A gene study has shown that incomers could have ousted Stone Age BritonsThe men and women who built Stonehenge left an indelible mark on the British landscape. However, researchers have discovered that their impact on other aspects of the nation may have been less impressive. In particular, their input into Britain’s gene pool appears to have fizzled out, having been terminated by light-skinned Bronze Age invaders who arrived just as Ancient Britons were midway through their great Stone Age project. In the end, these newcomers may have completely replaced the people who were building Stonehenge.This startling conclusion is the result of a huge gene study of humans in prehistoric Europe. It shows that around 2500BC – when the main sections of Stonehenge were under construction – a race of people known to archaeologists as the Beaker folk arrived in Britain. Their genetic profiles were similar to individuals who were living in the Netherlands at the time. In just a short period, all genetic traces of early Stone Age Britons were replaced by those from these continental newcomers, although work on Stonehenge continued. Continue reading...

Single poor night can increase appetite and slow metabolism, say researchersScientists are to give new advice on how to win the battle against the bulge: stop counting calories and count sheep instead. At a key international conference on Sunday, researchers will seek to highlight that a good night’s sleep is as important a factor as any other in ensuring people control their weight and waistlines.Related: What are the repercussions of one lost night’s sleep? Rudeness is just the start | Paul Kelley Continue reading...

Researchers may have found a way of making blood from human or mouse stem cellsHow might blood cells be made?Different groups of researchers say they have developed a way of producing blood cells from human or mouse cells that have been reprogrammed in the lab – an advance that has been touted as offering a solution to the need for blood donation. The latest studies are the result of 20 years’ work in the field. Continue reading...

Dinner plates with ridges to trick the mind into seeing a small portion as big could help cut obesityA crinkly plate, designed with ridges that cunningly reduce the amount of food it holds, may be heading for the market to help people concerned about their weight to eat less.The plate is the brainchild of a Latvian graphic designer, Nauris Cinovics, from the Art Academy of Latvia, who is working with a Latvian government agency to develop the idea and hopes to trial it soon. It may look like just another arty designer plate, but it is intended to play tricks with the mind. Continue reading...

How Darwin developed the radical idea of females’ power to choose their mates despite it being at odds with his own notions of women as inferiorAbout 150 years ago, and “almost a lifetime” either side, Charles Darwin was beleaguered by the problem of the peacock’s tail. Just the sight of a feather, he wrote in April 1860, “makes me sick!”The plumage of the male bird represented a hole in his theory of evolution. According to Victorian thinking, beauty was divine creation: God had designed the peacock for his own and humankind’s delight. Continue reading...

Life on an exoplanet is a tantalising prospect – but you may need to hitch a ride on USS Enterprise to reach it. For now, like Einstein, let’s travel on a light beam. On it you arrive at the Aquarius constellation and get dazzled by a planet system much like ours. Its sun is named Trappist-1 and around it orbit seven planets. The sixth one is Earth-sized, has flowing water and harbours life. (Not really. But hold on to that thought, as it could.)

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do now, especially if you’re holding back in the hope of doing it properlyAll you really need to succeed, according to the writer-philosopher Robert Pirsig, who died last month, is gumption. “Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going,” he writes, in a rare part of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance that’s actually about motorcycle maintenance. (Well, and the whole of human existence, too – but that’s always the case with Pirsig.) “If you haven’t got any, there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it, there’s absolutely no way in the world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed.” The biggest dangers, accordingly, are what he calls “gumption traps”: seemingly minor external events, or ways of thinking, that play a disproportionate role in depleting it. There are “maybe millions” of these, he writes. But there’s one I fall into far more often than others. You might call it the Importance Trap.This is hardly a brand new insight – but then, as Pirsig liked to point out, looking for new insights can be a fool’s errand; what you want are the ones that make a difference. The Importance Trap refers to the way that, the more an activity really matters to you, the more you start to believe you need focus, energy and long stretches of uninterrupted time in which to do it – things that, you tell yourself, you currently lack. And so the less likely you are to do it. Unimportant stuff gets done; important stuff doesn’t. Continue reading...

