The Orionids meteor shower will brighten our skies later this month. What are meteors and where do they come from?Spend an hour or so under a clear moonless sky and we will be unlucky not to spot a small number of meteors. Some are slow and graceful while others may be swift and glimpsed only out of the corner of our eye.They occur when meteoroids, usually dusty clumps no larger than a grain of rice but moving in excess of 20km per second, disintegrate in the atmosphere at altitudes between 75 and 100km. Continue reading...

Social anxiety can manifest itself mentally and physically. Here are ways you can learn to manage itAccording to British singer-songwriter Morrissey, “shyness is nice”. When it leaves you feeling breathless, voiceless and even friendless, though, it can be anything but nice.Shyness often manifests as social anxiety, and as Morrissey sings in his song Ask Me, it can stop you from doing the things you want to do in your life. Continue reading...

Entomologist EO Wilson’s meandering attempt to forge a new philosophy from arts and science is irritating rather than enlighteningAt 88, Professor EO Wilson has become festooned with the kind of accolades that might unhinge any scholar, however sober and down-to-earth. For his publishers, he is simply “the world’s greatest living scientist”; to Ian McEwan, he is “an intellectual hero”. On Wikipedia he is, variously, “the father of sociobiology”, or “the father of biodiversity”, a theorist, a naturalist, a two-time Pulitzer prize winner, and the author of more than 20 books; while Jeffrey Sachs describes him as “Darwin’s successor”. Lately, on the evidence of his latest volume, this grandeur seems to have got the better of his brilliance.Wilson is the author of three titles that have shaped contemporary philosophical and scientific thought: Sociobiology (1975); On Human Nature (1978); and Consilience (1998). He is, finally, the world expert in the study of ants, whose peculiar lives and customs have inspired many of his finest biological observations. The Ants (1990) is probably the last word on the subject. Continue reading...

Answer our questions to find out the link between the food you eat and your parentsIs it true that our taste in food is shaped early by our parents? Or are there other influences at play?On a scale of 1 (can’t stand it) to 5 (love it), how much do you like each of the following food types: Continue reading...

The terrifying prospect that even routine operations will be impossible to perform has been raised by experts alarmed by the rise of drug-resistant genesScientists attending a recent meeting of the American Society for Microbiology reported they had uncovered a highly disturbing trend. They revealed that bacteria containing a gene known as mcr-1 – which confers resistance to the antibiotic colistin – had spread round the world at an alarming rate since its original discovery 18 months earlier. In one area of China, it was found that 25% of hospital patients now carried the gene.Colistin is known as the “antibiotic of last resort”. In many parts of the world doctors have turned to its use because patients were no longer responding to any other antimicrobial agent. Now resistance to its use is spreading across the globe. Continue reading...

Drosophila share 60 per cent of human DNA, making them perfect for research that has led to vital strides in treating cancer, autism, diabetes and many other ills. Now scientists in the field have won yet another NobelAm not I

The Nobels were awarded this week, and the incredible work of some extraordinary minds was duly feted, covering areas as diverse as gravitational waves, circadian rhythms and cryo-electron microscopy. However, frustrated classicist that I am, the news that really had me wild with excitement was the news that the Antikythera shipwreck has yielded all sorts of fresh treasures. These include something that just might, maybe, maybe be part of the Antikythera mechanism (squee!) and a bronze arm. With metal detection results indicating that there are seven to nine statues beneath the seabed, it’s going to be hard to wait a year to find out what they’re able to recover. However, there’s no shortage of other intriguing archeology afoot at the moment as reports that Santa Claus’s tomb may have been unearthed show. But if that doesn’t seem like sufficient distraction, do ponder the strange and puzzling notions of pug cafes and drive-by sex toy hacking. And after all that sleep well – you need it. Continue reading...

The 2017 Nobel prize for medicine was awarded for the discovery of how our circadian rhythms are controlled. But what light does it shed on the cycle of life?The cycle of day and night on our planet is age-old and inescapable, so the idea of an internal body clock might not sound that radical. In science, though, asking the questions “why?” and “how?” about the most day-to-day occurrences can require the greatest leaps of ingenuity and produce the most interesting answers.This was the case for three American biologists, Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young, who earlier this week were awarded the Nobel in medicine or physiology, for their discovery of the master genes controlling the body’s circadian rhythms. Continue reading...

