Cruise missiles launched from eastern Mediterranean against Assad have been favoured by US military for decades owing to long range and pinpoint accuracyA mainstay of US warfare for more than 20 years, the Tomahawk cruise missile had been considered the most likely weapon for any strike by the Trump administration against the Syrian military. And so it eventuated.The US launched its surprise attack on an inland airbase near Homs early on Thursday morning, with 59 of the missiles deployed from two naval destroyers. Continue reading...

Chris King describes getting his life back since surgery last year, as surgeon says he has progressed faster than anticipatedThe first person in the UK to undergo a double hand transplant has said writing a letter to thank his surgeon has been one the highlights of his first nine months since the operation – that, and being able to applaud his favourite rugby league team.

Goal of finding alien life a step closer with discovery, which marks one of the first times an atmosphere has been spotted around a small, rocky worldAstronomers have found evidence for a hot and steamy atmosphere around an Earth-like planet that circles a red dwarf star in the southern sky.

I visited Peru to find out more about an intriguing ayahuasca study – and to have my own experience with the psychedelic brewI’m sitting on a blue plastic, wipe-down mattress with my back to a wooden pillar. Within arm’s reach on the floor is a small torch to light my way to the toilet during the night, on the other side an orange plastic bucket to puke into. As the light fades my four companions, each with his or her own plastic mattress and bucket, disappear from view while on every side the barks, croaks, growls and cries of jungle life grow louder. Twenty minutes ago I gulped down a draught of the bitter psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca and I have convinced myself that I can feel its hot, unstoppable progress through my body, from my seething guts into my veins and onwards to my brain.This is hardly a recreational drug experience, what with the nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, not to mention the possibility a truly terrifying trip, yet thousands now beat a path to Peru, Ecuador and Brazil every year to drink ayahuasca. Some are just looking for an exotic thrill, but others hope for enlightenment and healing from this ancient plant medicine. In the past few years, many of them have been war veterans desperate to escape the nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Our criticism of gender research has been portrayed as dogmatic feminism – thankfully the scientific community has looked beyond the headlinesAt a time when both science and feminism are under attack, there are welcome signs that neuroscience is showing new openness to critiques of research into sex differences. Mainstream journals increasingly publish studies that reveal how misleading assumptions about the sexes bias the framing of hypotheses, research design and interpretation of findings – and these critiques increasingly come with constructive recommendations, discussions and debates.For example, we, together with other colleagues, made recommendations in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience on best practice in sex/gender neuroscience. Some of the errors and traps we identified included human neuroimaging studies with small sample sizes, and the common “snapshot” approach, which interprets neural associations with sex as a matter of timeless and universal male and female essences, without taking seriously the fact that biological associations might as easily be the effect of social differences as the cause of them. Continue reading...

Humans are less nutritious than other forms of meat, findings show, indicating complex social motivations may be behind our ancestors’ cannibalism

A diving expedition off Easter Island (or Rapa Nui) in the Pacific pushes the boundaries of both technology and the human body to reveal a world of unique species just waiting to be discovered Continue reading...

Jorvik centre opens its doors to public on Saturday after £4.3m restorationThe builders are sitting gossiping on a fence, the groaning man is back in the latrine and the unfortunate woman who has been pregnant for the last 10 years has been allowed to sit down: after 16 months and £4.3m, the Vikings of the Jorvik centre in York are back.The attraction, a recreation of the houses and streets of Viking York situated where archaeologists excavated the real foundations, reopens to the public on Saturday after extensive flooding in December 2015 forced it to close.

Researchers trying to protect the Great Barrier Reef fabricate environmentally safe bait by harnessing the pheromones the marine pests use to communicateMarine biologists may have devised a new way to protect the Great Barrier Reef after decoding the pheromones of the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish.Researchers say the discovery can be used to create pheromone lures that attract the marine pest in large numbers and make them easier to remove. Continue reading...

Efforts to control tobacco have paid off, says study, but warns tobacco epidemic is far from over, with 6.4m deaths attributed to smoking in 2015 aloneOne in 10 deaths around the world is caused by smoking, according to a major new study that shows the tobacco epidemic is far from over and that the threat to lives is spreading across the globe.There were nearly one billion smokers in 2015, in spite of tobacco control policies having been adopted by many countries. That number is expected to rise as the world’s population expands. One in every four men is a smoker and one in 20 women. Their lives are likely to be cut short – smoking is the second biggest risk factor for early death and disability after high blood pressure. Continue reading...