Continued overprescribing and abuse could lead to more people dying of resistant infections than cancer. Only global cooperation can solve the problemWhen Prof Sally Davies published The Drugs Don’t Work in 2013, it wasn’t some allusion to a Verve number from the 1990s, but a sombre warning of the growing threat posed by bacteria evolving resistance to life-saving antibiotics. If this were left unaddressed, she argued, it would lead to the erosion of modern medicine as we know it.Related: Antimicrobial resistance: what you need to know Continue reading...

Eating without the distraction of work, computers or TV can help people lose weight and maintain the loss, researchers sayEating mindfully, choosing and savouring food away from the distractions of computers and televisions, can help people lose weight, a study has shown.A programme in the US tells people they can eat what they want, including their favourite high-calorie, fattening foods. But they must eat it mindfully, thinking about nothing but the enjoyment of eating their food – although not necessarily eating all of it. Continue reading...

Archaeologists find artefacts in a cave on Western Australia’s Barrow Island dating back more than 50,000 years, providing one of the earliest age brackets for the settlement of AustraliaAustralia’s earliest known site of human occupation of the Australian coast has been discovered in a remote cave in Western Australia, pushing back the start date of Indigenous occupation to more than 50,000 years ago.Related: Humans arrived in Australian interior 49,000 years ago, archaeologists believe Continue reading...

Despite sometimes being an annoying distraction for others, such items can have practical uses for adults, and perhaps even childrenThe fidget spinner craze has been sweeping elementary and middle schools. As of May 17 every one of the top 10 best-selling toys on Amazon was a form of the hand-held toy people can spin and do tricks with. Kids and parents are even making them for themselves using 3D printers and other more homespun crafting techniques.But some teachers are banning them from classrooms. And experts challenge the idea that spinners are good for conditions like ADHD and anxiety. Meanwhile, the Kickstarter online fundraising campaign for the Fidget Cube – another popular fidget toy in 2017 – raised an astounding US$6.4 million, and can be seen on the desks of hipsters and techies across the globe. Continue reading...

A lonely snail who had failed to find a mate because of his unusually-shaped shell has lost out again after two potential suitors hit it off with each otherA lonely snail who had failed to find a mate because of his unusually-shaped shell has suffered further indignity after two potential love interests coupled up with each other, leaving him out in the cold.The rare snail – named Jeremy – has a shell whose spirals turn in an anti-clockwise direction, meaning that he cannot mate with the majority of the world’s snail population who spiral the other way because their major internal organs are located on the opposite side of the body. Continue reading...

An atmosphere that could have enveloped it for billions of years and possible liquid water make planet most likely home for life, say scientistsAn Earth-sized world that swings around a star in the constellation of Aquarius has become a priority in the search for extraterrestrial life after scientists found that an atmosphere could have enveloped the planet for billions of years.The planet is one of seven circling a small and feeble star called Trappist-1 which astronomers reported in a wave of excitement in February this year. The rocky world lies in the habitable zone around its parent star, where temperatures should allow for free-running water, but that would count for little if the planet has no atmosphere.

Collection of samples found in hospital vault reveal genetic mutations that may be responsible for rarest forms of diseaseA collection of almost 100-year-old tumour samples has revealed genetic mutations that scientists believe could be responsible for some of the rarest forms of childhood cancer.

In the past 50 years the quantity and rate of plant growth has shot up, says study, suggesting further warming could lead to rapid ecosystem changesAntarctica may conjure up an image of a pristine white landscape, but researchers say climate change is turning the continent green.Scientists studying banks of moss in Antarctica have found that the quantity of moss, and the rate of plant growth, has shot up in the past 50 years, suggesting the continent may have a verdant future. Continue reading...