Flat-faced dog breeds are prone to a host of health conditions, say experts, who warn that events may raise their popularity and fuel trend for unhealthy breedsA growing craze for pug-themed social events has drawn criticism from experts who fear they could help fuel the fashion for the squashed-nosed dogs.Flat-faced breeds, including French bulldogs and pugs, have soared in popularity in recent years, with data from the Kennel Club in the UK revealing that annual registrations of pugs alone rose from 2,681 to 10,408 between 2006 and 2016. The two breeds are now the third and fourth most popular in the UK respectively, with Labradors remaining top dog at almost 34,000 registrations in 2016.

Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican), says she initially thought the announcement of the award was a prank. Speaking on Friday at Ican’s head office in Geneva, Switzerland, Fihn describes the prize as a surprise and an honour Continue reading...

I’ve repeatedly asked the government to ensure households won’t be vulnerable to internet-of-things safety breaches. Will vibrators finally attract its attention?Hacking tends to bring to mind compromised bank accounts or infiltrated government security systems, not anything as salacious as a dildo. But yesterday, the scientist Ben Goldacre alerted me to the practice of “screwdriving” – short-distance sex-toy hacking.It might sound far-fetched, but the bluetooth low energy (BLE) networking protocol that “smart” sex toys often use can be compromised relatively easily, as demonstrated by security consultant Alex Lomas, who wandered the streets of Berlin taking control of Lovense Hush buttplugs. Continue reading...

The men behind the first observations of gravitational waves deserve their prize. But you have to go back half a century to find a female physics laureateMore than 1bn years ago, a pair of massive black holes violently merged, sending ripples across the fabric of spacetime. Humans didn’t exist yet when this cataclysmic event took place – yet last year scientists were able to observe the event using a detector made from giant tubes and lasers.The people who came up with that experiment definitely deserve a prize – and this week, rightly, three of them – Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne – were awarded the Nobel prize in physics. In fact, all the science recognised this week is awe-inspiring in different ways. So it seems almost churlish to point out that this year has seen yet another glory parade of “stale white males”. The science speaks for itself – does it really matter who did it? Continue reading...

The world is terrible, mainly because of people. But today there is good news – the Lord Howe Island stick insect isn’t extinct!

After thousands of years of failure, some scientists believe a breakthrough might finally be in sight. By Nicola DavisonThe common cold has the twin distinction of being both the world’s most widespread infectious disease and one of the most elusive. The name is a problem, for starters. In almost every Indo-European language, one of the words for the disease relates to low temperature, yet experiments have shown that low temperature neither increases the likelihood of catching a cold, nor the severity of symptoms. Then there is the “common” part, which seems to imply that there is a single, indiscriminate pathogen at large. In reality, more than 200 viruses provoke cold-like illness, each one deploying its own peculiar chemical and genetic strategy to evade the body’s defences.It is hard to think of another disease that inspires the same level of collective resignation. The common cold slinks through homes and schools, towns and cities, making people miserable for a few days without warranting much afterthought. Adults suffer an average of between two and four colds each year, and children up to 10, and we have come to accept this as an inevitable part of life. Continue reading...

Website allows people to experience a 3D view of the SS Thistlegorm, a British merchant steam ship sunk in 1941, seen as one of the world’s best wreck divesArmchair archaeologists are being given the chance to explore a second world war shipwreck online in 3D virtual reality.

The hunger for ‘miracle cures’ has skewed our understanding of medical research. We need greater emphasis on quality of lifeThe horror of a cancer diagnosis is unforgettable. It is the grimmest and most personal bad news. The solemnness of the doctor; the loaded pause as the nurse asks: “Is anyone with you today?”; the strategically placed box of tissues.Related: Over half of new cancer drugs 'show no benefits' for survival or wellbeing Continue reading...

Therapy which restored consciousness hailed as huge advance, but researchers criticised for withholding fact that patient died of lung infection months after treatmentFrench scientists have been criticised for concealing the death of the patient at the centre of a breakthrough in which consciousness was restored to a man in a persistent vegetative state.The treatment was hailed as a major advance in the field and suggested that the outlook for these patients and their families might be less bleak than was previously thought.

