It’s not just MPs who are out of touch – I’ve seen how many people live, work and socialise in ways that mean we rarely encounter people unlike ourselves

Find out the link between schoolchild type and health and wealth as an adultIs it really true that the geeks, as they say, will inherit the earth? Or that the nerdy kids in school will go on to find fame and fortune (think Bill Gates, and most musicians and artists), while the good-looking, popular kids end up in their home towns, and quickly start large families? Or is that just a stereotype? Take the test to find out.Q1 At school, were you (a) a jock or jockette: good looking, popular, on the sports teams, grades not so great, or (b) a nerd: hard- working, good grades, not so good looking, not popular with the cool kids? Continue reading...

Overuse of antibiotics on farms is major cause of growing resistance in humans, as campaigners name Lidl as worst performerMost of the UK’s biggest supermarket chains are falling short on measures to reduce the use of antibiotics in the production of the meat and animal products they sell, campaigners have warned, with potentially harmful impacts on human health.Lidl performed worst of the nine supermarket chains examined by the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, a pressure group made up of several NGOs. Continue reading...

The US administration’s attempt to portray fossil fuels as vital to reducing poverty and saving US jobs is ridiculed in BonnThe Trump team was heckled and interrupted by a protest song at the UN’s climate change summit in Bonn on Monday after using its only official appearance to say fossil fuels were vital to reducing poverty around the world and to saving jobs in the US.While Donald Trump’s special adviser on energy and environment, David Banks, said cutting emissions was a US priority, “energy security, economic prosperity are higher priorities”, he said. “The president has a responsibility to protect jobs and industry across the country.” Continue reading...

Humans made grape wine hundreds of years earlier than previously believed, according to analysis of clay pottery dating back to 6,000 BCA series of excavations in Georgia has uncovered evidence of the world’s earliest winemaking, in the form of telltale traces within clay pottery dating back to 6,000BC – suggesting that the practice of making grape wine began hundreds of years earlier than previously believed.While there are thousands of cultivars of wine around the world, almost all derive from just one species of grape, with the Eurasian grape the only species ever domesticated.

Online ad campaigns based on smallest expressions of preference reveal effect of ‘mass psychological persuasion’Online ad campaigns created by academics in Britain and the US have targeted millions of people based on psychological traits perceived from a single “like” on Facebook – demonstrating, they say, the effect of “mass psychological persuasion”.More than 3.5 million people, mostly women in the UK aged 18-40, were shown online adverts tailored to their personality type after researchers found that specific Facebook likes reflected different psychological characteristics.

Study examining the impact of breastfeeding support programmes shows 54% reduction in eczema for children involvedBreastfeeding could reduce the risk of eczema in children, according to new research into the impact of programmes designed to support new mothers in feeding their babies.The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that babies should be fed just breast milk for six months to help protect them from infection, prevent allergies and provide nutrients and energy. Continue reading...

Gradable adverbs such as ‘rather’, ‘quite’ and ‘awfully’ are disappearing from our speech, according to linguistics professor Paul Baker. Is it a frightful shame – or are we just getting better at saying what we mean?Name: understatement.Age: not all that new. Continue reading...

Promising supervised flats, nursing homes and levelled streets, Valdivia’s Gerontological Hub project is tackling Chile’s ageing crisis head-on. Can it offset the country’s shockingly low privatised pensions?

Technology now exists to create autonomous weapons that can select and kill human targets without supervision as UN urged to outlaw themThe movie portrays a brutal future. A military firm unveils a tiny drone that hunts and kills with ruthless efficiency. But when the technology falls into the wrong hands, no one is safe. Politicians are cut down in broad daylight. The machines descend on a lecture hall and spot activists, who are swiftly dispatched with an explosive to the head.

Astronomers using the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Maui identified 1I/‘Oumuamua as it passed 24m km from EarthAstronomers finally have a name for the first known object from interstellar space to visit our solar system. The International Astronomical Union announced last week that it is to be called 1I/‘Oumuamua where “1I” designates it as the first interstellar object and ‘Oumuamua is a Hawaiian word that is said to reflect the way that this is akin to a scout or messenger reaching out to us from the past. Continue reading...

