On 22 April – Earth Day – scientists and champions of their cause around the world will mobilise. We’d like to hear from you if you are taking part

Orgasms are big business, but there’s surprising little scientific research being done into how they actually work. There are urgent reasons to fix this

Hannah Devlin explores the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, which aims to use lasers to propel spherical sails to Alpha Centauri - our closest star system - over four light years awaySubscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterOn 12 April 2016, Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and physicist Yuri Milner announced a new and ambitious initiative called Breakthrough Starshot. Kickstarted with $100 million, the initiative aims to develop and demonstrate new technology, which will enable unmanned space flight at 20% of the speed of light, in the hope of laying the foundations for a mission to Alpha Centauri – our closest star system. But how does this proposed technology work? And what are some of the barriers and challenges in the way? Continue reading...

Social network says it’s assembled a team to build technology that allows you to ‘think’ commands at your smartphone. But what if you think that’s scary?

We are only just starting to understand the shape of the molecular key that will unlock life’s secretsWhen Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the world’s top artificial intelligence theorists, mused about how superintelligent robots might wipe out humans he speculated that perhaps they would solve one of the science’s holy grails: predicting protein structure from DNA information. In Mr Yudkowsky’s words these robots would then “synthesise customised proteins ... building even more sophisticated molecular machines. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead.” Mr Yudkowsky’s apocalyptic scenario rests on something science has pondered with no answer for decades: why can’t we say what determines a protein’s shape?This is not some idle speculation. Proteins are the bedrock of living systems, intimately involved in every physiological process from triggering an immune response to thinking. Good health requires a fine balance of proteins. An imbalance, and disease often strikes. Cancer is traced to an overproduction of proteins. Misfolding proteins have been linked to type 2 diabetes, while the strange bundling of them is thought to be behind the death of brain cells in Parkinson’s disease. Proteins’ function is dependent on their form, which is the result of a folding up of hundreds of amino acids – its constituent parts – into a specific and complex 3D structure. That configuration determines what the protein does: whether it becomes an enzyme to accelerate a chemical reaction; or a receptor passing signals to a cell’s molecular machinery. Crucially, a drug can alter a protein’s function by binding to it in a particular spot. Designing medicines to target diseases requires knowing what proteins are involved and their form. After a half century we can identify 100,000 protein shapes. But we have a database of 100m proteins. That is why we have few molecular keys capable of picking the lock to understanding disease-causing proteins. Continue reading...

The fluid, which defies everyday laws of motion, is a rare achievement and provides a platform to study an otherwise hypothetical form of matterScientists have created a fluid that exhibits the bizarre property of “negative mass” in an experiment that appears to defy the everyday laws of motion.Push an object and Newton’s laws (and common experience) dictate that it will accelerate in the direction in which it was shoved. Continue reading...

Scientists hope protein infusion which rejuvenated brains of aged mice could combat mental decline in older peopleScientists have reversed memory and learning problems in aged mice with infusions of a protein found in human umbilical cord blood.The striking results have raised hopes for a treatment that staves off mental decline in old age, but researchers stressed that more studies, including human trials, are needed before the therapy can be considered for clinical use.

Exoplanet LHS 1140b is believed to be about 40% larger than Earth and lies 39 light years away in the constellation of Cetus, orbiting a red dwarf starA rocky planet that orbits a red dwarf star has been revealed as the latest contender for the best place to hunt for life beyond the solar system.The newfound world was spotted as it crossed the face of its parent star and cast an almost imperceptible shadow that was detected by the MEarth-South observatory in the Chilean desert.

New discoveries lead to new ideas – and sometimes the revival of old ones, such as the relationships between the earliest of the dinosaurs

From Newton to Einstein to quantum physics – an accessible survey ranges from pioneering ideas to today’s scientific perplexitiesThe Cambridge polymath William Whewell wrote in 1837 that Isaac Newton’s introduction of a universal law of gravity a century and a half earlier was “indisputably and incomparably the greatest scientific discovery ever made”. The judgment still looks sound. Gravity continues to make headlines, as we saw last year when astronomers first directly observed gravity waves, predicted a century before by Albert Einstein using his theory of gravity. This was not revolutionary theory, he often said, but simply a rational development of the Newtonian framework it superseded.In The Ascent of Gravity, the science writer and former astrophysicist Marcus Chown traces our understanding of gravity from Newton’s pioneering ideas to the present state of well-informed perplexity. Einstein’s theory of gravity has passed every observational test with flying colours but no one has succeeded in making it consistent with the other great theory of modern physics, quantum mechanics, which accurately describes the world on the smallest scale. Although physicists have made impressive progress towards a quantum theory of gravity, the subject is in a bit of a mess. Continue reading...

