the cryobiology research company 21st Century Medicine (21CM), has just won the final phase of the Brain Preservation Foundation’s prize – a prize that demanded all of a brain’s synaptic connections be preserved in a way that allowed for centuries-long storage of the entire information content of a whole large mammal’s brain.Related: Startup wants to upload your brain to the cloud, but has to kill you to do it Continue reading...

The physicist and author, who has died at home in Cambridge, made intuitive leaps that will keep scientists busy for decades

Hawking’s fascination with the cosmos never stopped him speaking out on an everyday issue of vital importanceIn one of his last articles for the Guardian, Stephen Hawking confessed that, thanks to the celebrity he had gained – not many theoretical physicists could boast cameo roles in Star Trek and the Simpsons – and “the isolation imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller”.And yet the last scholar who could be accused of living in an ivory tower, aloof from the problems of the world, was Stephen Hawking. Though he gazed at the stars, he never lost sight of the troubles of the Earth, including those of his own country. Continue reading...

PMs, astronauts, scientists and celebrities pay tribute to a ‘colossal mind and wonderful spirit’

The late physicist’s editor, Peter Guzzardi, recalls his first meetings with Hawking and how his book became a bestseller

A recent Observer article insisted millennials are embracing astrology. Like astrology itself, this claim is very questionableI once wrote a spoof horoscope column for a short-lived comedy publication under the pseudonym “Mystic Bob”. Spoofing horoscopes is a comedy staple, and my own take on it was that given how most horoscopes are largely just a jumble of vague generalisations and unspecific predictions, I figured it would be funny to do ones that were almost terrifyingly precise. The juxtaposition of painstakingly detailed claims in the horoscope section struck me as inherently amusing, So much so that I even repurposed the idea for this very blog some years later.Hilarious, right? But apparently my mockery was misplaced, what with the recent publication of an Observer article all about how millennials are flocking to astrology. That’ll show me and my snark. Continue reading...

The physicist and author of A Brief History of Time has died. Share your tributes hereStephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76.Related: Stephen Hawking, cosmology's brightest star, dies aged 76 Continue reading...

Theoretical physicist who made revolutionary contributions to our understanding of the nature of the universe

Other animals have us beat over short distances, but in an interspecies Olympic ultramarathon, Homo sapiens would likely take all the medalsRoger Bannister’s four-minute mile, while a remarkable human milestone, is noteworthy from a comparative physiology standpoint only for its mediocrity. A seminal paper by AV Hill on biomechanics illustrates the point with a table of maximum speeds across the animal kingdom – humans are outperformed by almost every animal on the list, including the wild donkey, the ostrich and the elephant. We just about beat the black rhinoceros, while the cheetah would complete the mile in about a minute.Related: An updated formula for marathon-running success Continue reading...

Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76. Continue reading...

A new experience transports you back 67 million years to view time-travelling scientists studying dinosaurs in the wildWhere most efforts at “edutainment” fall down is on being overly bombastic, with too little actual science and far too much whizz-bang. But Dinosaurs in the Wild, a mixture of puppets, models and 3D films (all accompanied by live actors), merges the two brilliantly and is both fun for all ages and genuinely absorbing. It’s also impossible to come away without learning a great deal about the world of the dinosaurs and how they lived.The central conceit is simple but well presented – tourists are offered the chance to “travel back in time” to a working research lab in what are now the fossil-rich beds of Montana, but 67 million years ago was a location full of dinosaurs, including Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and the colossal Alamosaurus among others. You get to move between various research stations and see dinosaurs being studied and lab work going on to learn about their biology and behaviour, and also see outside to dinosaurs in the wild. Continue reading...

The British physicist and author had a way with words. Here are a collection of some of his greatest quotations

The celebrated scientist frets about fame and his brain ‘going off with age’ in candid, soon to be auctioned correspondence with his sister, MajaA glimpse at the “private, hidden face” of Albert Einstein, including the celebrated scientist’s thoughts on everything from his fears that his best work was behind him to his equivocal feelings about his fame, has been revealed in a cache of letters he wrote to his beloved younger sister, Maja.The collection, which includes a previously unknown photograph of Einstein as a five-year-old and the only surviving letter written by Einstein to his father, comes from the archive of Maja Winteler-Einstein and her husband Paul Winteler. A mix of letters, postcards and photographs, many of which have not previously been published, the documents range in date from 1897 to 1951. Continue reading...