Spirituality, in its purest form, is not an escape from the world but a richer engagement with itSpirituality enables people to see more within the world and within others. It’s no surprise that this leads to a greater sense of fulfillment. A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute has found that higher levels of spirituality are strongly correlated with higher life satisfaction.As a person of faith, my experience with organized religion has ebbed and flowed throughout my life. Yet I have always appreciated how spiritualities across a variety of traditions animate expansive visions and compassionate ethics. Even as the religious landscape in the United States rapidly changes, the importance of spirituality won’t necessarily go away. Now, there’s more evidence to flesh this out. Continue reading...

It bonds workers, sheds light on the brain and pacifies us. Emma Byrne on the uses and paradoxes of swearingWhen I was about nine years old, I was smacked for calling my little brother a “twat”.I had no idea what a twat was – I thought it was just a silly way of saying “twit” – but that smack taught me that some words were more powerful than others and that I had to be careful how I used them. Continue reading...

Life is strong in people – we didn’t get to be wreckers of the planet without a mighty life force in us. But accepting death is one of the contentments of ageWhen I was 16, I was given a wonderful anthology, Poetry of the English-Speaking World, as an English prize. I recommend it to this day, since I have returned to it often between 1952 and now. And early in it occurs a poem which brought me up short then, at demented 16, and speaks still, at a somewhat differently demented 81.When I say “demented” I do not yet mean the aphasia which has disassembled the splendid cerebral mechanisms of some of my contemporaries. I mean just “demented” in the plain old sense of an animal whose end is not far off and who knows it. Continue reading...

Apollo 12 astronaut thwarted in his ambition to walk on the moonOf the 24 astronauts Nasa sent to the moon, only a dozen actually landed there. Richard Gordon, who has died aged 88, was one of the 12 who did not, and in some ways the one whose frustration might have been the highest. Gordon piloted the space module Yankee Clipper on the Apollo 12 mission, orbiting above the moon while his fellow astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean landed the lunar module. He was the backup command pilot for Apollo 17, and was scheduled to command Apollo 18 and finally land on the moon; but that mission was cancelled due to lack of funding, and there have been no further lunar landings.If Gordon was disappointed at how things turned out, he took it in his stride: “The name of the game, as far as I was concerned, was to walk on the moon ... but I had a job and a function to perform.” Bean described Gordon as “a happy guy” and the “best possible crew mate”, recalling that Gordon made him and Conrad remove their spacesuits covered with moon dust before re-entering the space module. Once, when asked if he had regrets, Gordon quipped “Hell no. If you knew those guys you’d be happy to be left alone.” But the view from 60 miles above the lunar surface inspired him. “It makes you think about the fragility of our Earth, and the things we do to it,” he said. Continue reading...

American clinic organised meeting between Calen Ross’s widow and Andy Sandness, who endured nearly 10 years of severe facial disfigurementIt made for an emotional meeting. More than a year after Andy Sandness had a groundbreaking face transplant at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, he met the widow of the dead man whose face it used to be.Andy Sandness, 32, from Wyoming, had 56 hours of surgery last summer to have the face of Calen “Rudy” Ross transplanted, in the first such operation the clinic had performed. The recent meeting, arranged by the clinic, brought Sandness and the donor’s widow, Lucy Ross, together for the first time. Continue reading...

PhD research student Sam Cooper, from Imperial College London, explains how artificial intelligence is helping to improve the way we treat cancerExamining images and data is time-consuming and relies on the judgement and skills of highly specialised experts. Here, artificial intelligence (AI) – or deep learning – can save vast amounts of time and give much more accurate results. We’re using deep learning to try and improve cancer diagnosis, as well as accelerate the search for new drugs against cancer.Using AI, a system can look at a tumour biopsy and diagnose what type it is. Algorithms generally give a more accurate diagnosis, as they are unbiased and can pick up on subtle features that are often really difficult to spot with the human eye. As well as exploring how AI can be used in diagnosis, we’re also using it to speed up the search for new treatments. When trying to find new drugs, researchers typically must process and search thousands of images, which can take months of work. With these new techniques, we will potentially be able to get results in a day or two. Continue reading...

In a world full of sad news and “harmless” radioactive clouds drifting over Europe, one piece this week stood as a beacon of hope, warmed the cockles of our hearts and mixed any other metaphor you’d care to chuck in there. The story of scientists saving the life of a seven-year-old Syrian boy by growing a whole new skin for him was incredibly moving – and just plain incredible science-wise. That plus a “transformational” new prenatal DNA test that detects Down’s, Edwards and Patau syndromes with 95% accuracy means that it’s been a pretty darn good week for medical research. And that’s before we even start to think about the sheep whose ability to recognise celebrities could help research into Huntington’s disease. The last two stories are linked by the year 1954 (spooky, no?). That was the year a Roman Temple of Mithras was discovered beneath the London mud. It’s also the year a star, iPTF14hls, first exploded in a supernova. The temple has just reopened, in a glorious new multi-sensory incarnation on its original site and the star ... well, the star has become something of a sensation, as it appears to have exploded in “fatal” supernovae multiple times since that 1954 sighting – the first star astronomers have witnessed doing so. Continue reading...

If the Yucatán asteroid hadn’t struck, dinosaurs would have continued ruling Earth – and our primate forebears taken a very different evolutionary routeSixty-six million years ago, dinosaurs had an exceptionally bad day. A chunk of space rock nine kilometres across smacked into what’s now Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, instantaneously triggering an extinction event that for ever changed the nature of life on Earth. This is one of the rare moments when we can look back at a pivotal point, where history veered off on an unexpected path. Maybe that’s why we’ve been so obsessed with what would have happened if Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and other Cretaceous celebrities hadn’t gone extinct.The urge to hit rewind on deep time and wonder about the fate of the non-avian dinosaurs is even stronger now that a study has determined that the terrible lizards were not only unlucky, but extraordinarily unlucky. The asteroid hit rock layers so rich in hydrocarbons that the impact threw massive amounts of soot and sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere, putting the chill on organisms that survived the initial blast. And the kicker? Rocks with such amounts of hydrocarbons cover only about 13% of the Earth’s surface. Continue reading...

A recently-discovered giant world lies right on the boundary between being a star and a planet – and that could answer some big questions‘When is a planet not a planet?’ is a lot more than the beginning of a poor joke at a drunken astronomers’ Christmas party (but we laughed nonetheless). It is actually a serious question that cuts to the heart of our ignorance about how celestial objects form.The discovery of a giant planet 22,000 light years away may now help shine some light on this particularly knotty problem. The planet is called OGLE-2016-BLG-1190. It was found on June 2016 by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (Ogle), a Polish astronomical project run by the University of Warsaw. Continue reading...

With the commercial sector providing most of the stimulus for advances in AI, we need to ensure societal goals and values are kept in sightIt’s a bit like buses. You wait for one new technology to come along and then three arrive, presenting a range of exciting journeys and destinations, full of promises and possibilities. With rapid developments in genomics; in data and computer science; in neuroscience; and in the combinations that their convergence make possible, it is easy to feel simultaneously confused, excited and anxious. And at the centre of it all and supposedly orchestrating our future – driving the driverless bus, you might say – we have artificial intelligence (AI). Moving quickly in this area is Google’s DeepMind with their multi-million dollar AI initiative, but they are not alone: there is also great interest from academia and huge investment from other parts of industry.Artificial Intelligence has various definitions, but in general it means a program that uses data to build a model of some aspect of the world. This model is then used to make informed decisions and predictions about future events. The technology is used widely, to provide speech and face recognition, language translation, and personal recommendations on music, film and shopping sites. In the future, it could deliver driverless cars, smart personal assistants, and intelligent energy grids. AI has the potential to make organisations more effective and efficient, but the technology raises serious issues of ethics, governance, privacy and law. Continue reading...