Study records what appears to be the first evidence for mind-opening state experienced by users of LSD, ketamine and psilocybin

On 22 April, from Oklahoma to Greenland, scientists and their champions will mobilise, and in many ways, the March for Science is already a successScience teacher Jackie Scott will be in the streets this Saturday in Little Rock, Arkansas. “I march because my middle school students deserve to have a better world,” she wrote. “They deserve to see what real research looks like and sounds like when it is communicated.”From Oklahoma to Greenland, scientists and their champions will gather on April 22 for the much anticipated March for Science. And in many ways, the event is already a success: because thousands of scientists are speaking up, millions of people are considering how science actually matters to our lives. Continue reading...

Breaking the cycle in which only highly profitable drugs reach the market is not just the responsibility of government

Homo sapiens | Pride and Prejudice | Formula for happiness | Messrs Block and Anderson | The Yotam effectHomo sapiens is the world’s most productive trader, whatever that means, in an ecosystem teeming with life, writes Christine McNulty (Letters, 17 April). Then why is it that the number of wild animals in the world has declined by over 50% since 1970, and that the rate of extinction of species is now somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural background rate? It seems to me that H sapiens is doing its best to destroy the “ecosystem that is teeming with life”, and that this is the consequence largely of free-market capitalism.

The hands of the Doomsday Clock currently stand at two-and-a-half-minutes to midnight. Professor Ray Pierrehumbert of Oxford University and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists explains why support for science and the global March for Science on 22 April is crucial Continue reading...

A recent analysis from a 19th century mass grave has revealed the surprisingly complex dietary - and social - diversity among Napoleon’s armed forcesUnderstanding the historic past can be incredibly challenging. Written records are only as accurate as the knowledge of the author, and historical narratives can be influenced by political orientations and specific agendas. Even accurate depictions of historical events may not reveal the whole truth; how some people may have experienced a particular event may differ radically from how the majority of people experienced it. The version of history that makes its way into history books can be incomplete.That’s why archaeology is necessary to corroborate written documents of historical events. Physical evidence is a powerful check on speculation, deceit, and inaccuracy. Continue reading...

Comedian Rob Newman is angry because he thinks scientists are too ready to devalue people and to belittle human experience. And that made me … curiousIn an interview in last Sunday’s Observer, comedian Rob Newman passed judgement on the scientific community. “Scientists think we’re all stupid,” he claimed. Worse still, we appear to him to be consumed by the view that “the nastier you can be about people then the more rigorous and critical your thinking must be.”In the court of Judge Newman, Stephen Hawking is guilty of calling human beings “scum”; Brian Cox stands accused of equating brains to computers; and Francis Crick (who’s not alive to answer back) is to be censured for reducing the joys and sorrows of human existence to the product of molecular and cellular machinations. These are serious charges, but do they really stand up? Continue reading...

Scientists are ditching their labs for the streets in a mass protest against the Trump administration’s war on facts, but will the effort resonate with skeptics?

Plant-based products meant to resemble animal foods are becoming even more convincing and delicious – and lowering the barriers to a vegan lifestyleSome of the most anticipated and iconic promises of the future have come up empty. There are no flying cars, interstellar teleporters, floating hoverboards, or fully functional, live-in robotic house cleaners. Not only have we not colonised Mars – we haven’t even set foot on it.But if there is one bright spot, it’s that the future of food is on the verge of living up to its hype, and possibly even surpassing it. Plant-based products meant to resemble animal foods are becoming even more convincing and delicious. Though I personally like tofu and tempeh, no one would ever confuse those high-protein plant foods for meat. That’s why it was so impressive that when Whole Foods accidentally sold Beyond Meat’s plant-based “chick’n” as actual chicken in a salad a few years ago, no one seemed to notice. Last year, Impossible Foods debuted its veggie burger that bleeds – and they will be developing plant-based chicken, steak, seafood and dairy. Continue reading...