Apes can tell whether a person has an accurate belief about a situation, showing the same level of understanding as human infants, research showsApes are on a par with human infants in being able to tell when people have an accurate belief about a situation or are actually mistaken, researchers say.

Nicola Davis asks theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and science communicator Professor Lawrence Krauss about the secrets of the universeSubscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterWhy is there something rather than nothing? How did life begin? And what are the secrets of our universe? These are just a handful of the questions theoretical physicist and cosmologist Professor Lawrence Krauss takes on every day as the inaugural director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. But what first inspired Krauss to become a scientist? What does the future hold for his own quest of discovery? And how important is science and scientific thinking in our modern world? Continue reading...

Film villains are often depicted with all manner of skin traits - and the association is damaging, say researchersBulbous noses, warts and dark circles under the eyes are among the skin conditions commonly used by filmmakers to indicate villains, researchers have found.A study by a team of US dermatologists has highlighted that while heroes of the silver screen typically have barely a mark on their features, characters with dubious morals are often depicted with all manner of skin traits – an association that, the researchers say, is damaging. Continue reading...

The relationship between physics and maths is deep and satisfying, even before cake gets involved, as Eugenia Cheng will demonstrate - with edible examplesThe power of mathematics to help us understand the natural world is remarkable. Physical laws and principles are very often expressed as mathematical equations. Practically, they allow us to predict real events and develop sophisticated technologies. Philosophically, the question as to whether mathematics is something we invent or discover, and why the physical world should seem to pay it so much respect, still fascinates.Related: Mathematician Eugenia Cheng: ‘We hate having rules imposed on us' Continue reading...

Egypt’s diving is spectacular, and could help revive the country’s tourism industry – but only if the value of its marine life is recognised and protectedTo say the Egyptian economy, much reliant on tourism, has seen a turbulent time of late, would be a woeful understatement. As you travel along the Red Sea coast from Hurghada, through Safaga, and El Quseir, the litter-strewn landscape of low hills and desert occasionally gives way to tourism developments and scattered international hotels. Their gardens are still maintained and the palm trees watered, but call in for a drink and the bars and pools are emptier than their designers expected. Equally, many hotels were never completed and desert-worn signs featuring smiling couples who will never visit, lend a post-apocalyptic air.Related: Tourism with bite: swimming with the great white shark Continue reading...

Early evolution of modern birds is fuzzy, so a fossil foot showing unexpected diversity in penguins shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct is big newsThe theory that birds descended from bipedal dinosaurs, Coelurosaurs to be exact, is now well-established within the palaeontological community. With that one out of the way, bird palaeontologists can focus on more pressing issues, such as the origin and evolution of Neornithes, the group of birds that comprises all living birds. Several groups of extinct birds are known to have existed alongside the dinosaurs, such as the aquatic diving birds Hesperornithiformes, the large, toothed Ichthyornithiformes, and the “opposite birds” Enanthiornithidae, named after the distinct anatomy of their shoulder girdle. None of them gave rise to the birds we see in our backyard today.The early evolution of modern birds is fuzzy, to say the least. Models based on molecular clocks place the origin of Neornithes as far back as the Early Cretaceous, whereas others suggest that modern birds did not diversify until the Late Cretaceous (see Brocklehurst et al., 2012 for a discussion). The sparse fossil record of Mesozoic Neornithes does little to clear things up. Continue reading...

Extended use increases chance of polyps forming in the colon, adding weight to evidence gut bacteria plays a key role in cancer developmentThe overuse of antibiotics could increase a person’s risk of developing bowel cancer, the findings of a US study suggest.Research published in medical journal Gut found extended use of antibiotics significantly increased the chance of polyp formation in the colon, a precursor of bowel cancer. Continue reading...

Scientists at Queensland Brain Institute find noninvasive technique slows progression of Alzheimer’s disease in miceAustralian researchers say they have made a promising step in the future treatment of Alzheimer’s disease after discovering ultrasound can effectively and safely deliver drugs to the damaged brain.Scientists at the Queensland Brain Institute found the noninvasive technique successfully penetrated the blood-brain barrier to deliver a therapeutic antibody to the brain. This then slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in mice, according to a study published in the journal Brain. Continue reading...