Google and Wikipedia have a responsibility to see that their content isn’t skewed – and we users should hold them to accountWe recently passed a milestone in the history of human connectivity – people online now ​make up the majority​ of the world’s population. This has largely gone unnoticed, but it is an important moment and not just for statistical reasons.North American and European internet users now make up only about a quarter of the world’s users. Furthermore, while countries like the US and the UK have almost reached internet saturation, Africa, Asia and Latin America are home to billions more people who will come online in the next few years. Continue reading...

Staff at Symbio wildlife park, located on the southern outskirts of Sydney, have announced the arrival of meerkat triplets. Born on 31 August to first-time parents Aya and Penfold, and weighing in at an estimated 25g and just 8cm, the pups have now emerged from the comfort of their den and are beginning to discover the world beyond. Still finding their feet, they are shadowing their parents’ every move and will continue to do so for up to 12 weeks, as they learn the ropes of being a meerkat Continue reading...

Of 48 cancer drugs approved between 2009-2013, 57% of uses showed no benefits and some benefits were ‘clinically meaningless’, says BMJ studyMost cancer drugs that have recently arrived on the market have come with little evidence that they boost the survival or wellbeing of patients, research reveals.Forty-eight cancer drugs were approved by the European Medicines Agency between 2009 and 2013 for use as treatments in 68 different situations. Continue reading...

Stem cell medicine has huge potential but unscrupulous clinics offering unrealistic hopes are endangering its futureThe credibility of stem cell research is at risk because of charlatans and dodgy clinics peddling unproven cures for diseases, according to a group of eminent scientists in the field.Stem cell research, or regenerative medicine, has great potential and has already delivered some breakthroughs, but its future is threatened by poor science, unrealistic hopes, unclear funding models and unscrupulous private clinics, they say in the Lancet medical journal. Continue reading...

The 2017 chemistry laureates were recognised for developing cryo-electron microscopy. But what is it, why is it exciting and where will it take us next?A trio of scientists share this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry: Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson.Their win is for work on a technique known as cryo-electron microscopy that has allowed scientists to study biological molecules in unprecedented sharpness, not least the Zika virus and proteins thought to be involved in Alzheimer’s disease. Continue reading...

Unicorn theatre, London

Arm points to existence of at least seven statues from Greek shipwreck, already the source of most extensive and exciting ancient cargo ever foundMarine archaeologists have recovered a bronze arm from an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, where the remains of at least seven more priceless statues from the classical world are believed to lie buried.Divers found the right arm, encrusted and stained green, under half a metre of sediment on the boulder-strewn slope where the ship and its cargo now rest. The huge vessel, perhaps 50m from bow to stern, was sailing from Asia Minor to Rome in 1BC when it foundered near the tiny island between Crete and the Peloponnese. Continue reading...

This year’s prize has been awarded for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution

Archaeologists say they have found almost fully intact temple and burial grounds of Saint Nicholas in AntalyaTurkish archaeologists have dashed the hopes of millions of children by claiming to have uncovered the likely burial place of Saint Nicholas.Surveys have uncovered an intact temple and burial grounds below St Nicholas church in the province of Antalya, where he is believed to have been born, archaeologists told the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet. Continue reading...

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson receive £825,000 prize for developing method for generating 3D images of life-building structuresThe Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for developing a technique to produce images of the molecules of life frozen in time.Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson will receive equal shares of the 9m Swedish kronor (£825,000) prize, which was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Restricting Nobel prizes to three individuals has always been problematic, and increasingly glosses over the contributions of everyday scientistsYesterday, the Nobel prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of gravitational waves, following a massive group effort by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) experiment. The announcement reignited the perennial discussion of how a scientific advance can possibly be ascribed to so few people.According to a tweet by BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh, Professor Martin Rees, former Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, told BBC News, “@LIGO’s success was owed to hundreds of researchers. The fact that the #NobelPrize2017 committee refuses to make group awards is causing increasingly frequent problems + giving a misleading impression of how a lot of science is actually done”. Continue reading...