At last, the environment secretary has stated his opposition to neonicotinoids. Now he needs to be brave, and confront the use of other poisonous pesticidesThere was good news this morning for the hundreds of thousands of people who have been calling on the government to endorse a ban on neonicotinoids, the main culprit for the precipitous decline in the world’s bee population. Michael Gove, the responsible government minister, has finally confirmed that the UK will support an extended ban against the use of these pesticides. It’s been a long time coming – and has taken years of effort from campaigners all over the UK. Make no mistake: this ban will do much to limit the damage done by these dangerous chemicals.Related: The evidence points in one direction – we must ban neonicotinoids | Michael Gove Continue reading...

The government’s new knowledge exchange framework can help universities commercialise their research – but we need to get the measures right

Campaigners say tycoon’s plan to invest in luxury Red Sea project jars with previous criticism of Saudi Arabia’s questionable human rights recordSir Richard Branson has been accused of hypocrisy after investing in a luxury tourism project in Saudi Arabia despite his track record of speaking out against human rights abuses in the country.The Virgin Group founder has backed a project to develop 50 islands over a 34,000 sq km (13,127 sq miles) stretch of the Red Sea, creating an estimated 35,000 jobs. Continue reading...

Many birds migrate at night, using the stars to orient themselves. For some, Britain is the last stop – for others, a staging postWaking in the small hours, I find my bedroom bisected by a ribbon of light. The waxing gibbous moon hangs like a beaten silver pendant, backlighting wisps of cloud that cling to the inky sky like cobwebs. As I raise my binoculars to view the moon’s craters, I notice a tiny silhouette flutter across the lunar disc.

This exciting new frog identification app will help you work out if anything around you is an actual frog and which one it is. It’s not all frog fun though

Rising costs of a flagship telescope designed to have 100 times the field of view of Hubble are forcing Nasa to cut back to ensure the mission goes ahead at allNasa plans to “downscope” one of its flagship missions to keep it within cost estimates. This almost certainly means reducing its scientific capabilities.The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFirst) is designed to study essential astrophysical and cosmological questions. This ambitious mission began in 2016 when Nasa asked its scientists and engineers to come up with a mission that was as sensitive as the Hubble space telescope, but would have 100 times its field of view. Continue reading...

It may be hard to tie the neonicotinoid group of chemicals directly to the global bee decline but they do cause widespread harm. A ban is the right callMichael Gove, the leading Brexiter who’s now in charge of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is a natural iconoclast, sometimes a valuable characteristic in government. His education revolution left a damaging legacy of unaccountability and underfunding. But in his year as justice secretary, he won fans across the prisons sector for his plans for radical reform. They were subsequently disappointed to find there was little to show for them after he left. Now he is ploughing up old Defra policies and on Thursday he made his first significant intervention. Writing on the Guardian website, he announced support for the EU’s plan for a total ban on the neonicotinoid group of pesticides. Evidence has been steadily growing of the debilitating harm these chemicals, the most widely used pesticides in the world, cause to pollinators, particularly bees. A paper published in Science last month reported that three quarters of honey from around the world contained some neonicotinoids; they appear to linger in the soil, can leach into waterways, and – through contaminated pollen – spread further than intended. Supporting the EU ban will antagonise the farming lobby and Mr Gove’s Brexiter fanbase. But it offers a future that gives bees a chance. Continue reading...

UK exhibition tells story of Paira Mall, an Indian doctor dispatched by a millionaire in 1911 to send back Ayurvedic materialsIn 1911 a young Indian doctor was kitted out by the patent medicines millionaire and obsessive collector Henry Wellcome, to go back to India and collect material relating to the ancient practice of Ayurvedic medicine.Related: V&A acquires segment of Robin Hood Gardens council estate Continue reading...

Only 13% of the Earth’s surface harboured rich enough hydrocarbon deposits to cause a mass extinction following an impact, research revealsThe massive asteroid that slammed into Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs might never have triggered a mass extinction had it struck almost any other part of the planet, scientists claim.In work that reveals just how unlucky the prehistoric beasts were, researchers calculate that the odds of the enormous space rock wreaking such havoc were low across 87% of the Earth’s surface.