After 22 orbits between the planet and its rings, Nasa plans for Cassini to ‘break apart, melt, vaporize and become part of the very planet it left Earth to explore’On its final mission, threading past hazardous cosmic dust and into hurricanes 1.2bn kilometers away, the Cassini spacecraft will end its 20-year journey with humanity’s closest ever look at what goes on in Saturn’s rings and within its clouds.On Tuesday, Nasa scientists unveiled their plan for the storied spacecraft, and their reasoning for driving Cassini to its own destruction: with the spacecraft running out of fuel, they do not want to risk it crashing into and contaminating Saturn’s moons, where there may be conditions for alien life. Continue reading...

Exclusive: More than 2,000 schools and nurseries close to roads with damaging levels of diesel fumes, joint investigation by Guardian and Greenpeace reveals

My father, Don Thomas, who has died aged 88, was inspired to take up an academic life as a biologist, by his childhood love of the rivers, mountains and wildlife of Ceredigion in Wales.Son of Dewi Jones, a farmer and poet, and his wife, Kate, Don was born at Llangeitho, a village near the market town of Tregaron, and attended Tregaron grammar school. He was always very grateful for the way that the school helped him to expand his horizons academically. By 1954 he had been awarded a BSc in zoology and a PhD from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, where he met his future wife, Joy Robinson. They married the following year. Continue reading...

Once attached to the European mainland, a new study shows how catastrophic flooding led to Britain becoming an island about 125,000 years agoBrexit might be causing political chaos but whatever Theresa May has up her sleeve it is unlikely to be as catastrophic as the first separation of Britain from the continent.A new study has revealed how giant waterfalls and, later, a megaflood severed our connection to France, resulting in the creation of island Britain and the watery moat of the English Channel. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific conceptsSince sheep have been farmed for thousands of years, why have no breeds evolved into being less nervous of humans?Paul Dodd, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire Continue reading...

Sleep is final frontier for French scientists studying microgravity as they seek 24 men willing to eat and perform all bodily functions in bed for 60 daysWanted: young, fit and healthy men willing to lie on their backs and do absolutely nothing for two months. Wage: €16,000.Researchers at France’s space medical institute are advertising for what could be, quite literally, a dream job. They are seeking volunteers to spend 60 days flat on their back to study the effects of microgravity, a state of virtual weightlessness. Continue reading...

Psychologists have been studying visual search in the lab for decades, in order to understand how we might have developed real-world ‘foraging’ behaviour. But just how similar are the two?One of the big questions in vision research over the past 40 years has asked how we effectively search around our visual environment. Search is something that we unwittingly engage in every day of our lives – whether it’s looking for our car keys, scrabbling around for a lost contact lens, or rummaging around in a bag for a lost pen lid. But the way in which researchers have classically tested the limits of visual search have looked very different to what we might think of as search in the real world. Continue reading...

Science isn’t just about explosions. But can children as young as 3 understand what it’s really about?There are few words more misunderstood than the term “science”. If you relied on the subject categories in some media outlets, you’d be forgiven for taking home the message that “science” is gadgets and technology, or pretty pictures of flowers and insects, or the latest health advice.But none of this stuff is really “science”. Science is a method for finding out how things work. In its simplest guise, a question is posed, a potential answer framed, and then an experiment designed and performed to see if the answer is right. Continue reading...

Cave discoveries suggest Indigenous Australians’ strong connection with animals may have its roots in the exotic species their ancestors encountered in SulawesiA cave dig in Indonesia has unearthed a unique collection of prehistoric ornaments and artworks that date back in some instances to at least 30,000 years ago. The site is thought to have been used by some of the world’s earliest cave artists.Published this week, our new findings challenge the long-held view that hunter-gatherer communities in the Pleistocene (“ice age”) of south-east Asia were culturally impoverished. Continue reading...

Study reveals fall in birth weight in areas of the Tennessee Valley which had greatest boom in coal-fired power plant activity following nuclear closuresChildren in a region of the US were born smaller after the area switched from nuclear plants to coal-fired power stations, new research has found.The study looked at of the impact of nuclear power plant closures in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979 – the most serious such accident in US history – in which one of the power station’s reactors underwent a partial meltdown. Continue reading...

Displays of public anger, or moral outrage, are more visible than ever. But the reasons for this are more complicated than you might thinkWhen 109 travellers entering the United States were detained by an executive order blocking citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, tens of thousands of Americans gathered all over the country to voice their anger. The policy had little to no direct effect on the protesters themselves.Related: Britain must not change how it measures child poverty. And this is why | Kitty Stewart Continue reading...

Can an interest in science unite a divided society? No, concludes research based on reading habits of those from right and left of the political spectrumHopes that science and its unending quest for the truth can mend the cracks in a divided society have taken a hit as new research has found liberals and conservatives share little common ground on the subject – apart from a fascination with dinosaurs.Because science intends – in theory at least – to accrue facts from solid evidence, it stands a chance of bringing people together on issues they all agree with, such as the Earth circling the sun, and the first five digits of pi. That, the hope goes, might help reverse the social fragmentation that increasingly pits different groups against one another.

Of course Cancer Research UK’s campaign is a worthy cause. But its nauseous pinkification reasserts gender stereotypes – and puts off donorsBeset upon by pink fluff on all sides, like awaking to find yourself trapped in Barbara Cartland’s musty closet, we’re once more in the midst of Race for Life fundraising season. It’s an important and worthy cause, and yet many hearts (soft, kind hearts) can’t help but sink at the pinkification. “I’ll donate later – I promise” is hesitantly mumbled to beaming participants, and donations are quietly given to the main Cancer Research UK branch instead.Related: An open letter to readers from the Colour Pink | Eva Wiseman Continue reading...

These are the winning entries from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council photo competition 2017, which allows researchers and doctoral students to share another side of their work Continue reading...

Meet the experts behind the Past and the Curious, who will be digging deep to bring Guardian readers the inside scoop on archaeology and anthropologyHere we go, a new archaeology and anthropology blog, bringing you tombs, treasures, tribes and high adventure. Well maybe; we’re hoping there’ll be even more interesting and unexpected things than those to be honest. There’s plenty more going on than the stuff that usually makes the papers and together the five of us will aim to bring you a view from the inside on some of the most important discoveries and ideas that are shaping archaeological and anthropological research right now; the things that the experts are excited about. We’ll take you on a tour of some of the most fascinating excavations, past, present and future. We’ll reveal the studies being done with contemporary communities around the world, and the secrets being revealed by evolutionary and forensic anthropologists.What unites archaeology and anthropology is that they are about people – past and present - based on the complex, multi-layered evidence available. We are interested in everything. No other research areas approach the study of humanity in such varied and encompassing ways. Continue reading...

No other dinosaur has sunk its teeth so deeply into our imagination, yet the focus on its hunting means we’re surprised to discover it was a real, living animalWe’re over 66 million years too late to know what tyrannosaurus mating rituals entailed. Whether the immense carnivores courted like oversized albatrosses, offered gifts of semi-rotted triceratops meat, or simply got down to business without pretence is a vignette lost to Cretaceous time. But research published last week in the journal Scientific Reports has spurred headlines suggesting that the great and powerful T. rex might have been a sensitive lover.The new study – perhaps to the chagrin of the authors – was not specifically about T. rex itself. Carthage College palaeontologist Thomas Carr and colleagues described a new species of tyrannosaur, Daspletosaurus horneri, excavated from the 75m-year-old rock of Montana. The specimen that forms the core of the description is gorgeous, with dark grey bones preserved in exquisite detail, and that palaeontological happenstance is what has set off the hubbub over tyrannosaur foreplay. Continue reading...

Country has seen 500 companies apply to join ‘green rush’ in cannabis products after more than 100 studies in pharmaceutical useIn a small pharmaceutical lab in Jerusalem, a complex construction of rubber tubes, pumps and a brass pipe sits on a worktop. A prototype device, its purpose is to “smoke” cannabis to remove its active constituents and turn them into powder, with the hope that the resulting product can be used for pain relief in young cancer patients.The Izun lab offers a glimpse of the ambition by Israeli researchers to corner the rapidly burgeoning new global market in medical marijuana, a market its proponents argue soon could be worth almost $20bn (£16bn) annually by 2020 in the US alone. Continue reading...

Archaeological research may represent first scientific evidence of English practices attempting to protect the living from the deadA study by archaeologists has revealed certain people in medieval Yorkshire were so afraid of the dead they chopped, smashed and burned their skeletons to make sure they stayed in their graves.The research published by Historic England and the University of Southampton may represent the first scientific evidence in England of attempts to prevent the dead from walking and harming the living – still common in folklore in many parts of the world. Continue reading...