British Homeopathic Association believes complementary and alternative medicine charities are being unfairly targeted by Charity Commission reviewCharities that promote unproven treatments for sick patients could be stripped of their charitable status under proposals being considered by the UK government’s regulator.The Charity Commission is reviewing how it decides which organisations qualify as charities – a status that brings authority as well as tax breaks – after it received complaints that some organisations make unfounded claims about complementary and alternative (CAM) therapies.

Small but unstoppable increases will double frequency of extreme water levels with dire consequences, say scientistsSmall but inevitable rises in sea level will double the frequency of severe coastal flooding in most of the world with dire consequences for major cities that sit on coastlines, according to scientists.The research takes in to account the large waves and storm surges that can tip gradually rising sea levels over the edge of coastal defences. Lower latitudes will be first affected, in a great swath through the tropics from Africa to South America and throughout south-east Asia, with Europe’s Atlantic coast and the west coast of the US not far behind. Continue reading...

Students have expressed scorn over a biology exam question on ‘Victorian monkey memes’. So how much does teaching the history of science matter?According to BuzzFeed, British year 11 students encountered a Biology exam question this week about science history and were “confused”, using Twitter to vent their frustration.Students taking the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) version of the GCSE exam were reportedly asked to explain why Victorian journalists lampooned Charles Darwin as a monkey in cartoons – thereby scuppering their chance to shine on topics they’d studied hard for, such as photosynthesis and the menstrual cycle. Continue reading...

Nothing fires up a media storm like a sighting of a dead sea monster no one can identify. However much scientists shout ‘It’s a whale!’I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I guess I’ll have to. It was a whale that washed up on the Indonesian island of Seram late last week. It was never a sea monster, no matter how hard we all tried to believe or hope it might be. Although the species of whale remains unknown (DNA analysis should solve that problem in time), the big giveaways were the presence of whale jaw-bone, the baleen plates, the vertebrae, the fins, the throat pleats, the whale shape and the fact that whales live close by and have skeletons that look exactly the same as this one did. Still, why let a bit of science get in the way of a good monster story, right?And so, within hours, a familiar narrative was playing out in the world’s media as the whale became a dead sea monster that no one could identify, a Scooby Doo mystery that could be maintained by journalists for days as long as nobody checked Twitter, where 10,000 scientists were screaming “That is clearly a whale” at each other. As such, in the news reports, the whale’s decomposing skin became “fur” and its blood became “mysterious red fluid” floating in the water. Nothing (apart from spiders and wasps) brings out the worst in journalism like a decomposing whale, it seems. Continue reading...

From a new variety of Turkish parsnip to Madagascar coffee beans, the discoveries offer the prospect of better crops, medicinal uses and new garden displaysFrom new parsnips and herbs to begonias and roses, the world’s plant hunters discovered more than 1,700 new species last year, offering the prospect of better crops and new colours and scents in the garden.The State of the World’s Plants report, led by scientists at the Royal Botanical Garden Kew in the UK and published on Thursday, reveals a cornucopia of new plants and assesses the risk to the plant world from pests and invasive species. Continue reading...

Although not a replacement for bariatric surgery, temporary balloon could be used as early intervention or for those who do not want, or cannot have, surgeryA balloon that can be swallowed and then filled with water while in the stomach can help obese people to lose large amounts of weight without invasive surgery, a new study has shown.Bariatric surgery to reduce the size of the stomach is highly effective, but anaesthesia for somebody who is very overweight can be risky. Those who want to undergo the surgery must also undergo a long period of preparation to ready them physically and psychologically. It is expensive, and there is a long waiting list in the UK, even though NHS guidance recommends it be considered. Continue reading...