Universities need technicians from abroad, but the current immigration regime makes them difficult to recruit – and it will get harder after Brexit

A new telling of the story of the Apollo astronauts between 1968 and 1972 involves nervous breakdowns, a former Nazi and an atheist churchAs he approached the moon in 1971 the Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa played the hymn “How Great Thou Art”. When Michael Collins first went into space in 1966 – he was the one who stayed on board the command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the steps – he carried a copy of the sonnet “High Flight” by the wartime Spitfire pilot John Magee: his Gemini X craft had “slipped surly bonds of Earth” and “touched the face of God”.All three members of the crew of Apollo 8 read the opening verses of Genesis in a global broadcast when they rounded the moon in late December 1968. The following year, Aldrin sipped communion wine on its surface, ate pre-consecrated wafers at a makeshift altar aboard the lunar module Eagle and read the words from the Gospel of John that begin “I am the vine; you are the branches.” Armstrong afterwards said: “I had plenty of things to keep busy with. I just let him do his own thing.” Continue reading...

Nicola Davis is joined by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy to explore zero, infinity and everything in betweenSubscribe & Review on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterTake a moment and think about a space that is infinite. A space with no boundary and extending forever. Having trouble? That’s probably because it’s near impossible to truly fathom infinity with our finite human minds. But, just because we can’t quite grasp it, that doesn’t mean we can’t come to grips with it. And all because we know how to count. But how and when did counting come about? How important was it for our survival? And how exactly does counting help us reach the unreachable? Continue reading...

Mocked-up Mars spacecraft inhabited for 17 months full of microbial life despite adequate cleaning, raising issues for craft design and human healthOf the many potential hazards astronauts might ponder on a trip to Mars, radiation poisoning, weightlessness and the foibles of crewmates might top the list.But according to scientists, there’s another potential problem. Researchers examining a mocked-up spacecraft inhabited for 17 months by a six-man crew say parts of the capsule were rife with microbial life. Continue reading...

The suffering inherent in mass meat production can’t be justified. And as the artificial meat industry grows, the last argument for farming animals has now collapsedWhat will future generations, looking back on our age, see as its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the first world war and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will revolt our descendants?There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe, will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of animals that are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it. Continue reading...

Janov achieved celebrity with the idea that repressed childhood trauma leads to mood disorders, addiction and even epilepsyArthur Janov, a psychotherapist whose “primal therapy” had celebrities screaming to release their childhood traumas and spawned a bestselling book in the 1970s, has died. He was 93.Janov died on 1 October at his Malibu home from respiratory arrest following a stroke, said his wife, France Janov. Continue reading...

The detection of gravitational waves scooped the 2017 Nobel physics prize. But in a Perimeter Institute lecture Erik Verlinde proposes a rather different theory of gravityOne of those big open questions that we have in physics goes like this.Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is elegant and accurate. It makes many correct predictions, including the prediction of gravitational waves, the observation of which won the Nobel Prize in physics today. Yet if we use General Relativity to predict the motion of galaxies, we get the wrong answer. Continue reading...

The 2017 physics Nobel prize was awarded for the detection of gravitational waves. But what else could be revealed now that this discovery has been made?You wait 100 years for a gravitational wave and then four come along at once. Or so it must seem to those who spent decades designing and building the exquisite instruments needed to sense the minuscule ripples in spacetime that Albert Einstein foresaw in his 1905 theory of general relativity.The first gravitational wave bagged by physicists reached Earth on 14 September 2015 and sent a quiver through the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo). The second hit three months later, on Boxing Day, followed by a third in January this year. When the fourth wave arrived in August, both Ligo and a second observatory in Italy, named Virgo, recorded the moment.

£825,000 prize awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for their work on Ligo experiment which was able to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime and were anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago. Three American physicists have won the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery. We explain why it is so important

I was a teenage choirboy – so it doesn’t surprise me that the timbre of their voices changes when girls are around. Love, or lust, makes peacocks of us allOn the one hand, love is just a chemical reaction, an evolutionary necessity that fuels humanity’s moistly metronomic purpose of incessant reproduction. On the other hand, it is pretty much the sole reason our god-forsaken species has ever had any meaning, one of the most insistent and eternal muses to the beauty of human creativity. When the horizon turns to ash before our eyes, love (or let’s face it, lust) will be one of the reasons we could be to proud to exist, however briefly.And so to choirboys, with recent research showing that the main reason to join the choir isn’t for the love of exulting to the heavens, but the love of the opposite sex. That’s right: young boys are joining not because they want to flex their creativity via the harmonies of the holy spirit but because they want to impress girls. The heathens. Continue reading...