Many people still strongly support Brexit and Trump, despite mounting evidence that both are problematic. Much of this is not politics, but the workings of the human brainIt’s now over a year since the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, plenty of time to witness the consequences of both. And, from an entirely objective perspective, going solely by the ever-increasing evidence, they were terrible decisions. Brexit has gifted Britain a veritable avalanche of governmental chaos, economic damage, international humiliation, internal strife, and much more. The Donald Trump administration has provided essentially the same for the US, although perhaps with slightly less economic injury. But more Nazis.You’d logically assume that, when confronted with the fallout from their decisions, those who supported Brexit and Trump would realise they’d made a mistake, and change their minds. However, when have people ever been logical? Recent polls show support for Brexit and Trump relatively unchanged, at least among those who supported them originally. Continue reading...

New test more accurate than current screening in detecting Down’s, Edwards and Patau syndromes and could simplify screening process, say researchersDoctors have developed a more accurate test for Down’s syndrome and two rarer genetic disorders that are so serious the children often die soon after birth.UK hospitals that adopted the test as part of a medical project found that it picked up nearly all affected pregnancies and slashed the number of women who wrongly tested positive, sparing them the anxiety of needless follow-up tests.

A major new report states unequivocally that humans are changing the planet. Archaeology puts those changes into context – and explains why action is crucialThe United States government recently published the Climate Science Special Report authored by 13 federal agencies, which states unequivocally that climate change is occurring and it is caused by human actions. The report follows several months of uncommonly strong hurricanes caused by warmer-than-typical ocean temperatures. The Trump Administration responded to the report by stating: “The climate has changed and is always changing.”Climate change is part of life on planet Earth; however, context is needed to understand past change and the current situation. Archaeology can explain how temperature change of just a few degrees cause extreme weather events, affect crops, and impact human lives. It also shows how the current changes are different from those in the past.

Hand-held device dubbed sKan measures skin temperature to quickly and accurately identify melanoma, and could save lives around the worldA low-cost hand-held device which could help save lives across the world by diagnosing skin cancer early has won its inventors a prestigious international award and cash prize of £30,000.Four graduates of McMaster University in Canada have scooped the James Dyson award for their invention, dubbed sKan: an easy-to-use gadget which measures skin temperature to quickly and accurately identify melanoma. Continue reading...

Country’s broadcast watchdog rules that the word is now so commonplace that it is no longer as vulgar as it once wasIt may be still be too blue for English speakers, but authorities in Canada have ruled that the word “fuck” is no longer taboo on French language broadcasts as its use is so commonplace.

New Zealand researchers say their study shows anxiety and depression may be reduced by colouring in for as little as 10 minutes a dayThe adult colouring book craze has thereupeutic mental health benefits, New Zealand researchers have found, including reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety.Colouring-in books for adults first caught on two years ago with bookshops around the globe devoting shelves to the generally childhood pursuit, and titles like The Secret Garden topping Amazon’s bestseller list. Continue reading...

Star has exploded in ‘fatal’ supernovae multiple times since 1954 – and is the first star astronomers have witnessed doing so

Seven-year-old boy suffering illness causing untreatable wounds over 80% of his body has had his skin replaced by new, genetically modified epidermisScientists have grown a replacement, genetically modified skin to cover almost the entire body of a seven-year-old Syrian boy who was suffering from a devastating genetic disorder.The treatment marks a rare and striking success for the field of regenerative medicine, which has been struggling to transform futuristic-sounding science into therapies that make a difference to patients. In the latest trial, the life of the young boy – whose illness had come close to killing him – was transformed. Continue reading...

New research suggests we are dangerously ignorant of the location of some of our anatomical structuresWhen it comes to the human body, it’s not merely our posteriors that most of us have trouble distinguishing from our elbows.In a recent survey, fewer than 15% of participants could pinpoint their adrenal glands. The spleen was correctly located by 20% of participants and the gallbladder by 25%. Four in 10 were unable to pinpoint the heart on a blank template of the human body. Continue reading...