WHO figures show people in Britain are more likely to die from dirty air than those living in some other comparable countriesPeople in the UK are 64 times as likely to die of air pollution as those in Sweden and twice as likely as those in the US, figures from the World Health Organisation reveal.Britain, which has a mortality rate for air pollution of 25.7 for every 100,000 people, was also beaten by Brazil and Mexico – and it trailed far behind Sweden, the cleanest nation in the EU, with a rate of 0.4. Continue reading...

My father, Balasubramaniam Kathirgamathamby, who has died of cancer aged 69, was a senior research chemist who specialised in coatings and formulation chemistry, developing fireproof architectural coatings, barnacle-resistant marine paints and drug excipients. He also invented a variant of the pigment ultramarine.His interest in ultramarine began while learning of its use in the Taj Mahal during part-time study for an archaeology degree at the North East London Polytechnic (now University of East London) in the late 1970s. This interest stayed with him and, many years later, while working for Holliday Pigments as a research chemist, he invented a method of making a pigment composition that did not possess the limitations (instability and decomposition) associated with ultramarine in acidic conditions. Removing these limitations enabled ultramarine to be used in applications such as plastics, inks and paints. Continue reading...

The 2,000-year-old Antikythera shipwreck is considered the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century. It included ancient, ornate pottery, weapons, a skeleton that provides scientists with their first real hope of sequencing DNA from a shipwreck victim, and the famous Antikythera mechanism - thought to be the world’s first computerImages and footage courtesy of Michael Tsimperopoulos and Brett Seymour/EUA/WHOI/Argo.

With funding from the US National Science Foundation and other government grants, scientists and meteorologists from the Center for Severe Weather Research try to get close to supercell storms and tornadoes. They’re trying to better understand tornado structure and strength, how low-level winds affect and damage buildings, and to learn more about tornado formation and prediction. Continue reading...

Far from being the special result of insular evolution, Komodo dragons are the last survivors of a group of huge lizards that ranged over much of AustralasiaIn 1910, Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek was stationed on Flores Island in eastern Indonesia within the Dutch colonial administration, when he received word of a “land crocodile” of unusually large size living on the nearby island of Komodo. Intrigued, he set out to Komodo to investigate for himself. He returned with a photo and the skin of the animal, which he sent to Pieter Ouwens, then director of the Java Zoological Museum and Botanical Gardens in Buitenzorg (now Bogor). The animal was not a crocodile of any sort, but a large monitor lizard. Ouwens realised that this animal was new to science and published the first formal description of the animal, which we know now as Komodo dragon, Varanus komodoensis (Ouwens, 1912). Continue reading...

Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queriesWay before the internet, people put a great deal of effort into getting “likes”. You could even say that one’s ability to generate likes is a primary human concern. Babies are useless, so it’s very important that people like them. If nobody likes them, they may die. Hence they inadvertently do loads of stuff to get on the right side of people. They smile, cling to fingers, copy sounds and gestures, and gaze endearingly into people’s eyes. At first they don’t “know” what they’re doing, but they pretty soon get the hang of doing it all on purpose, and in relation to other people who, one hopes, like them all the more for it. Gradually they learn to speak, and finally to write thank you letters.Related: Do women have a G-spot? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Nichi Hodgson Continue reading...

To many these past 12 months seem as if we have already slipped into a parallel universe but Brexit and Trump are nothing compared to the alternate universes some astronomers are contemplatingThey call it the multiverse. It’s a cosmos in which there are multiple universes. And by multiple, I mean an infinite number. These uncountable realms sit side by side in higher dimensions that our senses are incapable of perceiving directly.Yet increasingly astronomers and cosmologists seem to be invoking the multiverse to explain puzzling observations.

People who have had too little sleep are considered less attractive, in poorer health and less appealing to socialise with, a psychology study has foundNever mind the pallid face, wrinkles and bloodshot eyes. Missing out on sleep can harm your social life as well as your looks, researchers say.Psychologists found that people who had too little sleep were not only regarded as less attractive and in poorer health than when they had rested, they were also considered less appealing to socialise with.