An experiment shows how particles of varying sizes sort themselves out on the surface of a small asteroidBack in 2005 a small asteroid, known as 25143 Itokawa, was visited by the unmanned Japanese spacecraft, Hayabusa. Close up images of the asteroid – which measures approximately 540m by 250m – revealed that the “lowlands” were covered by dust and centimetre-sized small pebbles, whilst the “highlands” were made up from larger boulders (5 to 40m diameter). But how did this segregation come about?Initially researchers thought that the size sorting on Itokawa was most likely due to the Brazil Nut Effect, whereby smaller particles rattle downwards when something is shaken. But the force of gravity is weak on Itokawa, meaning that the Brazil Nut Effect would be unlikely to create such extreme sorting. Instead Troy Shinbrot, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, and his colleagues suggest that for the high-speed particles that bombard the asteroid, pebbly regions are “stickier” than boulder fields. Continue reading...

“Most early evolutionists were racist, Darwin included,” claims your correspondent (Letters, 30 March). Mid-Victorian intellectuals can conveniently be identified as racist or anti-racist by their reactions to the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and the brutal reprisals of Governor John Eyre.Darwin was a leading light of the Jamaica Committee, which tried to have Eyre prosecuted, and recruited most of the leading scientists of the day. The racists organised an Eyre defence committee, led by Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and John Ruskin. Continue reading...

Swedish researchers have found that specially selected songs played in a fast-food chain increased takingsIt’s elevator music, 21st-century style: not Herb Alpert, piped tinnily into your local department store, but carefully curated playlists generated by algorithms and used by major restaurants, supermarkets and retailers all over the world to entice us to spend more cash. In the largest study of its kind, researchers from the Swedish Retail Institute – in collaboration with Spotify-backed startup Soundtrack Your Brand – found that specially selected songs increased customers’ spending by 9.1%.Conducted at an unnamed American burger chain in Sweden, and analysing almost 2m purchases, the research compared the difference in sales when playing music chosen to match the brand with randomly selected popular songs. When playing bespoke playlists, sales of burgers went up by 8.6%, fries by 8.8% and desserts by a whopping 15.6%. The underlying message: if we like a tune, we’ll buy more chips. Continue reading...

The bank has introduced 10 new gender-neutral modes of address for customers to choose from. But there might be an even more liberating solutionPlain old Mr, Mrs and Ms just don’t cut it any more. At least, that’s what HSBC thinks. It may no longer be “the listening bank”, but it’s listened to its customers in all their gender diversity, and provided them with 10 new titles to choose from on official forms. These include “Ind” for individual, “Mre” for mystery, “Pr” for person and “Misc” for miscellaneous.Related: ‘Dear Sirs’ goes gender neutral Continue reading...

Restricting the amount you eat is said to fight disease, extend lifespan and improve wellbeing. As well as dieters, people with diabetes and MS could benefitYou probably first came across it with a pale-looking colleague slumped over their office desk. Or with The Fast Diet author Michael Mosely speaking effusively about it on television. Fasting, they’d have told you, is a great way to lose weight. It makes sense: eat fewer calories a couple of days a week, and don’t overeat on the others, and you’ll slim down. What’s less clear is the assumption that fasting from time to time can bring other benefits such as avoiding disease, keeping your brain sharp and even letting you live longer. With all this for the price of just a sprinkle of willpower though, surely it’s all too good to be true?The answer is not straightforward. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the evidence is strongest with type 2 diabetes – a disease often caused by overeating. The disease means that a person can no longer control their blood sugar levels. Once diagnosed they are left staring down the barrel of a lifetime on medication, unless, think researchers at Newcastle University, they begin to fast. Continue reading...

Answer these questions to see what price it takes to make you cheat‘Everyone has a price, the important thing is to find out what it is,’ said Pablo Escobar. But was he right? Picture the following scenario. You are taking part in an experiment where you roll a dice once, and report the result to the experimenter. If you report rolling a 6, you receive a certain amount of money. The experiment is set up so that nobody else can see what you rolled. So… what sum of money would it take for you to cheat?(a) £1, (b) £5, (c) £10, (d) £50, (e) £150? Continue reading...