Visitors to new museum will uncover mystery cult of Mithras the bull slayer in multi-sensory experienceLondon’s Roman-era Temple of Mithras, once displayed on a car park roof with a crazy paving floor, is to reopen to the public – this time on its original site.Visitors to the temple will now descend through steep, black stone-lined stairs, in Bloomberg’s new European headquarters, to seven metres below the city streets where in Roman times the smelly river Walbrook once flowed sluggishly through marshy ground. In approximately 240AD, the Romans built a temple next to the river to one of their most mysterious cult figures, Mithras the bull-slayer. Continue reading...

Hannah Devlin discusses the limits of human performance with sports scientist Professor John Brewer and amateur marathon runner Vicky SollySubscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterIn May of this year, Kenyan long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge attempted to run a marathon in under two hours – something nobody has done before. On the day, Kipchoge ran nearly three minutes faster than the current world record but missed his goal by just 26 seconds. But what can science tell us about the limits of human performance in long-distance running? How can running a marathon affect our body and mind? And with growing participation in amateur events, can just about anyone run a marathon? Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific conceptsI seem to spend a lot of time talking to myself. From murmuring back to myself as I read or type, to having full practice conversations (that I will never actually have) in the shower. Is this normal? I doubt it. But do other people do it?Toni Williamson Continue reading...

‘Cool guy and best possible crewmate’ Richard F Gordon Jr piloted orbiting command module while Alan Bean and Charles Conrad explored moon’s surfaceThe Apollo 12 astronaut Richard “Dick” F Gordon Jr, one of a dozen men who flew to the moon but didn’t land, has died aged 88.Gordon was a test pilot when he was chosen for Nasa’s third group of astronauts in 1963. He flew on Gemini 11 in 1966, walking in space twice. In 1969 Gordon circled the moon in the Apollo 12 command module Yankee Clipper while crewmates Alan Bean and Charles Conrad landed and walked on the lunar surface. Continue reading...

The three men and three women are the first group in a programme which will see teams spend up to a year in isolationThree men and three women were sealed in an artificial spacecraft unit in Moscow on Tuesday in a simulation of a 17-day flight to the moon, a preparation for long-term missions.

Figures from Macmillan Cancer Support and Public Health England show 17,000 people survived for several years with 10 types of stage 4 cancerThousands of people in England with the most advanced stage of cancer are surviving for several years after diagnosis thanks to improved treatment and care, research shows.Macmillan Cancer Support and Public Health England’s (PHE) National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service found that at least 17,000 people have survived for two years or more after being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, when the disease has already spread to at least one other part of their body. Continue reading...

Sheep able to distinguish pictures of celebrities from unfamiliar faces with near-human accuracy, with implications for research into Huntington’s diseaseIt has all the makings of a pub quiz teaser: what do Barack Obama, Emma Watson, Jake Gyllenhaal and the British TV presenter Fiona Bruce have in common? The answer, courtesy of neuroscientists in Cambridge, is that all have been recognised by sheep.The unlikely connection emerges from work on the face recognition skills of a Welsh Mountain breed that belongs to a university flock. Having trained the animals on mugshots of the four, scientists found the sheep could distinguish the celebrities from unfamiliar faces with an accuracy comparable to that of humans.

Analysis shows chance of death from blood loss is 70% less likely if cheap, widely used tranexamic acid is administered promptlyImmediate treatment with a cheap and widely available clot-stabilising drug could save the lives of thousands of people each year, including women with severe bleeding after childbirth, a study has found.A meta-analysis of more than 40,000 patients found that the likelihood of death due to blood loss was reduced by more than 70% if tranexamic acid was administered straight after injury or birth.

More work is needed to understand how the contraceptive device works to protect against cancer, but researchers say discovery could be “very impactful”Women who use intrauterine contraceptive devices may also be cutting their chances of getting cervical cancer, according to a new study.Research from the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California analysed data from several observational studies involving more than 12,000 women worldwide. The results, published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, showed that in women who used an intrauterine device (IUD) the incidence of cervical cancer was a third lower. Continue reading...