The scientist’s fame led to appearances on sitcoms, films about his life and music being written about him

The world-renowned British physicist has died aged 76. Here are images from his extraordinary life and times Continue reading...

Burketown, Queensland, named as origin of dominant Pama-Nyungan family of languagesMost Indigenous languages in Australia likely originated from a remote spot in far north Queensland as recently as 4,000 years ago, before slowly spreading across the country, a new study has claimed.The paper, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday, mapped the origins of the Pama-Nyungan family of languages, which encompasses about 90% of the continent. It traced the dominant family of languages back to an area near an isolated place known today as Burketown. Continue reading...

Users of new iQOS ‘heat not burn’ devices speed up their ‘puff rate’ to inhale more nicotine, researchers findThe new “heat not burn” smokeless cigarette devices are not as harmless as their manufacturer claims, according to a new study.iQOS – which stands for “I quit ordinary smoking” – is made by Philip Morris International, best known as the manufacturer of Marlboro cigarettes. PMI, the biggest tobacco company in the world, says its future is “smoke-free”, and it is investing in heated tobacco products, such as iQOS, and e-cigarettes, both of which it says are safer options. Continue reading...

The winged Late Jurassic creature would take to the air in frenetic, flapping bounds, fossil x-rays showArchaeopteryx, one of life on Earth’s first stabs at building a bird, evaded predators and cleared obstacles on the ground by bursting into flight like a startled pheasant, a new analysis suggests.High-resolution x-ray images of the creature’s skeleton reveal tell-tale similarities with the bones of birds that cannot glide or soar but instead take to the air in frenetic, flapping bounds, scientists say. Continue reading...

My mother-in-law, Dr Isabel Gal, who has died aged 92, was working at Queen Mary’s hospital for children in Carshalton, Surrey, in the 1960s when her research suggested that a hormone-based pregnancy test drug called Primodos caused birth defects similar to those seen with thalidomide.Her findings were published in the journal Nature in 1967. In 1975 the Committee on Safety of Medicines issued a warning which was printed on the packaging, but the drug remained in use in the UK until 1978 – and Isabel believed that she was subsequently frozen out of the medical profession. Continue reading...

The principles that define a good life protect me from despair, despite this diagnosis and the grisly operation I now faceIt came, as these things often do, like a gunshot on a quiet street: shocking and disorienting. In early December, my urine turned brown. The following day I felt feverish and found it hard to pee. I soon realised I had a urinary tract infection. It was unpleasant, but seemed to be no big deal. Now I know that it might have saved my life.The doctor told me this infection was unusual in a man of my age, and hinted at an underlying condition. So I had a blood test, which revealed that my prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels were off the scale. An MRI scan and a mortifying biopsy confirmed my suspicions. Prostate cancer: all the smart young men have it this season. Continue reading...

Climate modelling does not take account of how ice crystals form in the region’s atmosphere, with ramifications for meteorologistsWhat is the recipe for a cloud? This is like asking for the recipe for curry. There are many different types of curry, and the result depends upon which spices are used and how they are combined.For a long time, clouds over the Southern Ocean have puzzled meteorologists; there are more of them and they hang around for longer than climate models predict. Benjamin Murray and his colleagues from the University of Leeds have shown this is because of the delicate ingredients that goes into Southern Ocean clouds. Continue reading...