The trio have been honoured for their work on constructing Ligo and the detection of gravitational waves – follow the live reaction here

The brainbox of British dance is creating choreography from his own genetic code in an adventurous new show. It’s the latest experiment at his hi-tech dance HQ, where the lift changes colour and dancers rehearse in playful spacesIn a shiny Airstream trailer, on the roof of his company’s new headquarters, Wayne McGregor looks across the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London. This is not your usual dance HQ. But McGregor isn’t what you’d expect from a choreographer. The resident brainbox of British dance is always questing for new territory. His work with ballet companies often attracts headlines – it’s a world new to extreme moves, music by Mark Ronson and the White Stripes, big ideas about the multiverse – but his own company is a research lab for innovation.Now, the science geek is using his own DNA, and collaborating with scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, as the inspiration for a show called Autobiography. “If you’re looking for a document of my life with a narrative arc about me growing up in Stockport, you’ll be frustrated,” he grins. Instead, it’s Who Do You Think You Are? but with genes. The show began taking shape when McGregor wondered how artificial intelligence (AI) might animate his archive of 25 years’ working in dance. This led him to consider the body itself as “a living archive. Not as a nostalgia-fest but as an idea of speculative future. Each cell carries in it the whole blueprint of your life, basically.” Your genetic code tells the story of your past – and predicts possible stories of your future. Continue reading...

A museum specimen has revealed details of the early life of a marine reptile from the Age of DinosaursNot all new palaeontology discoveries are made on dramatic rocky outcrops. Sometimes dusty drawers in the back-rooms of museums are the source of exciting discoveries. A new study by Dean Lomax, a researcher at the University of Manchester, and colleagues on a previously neglected specimen in the the Lapworth Museum of Geology, University of Birmingham, UK, has increased our knowledge of how the youngest ichthyosaurs - a group of extinct marine reptiles - lived and fed.Ichthyosaurs were a diverse group of marine reptiles, viewed as the Mesozoic equivalent of modern day whales and dolphins (and a prime example of convergent evolution in action). With streamlined bodies, flippers and tail flukes, they evolved from a reptilian ancestor on land to become highly adapted to an exclusively marine lifestyle. Ranging from smaller, agile hunters less than a metre long to 20-metre, toothless suction feeders like Shastasaurus, we already know a fair deal about these animals – which died out about 95 million years ago – from exceptionally well-preserved fossils. Continue reading...

Food, sex, money, work, family, friends, health, politics: there’s nothing we can’t feel guilty about, including our own feelings of guilt. By Devorah BaumI feel guilty about everything. Already today I’ve felt guilty about having said the wrong thing to a friend. Then I felt guilty about avoiding that friend because of the wrong thing I’d said. Plus, I haven’t called my mother yet today: guilty. And I really should have organised something special for my husband’s birthday: guilty. I gave the wrong kind of food to my child: guilty. I’ve been cutting corners at work lately: guilty. I skipped breakfast: guilty. I snacked instead: double guilty. I’m taking up all this space in a world with not enough space in it: guilty, guilty, guilty.Nor am I feeling good about feeling bad. Not when sophisticated friends never fail to remind me how self‑involved, self-aggrandising, politically conservative and morally stunted the guilty are. Poor me. Guilty about guilty. Filial guilt, fraternal guilt, spousal guilt, maternal guilt, peer guilt, work guilt, middle-class guilt, white guilt, liberal guilt, historical guilt, Jewish guilt: I’m guilty of them all. Continue reading...

The discovery of two interacting genes which make a body clock shared by all living things is a triumph that deserves its prizeThe nights are drawing in, and with them for many people a sense of darkness and of discontent. The rhythm of day and night affects our health, and our cognitive functioning. When it is disturbed, we are. But our sense of upset, or even jet lag, is just a minute part of the whole living world’s adaptation to the alternation of day and night: animals, insects, plants and even plankton show a cyclical pattern of behaviour as the Earth turns. This is built into their DNA. But to get beyond that statement of the obvious, and to ask what is encoded, and how it might work, has been the labour of decades. The three American scientists who have just been awarded the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine have unpicked a complicated feedback loop whereby a gene encodes the protein that will shut its own operations down and then decay to let the gene start work again. It’s not that simple in practice but the principle is a beautifully clear example of the way in which biological clocks were built by evolution a billion years or more before humans could build mechanical ones. Some of our cleverest moments as a species come when we understand how much cleverer than us nature can be. Continue reading...