The German computer scientist says artificial intelligence will surpass humans’ in 2050, enabling robots to have fun, fall in love – and colonise the galaxyIn a soft-furnished studio space behind a warehouse in west Berlin, a group of international scientists are debating our robot future. An engineer from a major European carmaker is just finishing a cautiously optimistic progress report on self-driving vehicles. Increasingly, he explains, robot cars are learning to differentiate cars from more vulnerable moving objects such as pedestrians or cyclists. Some are already better than humans at telling apart different breeds of dog. “But of course,” he says, “these are small steps.”Then a tall, athletic man with a light-grey three-piece suit and a greying goatee who has spent most of the morning playing with his smartphone strides to the podium, and suddenly baby steps become interstellar leaps. “Very soon, the smartest and most important decision makers might not be human,” he says, with the pitying smile of a parent explaining growing pains to a teenager. “We are on the verge not of another industrial revolution, but a new form of life, more like the big bang.” Continue reading...

Increase in orbital traffic from thousands of communications satellites could lead to 50% rise in catastrophic crashes, says studyPlans to launch “mega constellations” of thousands of communications satellites to allow for global wireless internet could lead to a rise in collisions and build-up of dangerous space junk in Earth’s orbit, a study warns.Google, SpaceX, Boeing and Samsung are among the companies vying to launch global broadband networks by deploying thousands of tiny satellites into low orbit. The first launches are planned for next year. Continue reading...

Scientists have been able to examine a giant shipworm for the very first time. The giant worm was found near the Philippines, inside a giant tusk-like case. Shipworms are a form of clam and are found in wooden structures in the sea Continue reading...

Archaeologist who advised on the design of a replica Roman villa for the Channel 4 series Rome Wasn’t Built in a DayIn 2010 the archaeologist Dai Morgan Evans, who has died aged 73 after suffering from cancer, designed a replica Roman villa in Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury, and advised six craftsmen on how to build it. The project, shown on the Channel 4 TV series Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, used only tools and materials known in the 4th century AD, and drew on a manual from 25BC by the Roman architect Vitruvius and what had been learned from excavating an original building on the site.The challenges in completing the two-storey structure included erecting a massive timber frame, regulating the under-floor air flows of a hypocaust heating system, laying mosaic floors so that the tiles would stick and setting up a bath house with a plunge pool. The following year the Roman town house at English Heritage’s Wroxeter Roman City site opened its doors to visitors, including a great number of school groups. Walls of one room were left in a variety of stages of completion, so people could see what lay beneath the rendering and fresco finishes, and gain some idea of Roman ingenuity. Continue reading...

First ever observed case of ‘river piracy’ saw the Slims river disappear as intense glacier melt suddenly diverted its flow into another watercourseAn immense river that flowed from one of Canada’s largest glaciers vanished over the course of four days last year, scientists have reported, in an unsettling illustration of how global warming dramatically changes the world’s geography.The abrupt and unexpected disappearance of the Slims river, which spanned up to 150 metres at its widest points, is the first observed case of “river piracy”, in which the flow of one river is suddenly diverted into another. Continue reading...

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has coloured perceptions of electroconvulsive therapy, but the modern reality is differentThe public perception of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is rooted in cultural depictions, not least the dramatic scene in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in which Jack Nicholson is held down as the treatment is carried out.Sylvia Plath’s account in The Bell Jar is hardly less brutal. Describing ECT, administered without general anesthetic, the protagonist says: “With each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.”

ECT stages comeback after years of decline, with thousands treated on NHS despite lack of scientific explanation for effectsThe use of electroconvulsive therapy to treat serious mental health problems, a procedure long thought to be in steep decline, is on the rise again in England, a Guardian analysis indicates.

Rhododendron ponticum, when it runs wild, blocks out the sun, smothers other plants, is toxic to wildlife and can spread sudden oak death. It’s also extremely difficult to eradicateRhododendrons are flowering now in a magnificent springtime spectacle – but they are thugs, invading some of our finest and most precious countryside with catastrophic impacts on wild plants and animals.Rhododendron ponticum was first brought to Britain, probably from Spain or Portugal, around 1763 for botanical gardens and used on big estates as cover for game birds. But the shrub has spread out of control with huge damage to many native woodlands, heaths and other wild places like the Snowdonia national park. The plant now covers 98,700 hectares, roughly 3.3 per cent of Britain’s total woodland, a report by the Forestry Commission found, and Scotland has been hit particularly hard, where it covers 53,000 hectares. Continue reading...