Until recently the attractions and drawbacks of nuclear fusion reactors were largely theoretical. Within a decade this will not be the caseOne of the cliches of nuclear power research is that a commercial fusion reactor is only ever a few decades away – and always will be. So claims that the technology is on the “brink of being realised” by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company should be viewed sceptically. The MIT-led team say they have the “science, speed and scale” for a viable fusion reactor and believe it could be up and running within 15 years, just in time to combat climate change. The MIT scientists are all serious people and perhaps they are within spitting distance of one of science’s holy grails. But no one should hold their breath.Fusion technology promises an inexhaustible supply of clean, safe power. If it all sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. For decades scientists struggled to recreate a working sun in their laboratories – little surprise perhaps as they were attempting to fuse atomic nuclei in a superheated soup. Commercial fusion remains a dream. Yet in recent years the impossible became merely improbable and then, it felt almost overnight, technically feasible. For the last decade there has been a flurry of interest –and not a little incredulity –about claims, often made by companies backed by billionaires and run by bold physicists, that market-ready fusion reactors were just around the corner. Continue reading...

Sites of scientific discoveries | Alf Tupper | Pyrgic puzzles | Geological mnemonics | ParalympicsI enjoyed Brian Cox’s lively tour of sites of scientific discoveries (Travel, 10 March), but there was a glaring omission. The Eagle pub in Cambridge also has a plaque to Rosalind Franklin, a woman who played a significant part in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Young women scientists need to be inspired too.

Gather round for the solutions to today’s puzzlesIn my puzzle blog earlier today I set you three pi-flavoured puzzles.1. Move one matchstick below to make the equation approximately correct Continue reading...

Crisis? What crisis? New analysis shows polling accuracy has been stable over the decades – and might even have improvedIt seemed to be a hat trick of polling catastrophes: Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election and the 2017 British general election. But researchers now say that despite popular perceptions, polls are as accurate as they have ever been.They say a new analysis of political polls shows that errors have not increased over the decades since the 1940s – and might even have diminished.

What clues can our evolutionary past give us about human behaviour in the here and now? And, bearing in mind the likes of the recent #MeToo movement, does social conformity have a dark side?Subscribe and review on iTunes or Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterA Neuroscientist Explains is back for its second season. In each episode, Dr Daniel Glaser and producer Max revisit a column from Dan’s hugely successful weekly column in the Observer Magazine and explore the neuroscience within it. One subject, one interview and many, many interesting questions. Continue reading...

Join the circle of friends of the friends of the circleUPDATE: Click here for the solutionsHi guzzlers,Wednesday is Pi Day, an annual date of celebration in the mathematical community because March 14, or 3/14, using the US convention for dates, looks like 3.14, which is pi to two decimal places. Continue reading...

Marc Quinn to create likeness of Rick Genest, who is covered with tattoos of the inside of his bodyMarc Quinn, the artist best known for freezing 10 pints of his own blood in a bust of his head, is to create a giant sculpture of a tattooed man known as Zombie Boy to permanently greet visitors to new galleries at the Science Museum in London.Zombie Boy is Rick Genest, a Canadian artist and model who, after a period of illness, decided to cover himself head to foot with tattoos of the inside of his body. Continue reading...

Peterson has found an enthusiastic audience in Australia, so it’s worth understanding how he has tapped into thatThe 1960s were a simpler time, where artists were valued for having something to say, rather than how much money they made.I heard that sentiment in a Bob Dylan documentary once. “Have you heard them play? Did they have anything to say?” Continue reading...

Mercury can be difficult to spot in the twilight sky, but this week Venus, the unmissable bright evening star, will be close byThis week there is a treat for the early evening sky watcher. From 17 March onwards, the two inner planets of Mercury and Venus can be seen close together in the twilight sky. The sky will not be fully dark and viewers will need a clear western horizon to see the pair. Being the innermost planet, Mercury never strays far from the Sun. Hence it is only ever visible in twilight, making it a tricky object to spot. This week, however, Venus helps. Dubbed “the evening star”, it is unmistakably bright and will be visible just above the western horizon. Locate Venus, then hop to fainter Mercury, which is slightly higher in the sky to the right. The chart shows the view for 18:30 GMT on 17 March. On the two subsequent evenings, the planets will be joined by a beautiful new moon, which will be a faint hair-line crescent to the left of the planets. Continue reading...