Almost 95% of those seeking drugs and advice online safely ended their pregnancy without medical intervention, say researchers, although women should still be wary of scammersA study into women who seek abortion pills online in the face of strict laws against terminations has found that almost 95% safely ended their pregnancy without surgical intervention.Experts say the study underscores the safety of medical abortion, and highlights that women who go on to experience symptoms of possible complications do follow advice to seek medical help at clinics or hospitals.

‘Metabolically healthy obese’ are 50% more likely to suffer heart disease than those of normal weight, finds University of Birmingham studyPeople who are obese run an increased risk of heart failure and stroke even if they appear healthy, without the obvious warning signs such as high blood pressure or diabetes, according to a major new study.The findings, presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Porto, Portugal, may be the final death knell for the claim that it is possible to be obese but still metabolically healthy – or “fat but fit” – say scientists. Continue reading...

Scientists discover humans can correctly identify canine emotions – with women better at it than menHumans can determine a dog’s mood by the sound of its growl, scientists have found, with women showing greater ability than men.While previous studies have found that humans can unpick the context of barks, the latest study investigated whether the same was true of canine grumbles, with some previous research suggesting humans struggle to differentiate between playful and aggressive vocalisations.

Other child killers have slid off into obscurity, but Brady and fellow Moors murderer Myra Hindley have fascinated and revolted the nation for 50 years. We still haven’t heard the last of themHe has been, for half a century, “the most hated man in Britain”, the walking embodiment of evil, an unrepentant Antichrist and exhibit No 1 in the argument for bringing back the death penalty. Now he has departed in a final irony: the man whom many would have cheerfully killed with their bare hands was denied for years by medical science and the laws of the land his desire to end his own life.Ian Brady was the main protagonist in the Moors murders, a title that now has the echo of an old horror film rather than the grim reality of the killing of five children – Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans. Along with his accomplice, Myra Hindley, who died in prison in 2002, Brady represented the darkest side of the national psyche: unredeemed and unredeemable. But why has he cast such a baleful shadow for so long when other child killers, sexual torturers and savage pyschopaths have been able to slide off into the relative obscurity of psychiatric wings and solitary confinement? Why was it that Brady was able to embody for so many the almost biblical notion of evil? Continue reading...

The creation of artificial ovaries for humans is a step closer after birth of healthy pups from mice given ‘ovarian bioprosthesis’Infertile mice have given birth to healthy pups after having their fertility restored with ovary implants made with a 3D printer.Researchers created the synthetic ovaries by printing porous scaffolds from a gelatin ink and filling them with follicles, the tiny, fluid-holding sacs that contain immature egg cells.

Many phrases the British love to hate are actually old English expressions – while many genuine Americanisms are accepted without a fuss. Are they a bad thing? You do the mathDo you hate Americanisms? Lots of people wince and reach for the green ink if they hear a British person speak of death as “passing”. Yet that euphemism is present in Chaucer and Shakespeare. What about “oftentimes”? It’s in the King James Bible. And even “the fall” for autumn is good old 17th-century English, a shortening of the traditional term “fall of the leaf”.By contrast, some phrases that appear echt-British are, in fact, American. A “stiff upper lip” first appeared in a Massachusetts newspaper in 1815. Americans also coined the terms “commuter” and “teenager”, which don’t seem to prompt so much of a post-imperial cringe from those who want to take back control of our linguistic borders. Continue reading...

Classical music makes shoppers buy more. Gentle tunes can cure insomnia. How? Writer, composer and science lecturer John Powell explainsLike many music lovers I’ve always had a fascination withthe emotional power. How can a combination of sounds make all the hairs on your arms stand on end, or make you cry? I’ve always enjoyed reading newspaper and magazine articles about the psychological effects of music, but apart from the general conclusion that “music is magical”, they rarely provide any scientific answers.But there are answers as to why music has such power over us. Since the middle of the 20th century, music psychologists have been carrying out a wide range of fascinating research into how our brains and bodies respond to music – but most of this has been relayed to us in formal scientific language, so I thought it would be a good idea to gather together the most interesting facts and theories from this large body of work and present them in plain language for the general reader. Continue reading...