One of your correspondents likened Ayn Rand’s “selfishness” to “animal behaviour…” (Letters, 13 April). The belief that fierce competition or altruistic cooperation are the only alternatives, in both evolution and socio-politics, is the legacy of Charles Darwin. The science has moved on, providing a justification for the trader principle that has been so successful as the basis of free-market capitalism. As Ayn Rand said: “The moral symbol of respect for human beings is the trader.”The new science of epigenetics is demonstrating that it is the organism not the “gene” that drives evolution. (See the new A-level biology syllabus, epigenetics.) Genetic determinism is dead. Organisms actively “trade” the products of metabolism. They switch genes on and off, and tweak them, in response to environmental influences. It turns out that genes do not use life-forms; life-forms use their genes. We humans switch our genes on and off and tweak their effects by means of language. We can change our minds. We have free will. The old Malthusian idea that resources are fixed and in short supply profoundly influenced Darwin and his contemporary, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. But resources are neither fixed nor in short supply. Thanks to the dynamic nature of the trading principle working throughout nature, what was once a barren rock, slowly rotating in cold space, is now teeming with ecosystem-generating life. Its most productive trader? Homo sapiens.

Ahead of a new documentary about Nasa’s ground crews, astronaut Jim Lovell talks about the team that saved his life during 1970’s ill-fated moon missionIt is unlikely there is anyone who has more appreciation for the work of Nasa’s mission control than Captain Jim Lovell. His Apollo 13 mission was nearly destroyed when an oxygen tank in its main command module exploded. His spaceship was crippled and only narrowly coaxed to a safe return to Earth thanks to his crew’s heroic efforts – and the crucial aid of mission control.Lovell was commander of Apollo 13 but was forced to abandon his mission’s planned lunar landing when the blast, which occurred 200,000 miles from Earth and two days into its journey in April 1970, triggered a major loss of power. Cabin heating stopped working, the water supply was disrupted and carbon dioxide began to build up. Lovell and crewmen Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were facing death. Continue reading...

We’re taught to seek our individuality, but perhaps we should just try to fit in and resist the craze for self-improvementA vast array of books and courses is offered on self-development and self-improvement. Our lives seem to be in a state of flux and change, but legions of coaches, therapists and lifestyle counsellors are on hand to steer us safely through these choppy waters by teaching us self-esteem and authenticity. The message often is: be yourself! Look within yourself for answers and then you can achieve what you want.This message might once have been emancipatory. When the counter-cultures of the 1960s objected to oppressive structures by looking inwards and seeking self-realisation, there was no shortage of good reasons to throw off the shackles of a rigid society. However, as social theorist Axel Honneth argues, while this may once have constituted a legitimate form of resistance to “the system” (patriarchy, capitalism, etc), it has subsequently become the basis upon which that very same system now legitimises itself. Continue reading...

The president’s savaging of environmental safeguards is a direct attack on reason and researchNext Saturday, in Washington, DC, and in hundreds of rallies around the world, scientists and their supporters will stage what is likely to be the largest gathering of its kind in history. The March for Science, an idea hatched by a few enthusiastic people on Reddit, has mobilised scientists and their supporters as never before.As a colleague observed: “You know you’re in trouble when scientists take to the streets.” He’s right. I’ve worked closely with scientists for decades and, by training and temperament, they tend to be happiest in the lab, testing and retesting experiment results – among the last groups of people you might expect to find protesting. Continue reading...

Programme will help protect 200 million in world’s poorest countriesThe UK has pledged to double the funding it gives to fighting neglected tropical diseases, in a move that will protect more than 200 million people around the world from debilitating and painful conditions. The funding programme is expected to wipe out the parasitic disease visceral leishmaniasis in Asia, eliminate Guinea worm and save hundreds of thousands of people from blindness and other disabilities.Speaking ahead of the World Health Organisation conference on neglected tropical diseases in Geneva on Wednesday, Priti Patel, the international development secretary, said such diseases belonged to the last century. “They cause unimaginable suffering and pain to some of the world’s poorest people, forcing them into a deeper cycle of poverty with no way out. Yet they are treatable,” said Patel. Continue reading...

A 10-part drama will explore the many facets of the physicist’s lifeHis image has beamed out at us from posters, T-shirts and even mugs, transforming his name into handy shorthand for eccentric genius and ensuring that Albert Einstein is considered the original mad scientist, science’s first celebrity and, arguably, still its greatest.Related: Albert Einstein in Manchester – archive, 10 June 1921 Continue reading...

The city is successfully fighting fat by promoting tap water in its schools, along with healthy cooking classes and a ban on fast food sponsorshipThe city of Amsterdam is leading the world in ending the obesity epidemic, thanks to a radical and wide-reaching programme which is getting results even among the poorest communities that are hardest to reach.Better known for tulips and bicycles, Amsterdam has the highest rate of obesity in the Netherlands, with a fifth of its children overweight and at risk of future health problems.

The English language is full of value judgments. These are taken over by the computer algorithms that use it. What can we do about these unconscious biases?“Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” wrote David Hume. Language, our instrument of reason, is saturated with value judgments. So what happens when computers – apparently the embodiment of pure mathematical rationality – start to use human language? They reproduce the traces of our passions, of course.A thorough and elegant experiment reported in the journal Science this week shows this clearly. Researchers analysed a gigantic collection of English texts – more than 840bn instances of 2.3m words – and expressed mathematically how likely different words are to appear in the same contexts. This captures the largely unconscious web of associations around any given word with greater subtlety and fidelity than dictionary definitions can do, since people use words with much greater confidence than they can define them. Continue reading...

Flies are often the first visitors to a murder scene. Studying their grisly dining habits can reveal vital clues to help catch the killerFlies are regarded by most people as a nuisance at best, a harbinger of death at worst. They elicit little more than feelings of disgust and many people are happy to kill them without a second thought. But there is another side to the story. The fly is one of nature’s great marvels and, perhaps, the criminologist’s best friend.In addition to familiar forensic clues such as fingerprints, tell-tale hairs and bloodstains, more and more criminal investigators are relying on the services of the humble fly. Forensic entomology is the technical term for using insects to help us solve crimes. Given the nature of the things flies choose to dine on, they are often the first to be found at the grisliest of crime scenes. There is a predictable succession of flies that arrive at a corpse, with different species of fly specialising in eating different parts of the body at different stages of decomposition. Continue reading...

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has ‘almost all of the ingredients you would need to support life as we know it on earth’, says Nasa project scientist, Linda Spilker, on Thursday. Beneath its frozen surface, Enceladus has a saltwater ocean, and the hydrogen – produced in a reaction between heated water and rocks – indicates that the moon has active energy sources

The International Space Station is scheduled to cease operation in 2024 but Russia seems interested in continuing to utilise this orbiting laboratoryNasa and Russia could soon begin talks to extend the life of the International Space Station in order to test life-support systems for the human exploration of the moon.The International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to cease operations in 2024. This was the date set by President Obama in 2014, when the future of the station was being discussed. Continue reading...

Space organization finds that hydrogen erupts out of underground ocean on Enceladus, meaning it has the water, chemistry and energy sources life requiresA tiny moon of Saturn has most of the conditions necessary for life, Nasa announced on Thursday, unveiling a discovery from an underground ocean that makes the world a leading candidate for organisms as humans know them.Scientists stressed that the discovery on a moon named Enceladus is not evidence that life has in fact developed on another world, but they have managed to establish the existence of the water, chemistry and energy sources that are necessary for it. Continue reading...

The faithful and the futurologists imagine life without death. But living forever may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and then what?Good Friday seems a suitable day to consider the fact that, in an era in which life expectancy everywhere has almost doubled, humankind is more confused than ever about death. Nearly half of the British population supposes that death is complete annihilation; an almost equal number still believes in some form of life after death, and, for a subject notably lacking in eyewitness data, a surprisingly small proportion, less than 10%, acknowledge they do not know what happens. Meanwhile, in California but also elsewhere, there are enormously rich men who believe that death is a problem with a technological solution which they hope to live to profit from.Ideals of technological immortality come in two sorts. There are those who hope that their bodies will be preserved or at least prolonged almost indefinitely, usually by freezing. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the present technology allows brains to be frozen and rethawed without being reduced to a unworkable state. To hope that this will be changed by some future breakthroughs is an act of faith at least as remarkable as supposing that Jesus rose from the dead. That belief was at least marked since its earliest appearance by a saving ambiguity about what it might actually mean. Saint Paul, for example, was absolutely certain it had happened but nowhere managed to explain what it materially might have been. Continue reading...