Study suggests those who miss breakfast have a greater buildup of fatty material in their arteries, likely to be down to indirectly linked lifestyle effectsFrom the full English to a continental croissant, the importance of a hearty breakfast has long been debated – now scientists say skipping the morning meal could be linked to poorer cardiovascular health.The findings reveal that, compared with those who who wolfed down an energy-dense breakfast, those who missed the meal had a greater extent of the early stages of atherosclerosis – a buildup of fatty material inside the arteries. Continue reading...

The Nobel prize for medicine or physiology was awarded for research on the body’s clock, which is at work in all multicellular life. But what exactly is it?In the age of international travel, shift work and personal gadgets that stave off sleep, the award of the Nobel prize for research on the body’s clock, or circadian rhythms, could hardly be more timely.First identified in fruit flies, the tiny molecular components of the clock are at work in all multicellular life, humans included. The internal clock is now regarded as a key feature of life on Earth, one that wired the rotation of the planet into the fabric of our cells over millions of years of evolution.

It’s time to start promoting black mathematicians and talking about building a more representative mathematical communityThis October marks the 30th Black History Month in the UK. The annual event, first celebrated in the US in 1976, aims to highlight the ongoing struggle for equality and to educate people on the achievements of members of the African diaspora.Of course there is plenty to celebrate, from both a historical perspective and in modern society. It is easy to reel off a list of black stars from football, athletics, basketball or cricket. The evolution of popular music has been driven by black artists, from Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin to Kanye West and Beyoncé. The success of Lena Waithe at the Emmys and Moonlight at the Oscars shows the abundance of black excellence on screen, and the beginnings of recognition at the most prestigious award ceremonies. There are also increasing examples of mainstream success in areas such as literature and politics where, with a record number of black and minority ethnic MPs elected in the 2017 General Election, the UK parliament is more diverse than ever – although there is still a long way to go. Continue reading...

£825,000 prize shared between American scientists Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young for work on the internal clock of living organismsThe 108th Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to a trio of American scientists for their discoveries on the molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms – in other words, the 24-hour body clock.According to the Nobel committee’s citation, Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young were recognised for their discoveries explaining “how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronised with the Earth’s revolutions.” Continue reading...

Blockchain technology is revolutionising financial systems. Could it do the same for archaeological data?This month the world’s first “archaeology coin” launched to fanfare from a small community; however, it might be part of a coming social science data revolution. Named Kapu, the digital currency is similar to Bitcoin, but specifically designed for archaeology. The technology underlying Kapu and Bitcoin is called blockchain and it may change data storage and cultural heritage protection. While the public is unaccustomed with blockchain, there is good reason to believe we may be witnessing the first step in what will become a standard technology over the next decade.Everyone from financial markets and politicians to libertarians and doomsday savers are taking an interested in blockchain. Many of these individuals are not focused on the currencies, but the use of blockchain as a means to store and share data. It can create a record of assets that cannot be tampered with and it is being tested for assets such as homes and cars, organic food and sustainable fisheries, and, of course, artifacts. Continue reading...

Scientists share prize awarded for discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms – the body’s inner clock – fundamental to human health12.07pm BSTOne down and two to go – for the sciences at least. Today we saw the 2017 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine go to three American researchers, Jeffrey Hall at the University of Maine, Michael Rosbash at Brandeis University, and Michael Young at the Rockefeller University, for their decades-long work on the circadian clock. Given the 5am calls they had from Stockholm, I suspect they are experiencing firsthand what happens when that clock is disturbed.Thanks for joining us for today’s announcement. We’ll be back on Tuesday morning with our live coverage of the Nobel prize in physics. We expect to hear the winner or winners at the slightly later time of 10.45am BST. Do join us if you can.11.55am BSTThe Swedish news agency TT has quoted Rosbash as saying he got the call about the award just after 5 am local time. He paints a glamorous scene: