Kidney disease has killed 20,000 agricultural workers, but no one knows whyTwo brothers stand in a dusty alley in the town of Chichigalpa in Nicaragua. They stare with suspicion at Australian photographer Josh Mcdonald, who has just captured their image – a picture that won a Wellcome Image award last week for its depiction of the impact of a medical condition that has been devastating the male population of central America.The illness is described as “chronic kidney disease of undetermined cause” and it is responsible for 75% of deaths of young and middle-aged men in Nicaragua. Workers in the sugarcane industry are worst affected, and the disease has been destroying families and communities for 20 years. Yet the cause remains unknown. Continue reading...

James Runcie plans to rebalance programmes in drive to put more ‘creative voices’ on airWith mathematicians, physicists and doctors dominating much of the airtime on BBC Radio 4, science coverage has never had it so good. But is it time to restore some balance?The talk station’s latest signing, the Grantchester novelist James Runcie, thinks so: “The renaissance in science shows has been remarkable. Now we really need to listen to a few more creative voices. Radio should be the perfect place to take creative risks.” Continue reading...

Climate change denial and energy conspiracy are high on the president’s agenda, but US scientists are fighting backEver since Donald Trump became US president, certain sectors of American society have felt particularly embattled. His statements on Mexicans and Muslims are notorious, but there is another community, less heard about, that has also been sent reeling: scientists.If politics has never been a world that is overly respectful to empirical research, Trump’s victory exploited a growing popular suspicion of expertise, and a tendency to seek out alternative narratives to fact-based analysis. Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination campaigns and climate change deniers have all traded on this rejection of science, and their voices have all been heard, to differing degrees, in the new administration. But for the science community perhaps the most provocative act so far of Trump’s short time in office was the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a Republican lawyer and climate change sceptic, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Continue reading...

From prince being under fire for having no proper job to George Osborne fitting yet another job in with his MP’s dutiesPrince William is getting a lot of flak for going on a lads’ ski trip to Verbier, though the headlines of “Don’t you have a proper job to go to?” appear to have been mainly an excuse for newspapers to print pictures of the prince drinking and dancing in nightclubs. Not least because the simple fact is that he doesn’t have a proper job to go to. That’s the whole point of him. Most of us encounter a sense of existential futility at some point, but few have it embedded in our job description. He’s basically twiddling his thumbs waiting for his granny and his father to die. It’s almost enough to make a member of the royal family turn republican. Continue reading...

Diagnosing yourself as having writer’s block, rather than just not currently writing, will make matters worse‘What do you do when you get writer’s block?” someone asked me the other day. I was happy to answer. I get up from my desk and wander around with a self-pitying expression on my face, sometimes clutching at my scalp in an agonised fashion. I buy sour gummy chews and eat too many; I compulsively click “refresh” on Twitter; I start to hate myself, and express it by snapping at others.On reflection, I see why this response didn’t satisfy my questioner: he wanted to know what I do to overcome writer’s block. I’ve no idea. I keep eating the chews and snapping, and eventually it’s bedtime, and in the morning the block has usually gone. Feel free to try this solution yourself. Continue reading...

The pace of AI advances is speeding up. It seems like every week we hear of another breakthrough, and so this week’s big news is that Google’s DeepMind has taken another step closer to artificial general intelligence with a program that can learn like a human. And if that weren’t enough of a mind-flip, a study out this week that suggests it’s possible to use brain scans to spot the difference between people who committed crimes on purpose and those who broke the law through sheer reckless behaviour. All this just goes to show that humans have come a long way, whether it’s through adapting physiologically to thrive in particular climates or developing IVF techniques to prevent incurable genetic diseases being inherited by children. The latter development is an extremely exciting one, and this week the first UK clinic was granted a licence to use the three-person baby fertility technique – doctors hope to offer the procedure to the first UK patients from this summer. Continue reading...

Artist Siobhan McDonald named UN Climate Action Programme’s first artist of the week with ‘beautiful and intelligent’ mixed media exhibition Crystalline

Variations in nose shape developed as a result of natural selection in response to different climates, new study suggestsHuman noses have been shaped by climate, according to research probing variation in the human snout.Researchers say their findings back up the theory that wider nostrils developed in populations living in warm, humid conditions, while populations living in high latitudes, such as northern Europe, developed narrower nostrils as an adaptation to the chilly, dry conditions. Continue reading...

The Guardian’s picture editors bring you a selection of photo highlights from around the world, including a cunning flower mimic and a twinkly night Continue reading...

IVF technique uses DNA from three people to prevent genetic diseases being passed on, and could be offered by Newcastle clinic from this summerDoctors in Newcastle have been granted permission to use the three-person baby fertility technique to prevent incurable genetic diseases being inherited by children.

Ariel Leve offers strategies to stay resilient in the face of psychological abuse that distorts the truth – much like what’s coming from Trump’s administrationRight now, many Americans listening to their president are experiencing what I experienced frequently a child. Nothing means anything, and reality is being canceled. There is confusion, there is chaos, everything is upside down and inside out. When facts and truth are being discredited, how is it possible to know what to believe, especially when it comes from someone we expect to embody both ethics and etiquette?Related: Ariel Leve: 'I was the parent and my mother was the child' Continue reading...

Florida case an example of growing ‘wanton misapplication of cellular therapy’, says dean of Harvard Medical SchoolThree women were left nearly or totally blind by a vision treatment at a stem cell clinic, in what doctors called a dramatic illustration of how risky such clinics can be.“These women had fairly functional vision prior to the procedure ... and were blinded by the next day,” said ophthalmologist Dr Thomas Albini of the University of Miami, whose team examined the women after their treatment at a clinic in Florida. Continue reading...

Naomi Alderman’s science fiction story The Power is the sole novel on a 14-book longlist for the political writing award, with accounts of recent and historical developments in Britain dominatingNaomi Alderman is the only novelist to make it on to the longlist for the 2017 Orwell prize for outstanding political writing, in a year when George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is once again troubling the bestseller lists.Alderman’s The Power heads a 14-strong list of books that span anthropology, politics, memoir and history for an accolade considered Britain’s most prestigious for political writing, which comes with a cash award of £3,000. Described as The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale, Alderman’s dystopian novel examines the roots and impact of misogyny by reversing the gender roles in a future society ruled by women. The novel has also been longlisted for the 2017 Bailey’s prize for women’s fiction, and shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust science writing prize. Continue reading...

Established in 1997, the Wellcome Image Awards reward and showcase the best in science image making – and this year’s 22 winning images represent a broad spectrum of techniques and specialisms Continue reading...

Improvements to water quality or fishing controls don’t prevent underwater heatwaves damaging coral, studies of mass bleaching events revealThe survival of the Great Barrier Reef hinges on urgent moves to cut global warming because nothing else will protect coral from the coming cycle of mass bleaching events, new research has found.The study of three mass bleaching events on Australian reefs in 1998, 2002 and 2016 found coral was damaged by underwater heatwaves regardless of any local improvements to water quality or fishing controls. Continue reading...

Study gets to the bottom of ‘musical symphony’ produced in regions prone to mega-quakes as scientists work toward better quake hazard forecastingYou are at a classical music concert. There is an orchestra with three main sections. High up at the back, the percussion section has one very loud, large and moody-looking drum that gets struck very rarely. A handful of triangles produce occasional quieter “tings”. Further down, in the middle, there is a small band of violinists, but they are playing the strings so slowly the audience can barely hear them. Down at the front, a family of double bass instruments produces low-pitched, gentler hums from time to time.This somewhat unconventional orchestra is like a type of tectonic plate boundary known as a subduction zone. Subduction zones delineate the battle lines between the collision of two titanic tectonic plates. Yet, this encounter is rather one-sided. One plate firmly stands its ground; the other sinks into the depths of the Earth. The grinding and sliding of these two plates produces a musical concert that can be detected by sensitive geophysical instruments and by humans during large quakes. The shallow parts of subduction plate boundaries can produce devastating mega-earthquakes with magnitude eight or greater (like the giant drum in the percussion section). In the tens to hundreds of years between these massive quakes, scientists eagerly listen to the signals at subduction zones to estimate whether the plate boundary fault is primed for a future quake, and to forecast what a rupture may look like.

A new study sheds light on how the English language is changing – but what shapes the vocabulary du jour?A huge ongoing study by Lancaster University and Cambridge University has discovered what, in fact, we probably knew already: that word-usage changes continuously under the pressures of historical malaise, new sensitivities, the new machineries of life and fashion.“Golly” is fast going. No need to ask why. Good thing, too. And “gosh” is long gone; it’s one of those euphemistic items of religious vocabulary (along with “blimey” and “gadzooks”) that we largely godless people don’t see the point of any more. “Gee!” I rarely hear any more. Jesus weeps. Continue reading...

To usher in the ‘Singularity’ – when computers match human intelligence – superintelligent one trick ponies like DeepMind must become jacks of all tradesThe road to human-level artificial intelligence is long and wildly uncertain. Most AI programs today are one-trick ponies. They can recognise faces, the sound of your voice, translate foreign languages, trade stocks and play chess. They may well have got the trick down pat, but one-trick ponies they remain. Google’s DeepMind program, AlphaGo, can beat the best human players at Go, but it hasn’t a clue how to play tiddlywinks, shove ha’penny, or tell one end of a horse from the other.Related: Google’s DeepMind makes AI program that can learn like a human Continue reading...

Influential archaeologist who helped to change the public experience of StonehengeThe young Geoff Wainwright once nervously approached Dame Kathleen Kenyon to inquire about employment prospects in archaeology. She apparently told him that without an inheritance or private income he had no hope. Luckily, he disregarded her advice and went on to become a big influence on archaeology in Britain and Europe.Geoff, who has died aged 79, was fascinated by archaeology from an early age and in 1956, while still a student, excavated a Mesolithic settlement at Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire, two miles from his family home. His early excavations were traditional affairs, but led him to a realisation that empirical research required clearly defined questions, and methods that matched the scale of the problem. Continue reading...

The Rhynie Chert fossil deposit in Scotland is just over 400 million years old and reveals secrets of life’s conquest of the landHow life made the move onto land is one of the big questions for palaeobiologists. The physiological challenges were immense, and affected most facets of life. Organisms needed to adapt how they gained water (and prevented themselves drying out), how to obtain nutrients, how to exchange gases with the atmosphere, how to support and move a body without water buoyancy, not to mention reproducing out of water.Related: Scotland holds the key to understanding how life first walked on land Continue reading...

EPA data is kept in dozens of databases and represents decades of monitoring the American environment in fine detail. Here are some examples

How can you tell if a sheep likes theatre? Or a pig is into dance? Fevered Sleep are staging a show for farmyard creatures – while humans decide if they’re bleating for moreAlmost 10 years ago, David Harradine made a show in a basement for the Brighton festival. It was called An Infinite Line and featured a horse that stood entirely unconcerned throughout the performance, barely blinking at what went on around him. He was an impressively large presence, a symbolic representation of the natural world, and clearly didn’t give a fig for the theatrical avant-garde.Related: Our obsession with the natural world isn't about power – it's about love Continue reading...

Waters off the coast of Tasmania turned a shimmering blue this week, a phenomenon known as ‘noctiluca scintillans’, or sea sparkle. Despite people flocking to photograph the eerie scene, scientists have warned that it is, in fact, a worrying sign of climate change

Over-the-counter drug linked to 31% increased cardiac arrest risk, with the figure rising to 50% for diclofenac, says researchThere have been fresh calls for restrictions on the sale of the painkiller ibuprofen after another study found it heightens the risk of cardiac arrest.Taking the over-the-counter drug was associated with a 31% increased risk, researchers in Denmark found. Continue reading...

To celebrate the announcement of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize shortlist, Hannah Devlin asks three of its featured authors about the secrets to writing a successful science bookSubscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterNow in its eighth year, the Wellcome Book Prize aims to showcase fiction, nonfiction, and memoirs, that engage with some aspect of biomedical science. And with the shortlist for this year’s prize announced on Tuesday, we ask a handful of authors where they get their inspiration, how they research their chosen subject, and what strategies they have up their sleeve to turn complex scientific concepts into riveting narratives. Continue reading...

Roscosmos space agency looking for six to eight cosmonauts who will operate a new-generation spaceship headed to the moon in 2031Russia’s space agency has announced a recruitment drive for young would-be cosmonauts who it hopes will become the country’s first on the Moon.

Children and young people are being denied the latest cancer treatments by outdated European regulations. Pharmaceutical companies are able to use a loophole in EU legislation to avoid trialling cancer drugs in children – despite evidence that these treatments could work. An analysis of European Medicines Agency data by the Institute of Cancer Research shows that since 2012, the loophole has been enacted to prevent 33 new cancer drugs from being evaluated in children. There is evidence that at least some of these treatments could be effective against children’s cancers.Children’s cancers are rare, and there is little financial incentive for companies to develop drugs for them. The current EU paediatric regulation could do much more to ensure that children benefit from the dramatic advances in treatment we are seeing for adult cancers. The regulation is badly out of date. It allows pharmaceutical companies to opt out of running paediatric trials simply because the adult cancer a drug targets does not occur in children. But these days, scientists understand that it is a cancer’s genetic causes – rather than where it happens to grow in the body – which are the most important factor in determining which treatments work. Continue reading...

Program brings artificial general intelligence a step closer by using previous knowledge to solve fresh problemsResearchers have overcome one of the major stumbling blocks in artificial intelligence with a program that can learn one task after another using skills it acquires on the way.

The US president has made much use of quote marks to distance himself from his outlandish statements – is Steve Martin to ‘blame’ for this phenomenon?

Following the shark bite death of a body boarder in February, there have been calls for a cull of bull sharks. But it isn’t the answer – and it won’t workI’m a shark biologist and I also love to surf. One of my favourite surfing memories isn’t one of my rides, however, but of being a spectator. I remember standing on the Waimea shoreline in 2009, feeling the beach shake as enormous waves thundered to a close. Moments before, my favourite surfer had just scored a 98 point ride in the prestigious “Eddie” competition, named in honour of Hawaiian surfing legend Eddie Aikau. That surfer was Kelly Slater.

Academics fear Donald Trump’s environmental policy may put an end to key data from US agenciesUK scientists are warning they may be unable to carry out crucial research on climate change if Donald Trump cuts climate science funding in the US.Trump tweeted in 2014 that research on global warming is “very expensive bullshit” that “has to stop”. Scientists are braced to find out whether his administration will put these words into practice. The early signs are not good. Last month Scott Pruitt, one of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s fiercest critics, was named as its new head. There are rumours that the budget of its office for research could be cut by more than 40% as part of extensive overall cuts. Continue reading...

Life expectancy of men and women aged between 60 and 100 and having children better than those with no children, study findsParenthood could boost your chances of living longer in your later years, according researchers who believe the effect could be down to children helping with care and support.

Spending over three hours watching TV or playing computer games every day increases risk of type 2 diabetes in childhood, study saysChildren who are allowed more than three hours of screentime a day are at greater risk of developing diabetes, new research suggests.The study found that children who were glued to their screens for three or more hours a day scored higher on measures of body fat and had higher levels of resistance to the hormone insulin than their peers who spent an hour or less watching TV, videos or playing computer games. Continue reading...

It is good that neuroscientists are taking seriously their responsibility to improve education (No evidence to back idea of learning styles, Letters, 13 March). However, debunking can oversimplify matters.My favourite example showing that learning styles do exist, but that focusing on them does not improve learning, comes from football. We easily agree that most players have a preferred foot (typically the right one). However, unfortunately for them, the pitch has two sides to play on. Hence, though laterality does exist, it is a great advantage if you also learn to kick the ball with your non-preferred left foot. Continue reading...

An Egyptian-German archaeological mission has unearthed two 19th-dynasty royal statues near Pharaoh Ramses II’s temple in ancient Heliopolis: an 80cm bust of Seti II, and an 8m statue believed to be of Ramses II himself Continue reading...