Genetic determinism is not a concept used by practising geneticists, write Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth, and Anthony Gordon clears up some factsMartin Yuille and Jonathan Bard (Letters, 9 March) assert that recent scientific developments have undermined genetic determinism, the idea (in Yuille’s words) that human traits “specify the characteristics – in their entirety – of the individual”. This overlooks the fact that geneticists have known for 100 years that variation in most traits of biological importance reflects the combined effects of many genes with individually small effects, together with non-genetic factors that include direct effects of the external and maternal environments on the individual.This year geneticists will celebrate the centennial of Sir Ronald Fisher’s classic paper laying the foundations for the statistical analysis of such joint effects. These concepts and their evidential base have been explained in many subsequent scientific papers, and in genetics textbooks. For example, p27 of Human Heredity by J V Neel and W J Schull (published in 1954, and the standard textbook of human genetics for many years) explains, in a chapter entitled Nature and Nurture, “When we speak of the effect of any particular gene, this is really an abbreviated way of referring to the result of the introduction of a particular gene into a particular genetic background and particular environment. Genes do not operate in a vacuum, but, rather, each has its role to play in the complex machinery of development.” Genetic determinism is not a concept used by practising geneticists.

Pioneering biologist best known for his work on the human genome who was a fierce advocate of free access to scientific dataIn 2002 the biologist John Sulston, who has died of stomach cancer aged 75, shared a Nobel prize for physiology. He won it for elucidating the entire sequence in which the daughters of a single cell divide and sometimes disappear as an embryo grows into an adult in the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. However, he is much better known for leading the British team that sequenced a third of the human genome, and for the fierce integrity with which he successfully argued that all genomic data should be openly accessible to the scientific community without commercial involvement.Previously content to pursue his work out of the public eye, in 1998 Sulston found himself catapulted on to the front pages as the publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP) faced competition from a rival, private genome-sequencing project launched by the American geneticist Craig Venter’s Celera Genomics. Sulston took every opportunity to challenge, on both ethical and scientific grounds, a model in which access to the data would be controlled by commercial licence agreements. Continue reading...

David Adam explores the history of intelligence and ways to improve his own, raising timely questionsWhich of us would not want to enhance our intelligence? Indeed, some ethicists, such as John Harris at Manchester University, argue that it is our duty to improve ourselves if we can, and in turn society and the quality of life for future generations. If we were more intelligent, perhaps we would invent better ways to generate energy efficiently at less cost and damage to the environment. Or generate ideas for solving political disputes without engaging in aggression and conflicts.It is interesting that when we think of improving ourselves as individuals, we immediately consider boosting “cold” cognition – logic, critical thinking, memory capacity, etc – rather than “hot” cognition – the type required for you to understand what another person is thinking, termed “theory of mind”, and so important for soft diplomacy, resolving conflicts and psychological therapy. Cold cognition is nonemotional and reflects what is measured by the intelligence test, whereas hot refers to social and emotional cognition. David Adam, author of The Genius Within, regards cold intelligence as a key target for enhancement and I agree that superior cold intelligence is a great advantage. However, many of the jobs currently available are in the service industry and while these require a certain degree of skill, such as knowledge of computer use, the ability to have theory of mind, to understand what others are thinking and feeling and to be personable and likable are essential. Continue reading...

The evolutionary scientist on her in-depth study on women’s hormones and their effectsYour book is all about reproductive hormones, and their impact on our behaviour. It only focuses on female hormones. Why not look at men’s too?

A new survey reveals Britons are keen to understand the possibilities offered by the groundbreaking science but also concerned it is properly regulatedThe Royal Society has recently published the results of an extensive survey of the attitudes of the general public to genetic modification. This sent my mind back to 1990, when the human fertilisation and embryology bill was going through parliament.The emphasis, at least in the House of Lords, where the bill started, very soon switched from remedies for infertility to the new concept of eliminating some heritable diseases. IVF could be used to select embryos in the laboratory that did not carry the disease and implant one or two of those in the mother’s uterus. At the time, it was also speculated that one day it might be possible to eliminate a faulty gene from a live embryo after a pregnancy had been established, rather than at the pre-implantation stage. Continue reading...