Metallica has joined a long line of musicians, including Muse and Gabriella Cilmi, who say they want to play the first concert in space. Is it all just more hot air?So Metallica want to play the first gig in space. Well, of course they do. Join the back of the queue lads, behind Gabriella Cilmi and the bloke from Muse. Because when it comes to pop and the final frontier, it seems every man and his Laika fancies their chances. And why not? Playing in space is glamorous, it’s futuristic, and nobody’s ever done it before. It sounds like a right laugh, does playing in space.Just listen to Lars Ulrich: “Living in San Francisco which is the gateway to the future, obviously all those things are being planned around San Francisco to a degree, so I feel that we are close to that [playing in space] as we can be,” he told radio station SiriusXM last week. He added: “I don’t really want to commit to anything other than to say that if there really is a possibility for this to happen, then we will happily be at the very front of that line.” Continue reading...

Being the only girl to do an engineering diploma in my school year group has not stood in the way of my ambition to design aeroplanes or work at Nasa

An 18ft nodosaur, one of the world’s best preserved armoured dinosaurs, has been unveiled at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Alberta, Canada. The fossil was found in 2011 in Alberta’s oilsands, and was subject to 7,000 hours of reconstruction work before being put on display

Fossil of 18ft nodosaur found in 2011 in Alberta’s tar sands goes on display after 7,000 hours of reconstruction workIt has been compared to a dinosaur mummy, a lifelike sculpture and even a dragon from Game of Thrones.Now, 110 million years after it died, the 18ft-long nodosaur – hailed as the best-preserved armoured dinosaur in the world – has been unveiled at a Canadian museum. Continue reading...

Women who have never given birth also have higher risk, pointing to importance of reproductive factors in cardiovascular health, say researchersWomen who start the menopause earlier have a greater risk of being taken to hospital with heart failure, researchers have found.The US-based study also revealed that women who have never given birth have more than a two-fold increase in the risk of a common type of the condition, known as diastolic heart failure, compared with women who have children. Continue reading...

Standing Rock is cast as an environmental protest, but the Native American Water Protectors are part of a religious tradition that predates ChristianityOn May 15, the Dakota Access Pipeline is scheduled to start delivering oil. The indigenous community of Standing Rock, North Dakota, has protested the pipeline for two years since its re-routing. Media coverage has largely portrayed the protest as an environmental movement and discussion of indigenous religion is rare. However, while environmental protection is a central and connected issue, discussions of Standing Rock that do not include an understanding of Native American religious traditions are missing important context.Over 5,000 years ago, the inhabitants of a village along the Green River, Kentucky, practiced the Cult of the River Keepers. Skeletons show evidence of auditory exostoses, a growth of cartilaginous tissue on ear bones that is found in humans who are repeatedly exposed to cold water – suggesting they frequently performed religious ceremonies in the river. Today, Native American cultures in the midwest and south regard rivers are sacred entities, known as the Long Man or Long Snake, and continue to perform religious ceremonies in them. In the Missouri River, indigenous Water Protectors have tried to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline from passing through a sacred landscape. Understood in its religious context, the Standing Rock Sioux are not anti-industry protestors, but practitioners of religious elements that may predate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by centuries. Continue reading...

Donald Trump allegedly believes that exercise is bad because the body has a finite store of energy: exactly the logic used to warn 19th century women off educationA piece in this month’s New Yorker magazine has drawn attention to Donald Trump’s alleged views on exercise: “... he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.”While this may be a joke or a weak excuse for being one of the least active Presidents in living memory (if we don’t count golf), as a theory about the human body it actually has a fairly long pedigree. In the late nineteenth century ideas about industry, fatigue, thermodynamics and evolution came crashing together, producing some over-cautious advice for athletes, and some terrible advice for women. Continue reading...

Utopian and dystopian visions of an AI-dominated future are everywhere, from films to tech company press releases. But what are people really concerned about? The Royal Society created a public dialogue to find outWhen we don’t know much about a new technology, we talk in generalisations. Those generalisations are often also extreme: the utopian drives of those who are developing it on one hand, and the dystopian visions that help society look before it leaps on the other.These tensions are true for machine learning, the set of techniques that enables much of what we currently think of as Artificial Intelligence. But, as the Royal Society’s recently published report Machine learning: the power and promise of computers that learn by example showed, we are already at the point where we can do better than the generalisations; give members of the public the opportunity to interrogate the “experts” and explore the future, and they come up with nuanced expectations in which context is everything. Continue reading...

Being a professional perfumer I understand the potential of our olfactory skills. And it’s amazing what you can achieve with practiceI’ve spent 20 years learning to recognise different aromas; I make perfume for a living, and I run workshops to guide people around the world of fragrance. Apart from those whose sense of smell is irreparably damaged, we humans get better with practice pretty quickly. Even people who believe they have a terrible sense of smell are often good at it. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to read that, despite what many believe, human noses rival those of dogs and rodents.Developing our sense of smell is similar to the way we get better at identifying sounds. If you haven’t listened to a lot of music, you’ll have a hard time spotting the difference between a clarinet and an oboe, mandolin or guitar, tabla or congas. As soon as you practise listening and see the instruments being played, you improve. Continue reading...

The fully networked life can be a frantic one. Prioritise major tasks, filing, and time itself to find some calm in the stormMore emails, more media, more madness. For all the progress that we have made in the past 20 years, life often seems more difficult than ever. In her new book, Fully Connected, Julia Hobsbawm argues we’re heading for a health crisis if we don’t “balance face-to-face and technology, and discover where to find the off switch”.Certainly, it’s good to take a breath, but we still have to get things done – with distractions at every turn. Here are some solid foundations that can help bring order to the chaos. Continue reading...

When it comes to attracting pollinators, buttercup petals hold all the aces. They even provide their guests with heatingDo you like butter? Hold a buttercup under your chin and folklore says if there is a yellow reflection on your skin it means you do. But the real reason the flowers seem to shine with an intense glittering yellow is nothing to do with butter but about advertising the plants to insect pollinators from a great distance.Buttercups get their bright colour from yellow pigments in the petals’ surface layer, and their shiny gloss is thanks to layers of air just beneath the surface reflecting the light like mirrors. The glowing phenomenon is unique in plants, although something similar happens with some butterfly and bird wings. Continue reading...

Jupiter the giant planet currently dominates Britain’s twilit skies, and even binoculars will reveal its four main moonsThe giant planet Jupiter, brighter than any star, stands 30° to 35° high in the S during Britain’s evening twilight at present and tracks westwards to dip beneath our W horizon about one hour before dawn.

My friend Kwame Owusu-Bempah, who has died of cancer aged 72, underwent a rare journey from a village childhood in colonial Ghana to a position as an academic of distinction in the UK.Born in Akokofe, near Kumasi, Ghana’s second city, Bempah (he was never known as Kwame), the son of farmers, had a love of study. He was an academically gifted child and progressed to study at the British seminary near Cape Coast, many miles from his home. Being away from his family taught him independence, and the art of creating new families around himself wherever he went. Continue reading...

Alzheimer’s disease affects millions of people worldwide. But despite decades of research costing hundreds of millions of dollars, we have no cure. Why?Subscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast why not recommend it, or any other podcasts you’ve loved to podcasts@theguardian.com to be in with a chance of featuring in our Hear Here column.It was first identified in 1901 by German scientist Alois Alzheimer; today, about 30 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer’s disease, a figure that could triple by 2050, according to some estimates. Continue reading...