A site once used to guide ships and tell the time focused its attention on the skies in the latter part of the 19th century – and hasn’t looked backWhen Australia’s first government astronomer, William Scott, took up his posting in 1858 in Sydney, his equipment was so defective that, according to his diary records, it “destroyed all confidence in the result furnished by it”. And the shutters that were supposed to protect the finely calibrated instruments within the dome let in “a considerable quantity of rain” when the wind was high.It was an uneasy start to an important mission. But Scott would probably be pleased to learn that the observatory he built in Sydney still stands. And more than 150 years later the dome that looks over the city is continuing to fulfil the role Scott envisioned of opening the stars to all Australians. Continue reading...

The left must learn that moral outrage will never win an argumentIt took but a quick click, but even as I joined the collective expression of disgust on social media at last week’s Daily Mail “Legs-it” front page I felt a bit sheepish. Not because juxtaposing a headline that posed the question of who had better legs next to a photo of Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon wasn’t deeply sexist, but because it was a futile gesture, and I knew it.We lefties have impeccable pedigree when it comes to righteous outrage. It has a time and a place: there’s something life-affirming and motivating about asserting your membership of a tribe with common values. But it also carries something of the guilty pleasure: the smug satisfaction of earning your virtue-signalling stripes in our social media age. Continue reading...

A man paralysed from the shoulders down can now raise his arm to eat, thanks to neuroprosthetic implants – and there is hope that the technology will help many others in the futureIs it possible to overcome paralysis by harnessing thoughts?

Everyone’s theories are wrong: through cunning and selective use of statistics, I can prove that my pet whinge is the reason for Trump’s election winThe unexpected US election result has left people grappling with some difficult questions. Questions like, “if we’re so good at being pundits then why were we all wrong?” and, “how do I draft an executive order without cocking it up?” One question stands above all others though: “Why did millions of people who nearly always vote Republican continue to vote for a Republican candidate, even after lots of Democrats and centrists told them not to?”To find out, we have to use the key tool of analysis available to political science in the Internet era: the think piece. Think pieces are the social media equivalent of an immune response, an innate and primitive defense system in which endless varieties of the same basic cell swarm over a topic until it’s entirely obscured by a cloud of literary pus. Continue reading...

In an astonishing display of digging prowess, an American badger has been seen completely burying a calf carcass several times bigger than itselfAn American badger has been captured burying the carcass of a cow – a previously unrecorded behaviour – in an astonishing display of the creature’s digging prowess.The images were taken by camera traps set up by researchers who had left seven calf carcasses in Utah’s Grassy Mountains in January last year in an attempt to study which scavengers descended on the animals. Continue reading...

Even among couples who share housework and parenting, subtler inequities persistIn her new book Drop The Ball, a manifesto for women juggling jobs and an unequal share of the burden at home, Tiffany Dufu describes a phenomenon I’d never previously seen given a name: “imaginary delegation”. This is the all-too-familiar relationship pattern whereby you see (or just think of) some household task that needs doing, mentally assign it to your partner, fail to inform them you’ve done so, then feel sincere outrage when they disregard the instructions you never gave them.The problem here is that both sides have an excellent case for feeling aggrieved. The person on the (non-)receiving end naturally protests that he can’t be expected to read minds. But the other person is also justified in saying she shouldn’t need to spell it out: for a cohabiting couple, teamwork demands that both partners keep an eye out for what needs doing, without being told by the other. So the stage is set for the worst variety of domestic row: the kind where both parties are right. Continue reading...

Experts warn about growing number of men in their 40s and 50s taking drugs to fight signs of ageing and boost sex driveGrowing numbers of middle-aged men are turning to anabolic steroids to make themselves look and feel more youthful and boost their sexual performance, experts say.Related: Spiralling anabolic steroid use leaves UK facing health timebomb, experts warn Continue reading...

Well, big in all sense of the word is the news that the discovery of a new member of the tyrannosaur family has revealed that these fearsome dinosaurs had sensitive snouts that they may have enjoyed rubbing together while mating. It’s a sweet mental picture, no? Anyway, canoodling carnivores aside, there have been some really exciting breakthroughs this week, including the amazing neuroprosthetic work featured in this week’s video section below. One study that could have an enormous impact on worlds health is the discovery that the short-chain fatty acids produced by a diet rich in a certain type of fibre could prevent type 1 diabetes. We await human trials with hope and interest. Less vital, but no less interesting is the news that lonely people feel more rotten when they get a cold – but aren’t actually any more ill than their less lonely counterparts. Warning: there’s some mucus talk in the piece, so finish your sandwich before reading, eh? Finally, it seems that fruit foraging rather than social interaction may be key to the evolution of large brains in primates. Continue reading...