Ducks, red deer, cherry blossoms and leopards in the hill forests of Myanmar are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world Continue reading...

Harvesting syrup from maple trees has been a tradition for centuries, but new techniques are helping sugarers modernize their farms and maximize yieldsThe late March wind tugs at the jackets of Mooretown Elementary students as they clamber after Burr Morse into a wooden sugar shack. Morse, 70, is taking a break from preparing for open house weekend, the annual Vermont maple free-for-all, where 94 farms will open their doors to the public, offering sugar-on-snow, sleigh rides, and maple treats. The sap is temporarily frozen, but sugarers are anticipating potential flow over the weekend, when the temperatures hit a high of 40 degrees.

Team at Israel’s Hebrew University test system that uses lasers and modified bacteria to locate buried devicesA team of researchers at an Israeli university has successfully tested a technology using fluorescent bacteria and lasers that could become a safer system for detecting buried landmines.An estimated 100m landmines are scattered in some 70 countries, a legacy of often long-past conflict, and the devices injure up to 20,000 people a year. Continue reading...

Ian Sample and Nicola Davis delve into the world of reason and ask why do we have it? How does it work? And what insights might our evolutionary past provide?Subscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterLong heralded as one of the last remaining barriers between “man and beast”, our ability to use reason and logic has historically been seen as the most human of behaviours. But as the field of neuroscience and psychology continues to probe our cognitive processes, are the foundations of reasoning now experiencing a shake up? Or, as many argue, are they somehow immune? Continue reading...

The metal’s curious chemistry and propensity to alter enzymes have disfigured royals, killed Romans and gained it notoriety for murdersBullets are dangerous. This may seem like stating the obvious. Of course bullets fired into a body at high velocity are dangerous. But, it turns out that there are other ways that bullets can cause harm, through lead poisoning.

Human army like behaviour of rescuing mates observed in ants raiding termite mounds where pheromone secretion acts as distress callIt sounds like a heroic tale from a classic wartime movie: the rescue of an injured warrior on the battlefield so that they can fight another day. In fact, it is behaviour seen in ants.Researchers have found that a termite-eating species of ant, called Megaponera analis, carries wounded compatriots back from the field. Continue reading...

Life on Earth 600 million years ago comprised enigmatic mattress-like organisms, but some modern ecological rules did applyIn Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams has left Marvin the Paranoid Android stranded and walking in circles (literally) on Sqornshellous Zeta. This is a swampy planet, where the dominant life form is the mattress. Marvin chats with Zem, a perky and affable pocket-sprung mattress, who encourages him to be ‘more mattressy*’. In an infinite universe, Adams tells us, very few things are manufactured, since everything has evolved somewhere, including mattresses. They are harvested and shipped out to be slept on across the galaxy.Douglas Adams certainly liked to play around with ideas in evolution. The unlikely evolution of the babel fish was the cause of a theological existential crisis, and his bureaucratic and bad-tempered Vogons were effectively disowned by evolution as soon as they left the primordial seas of Vogsphere. What I don’t know is whether Douglas Adams had ever read about the Ediacaran biota: fossils from a time when Earth was, briefly, the planet of the mattresses.

This spiralling, three-dimensional coral maze is bleached for the second year in a row, but it can recover – if we act immediatelyAnd so it begins: the end of days. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching for the second year in a row and now, according to the results of helicopter surveys released on Monday, it is the middle part (all 300 miles-plus of it) that is suffering the awful reef stress that comes courtesy of a warming ocean.Related: Australia's politicians have betrayed the Great Barrier Reef and only the people can save it | David Ritter Continue reading...

Researchers discover how laces come undone and offer alternative way to tie them that does knot involve your granny

Survival rates improve across the globe, as increase in cases over 20 years attributed largely to better detection and recordingChildhood cancers have risen across the globe by 13% over 20 years, according to data from the World Health Organization’s cancer section.Cancer in children is comparatively rare; when it does occur it is more likely to have been triggered by something in the child’s genetic makeup than by anything to do with lifestyle or the environment. Continue reading...