Experiments prove judicial distinction between criminal intent and reckless behaviour has scientific merit tooNeuroscientists have used brain scans to spot the difference between people who committed crimes on purpose and those who broke the law through sheer reckless behaviour.It is the first time that people’s intentions, or otherwise, to perform criminal acts have been decoded in a brain scanner, revealing that legal categories used to draw up sentences reflect real brain activity.

The warning that children with cancer risk missing out on drug trials (Report, 9 March) highlights an issue that has been largely overlooked in the Brexit debate. I led work on the EU clinical trials regulation, which will come into force in 2018. By harmonising EU law and creating a single application portal, this will make it easier to carry out clinical trials in more than one country. Cross-border trials are particularly important for paediatric cancers because there are usually not enough cases in one country to make a trial viable. Once outside the EU, it will be harder for UK patients to participate in these trials.Related: UK children with cancer could miss out on drug trials after Brexit, doctors warn Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s gyral and viral puzzlesEarlier today I set you two puzzles as a pre-party for Pi Day.1) Pictured below are three identical boxes packed with pies. You can assume that all pies are exactly the same height. Which box contains the most pie? Continue reading...

A study has found that 98% of people think they’re among the nicest 50%. And this delusion seeps into everything from how we rate our attractiveness to our drivingHow nice are you? No, really, deep down, how nice are you? It would be easy to imagine that low self-esteem leads us to play down our better qualities, but the research shows the opposite is true – regardless of our confidence, we are not as nice as we think we are. Nor are we as attractive or competent … the list goes on. If niceness were a number, we would be guilty of some pretty extreme rounding up.If you can take that emotional blow (you’re probably still nice, just, you know, not that nice) listen to Jonathan Freeman, a psychology professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. In a study he carried out for an airline, he found that 98% of us consider ourselves to be among the nicest 50% of the population. Continue reading...

Misconduct in academia isn’t rampant but should be taken more seriously: let’s consider independent anti-corruption unitsWatching the BBC’s detective drama Line of Duty, I thought: could the academic research community benefit from an internal affairs style anti-corruption unit? Not to police illegal behaviour in an underworld of dons and deans – but to tackle the very real problem of fraudulent research.Related: How big data has transformed research Continue reading...

Robot submarine, named after competition, will collect data from depths of Southern OceanA small yellow robot submarine, called Boaty McBoatface after a competition to name a new polar research ship backfired, is being sent on its first Antarctic mission.Boaty, which has arguably one of the most famous names in recent maritime history, is a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which will be able to travel under ice, reach depths of 6,000 metres, and transmit the data it collects to researchers via a radio link. Continue reading...

Two teasers – one gyral and one viral – to usher in the annual celebration of mathsUPDATE: You can read the solutions and poll results here.Hi guzzlers.Tomorrow is Pi Day – March 14 – the annual excuse for the mathematical community to circulate puns about buns. I mean to honour pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, which to two decimal places is 3.14, hence 3/14, as the Americans write tomorrow’s date. Continue reading...

Whether they were introduced to you by family or friends, we want to hear about the distinctive words in your vocabulary

A British Library project preserves words used in different parts of the country. How many of them can you recognise?

How to find the, rather dim, comet 41P/Tuttle–Giacobini–Kresák, from the Jupiter family of comets, as it passes through our skies during the next few weeksWith a week to go until the spring equinox in Earth’s northern hemisphere, the brilliant Venus is poised to plummet into our western evening twilight on its way to passing 8° N of the Sun’s near side on the 25th. Meanwhile Jupiter rises in the E in mid-evening and is prominent in the S in the small hours where it stands below-left of the Moon on the 14th and alongside the Moon on the 15th. Continue reading...

My friend David Jacobi, who has died aged 54, was a research scientist with a particular expertise in the disposal of radioactive waste and a keen general interest in the environment.Born in London to Harry, a rabbi, and his wife, Rose (nee Solomon), a secretary and voluntary worker originally from India, David went to Claremont high school in Wembley before studying chemical engineering at Bath University. It was in the West Country that we first met in the early 1980s, when I was at nearby Bristol University. From time to time members of Bath’s tiny Jewish Society used to come over to join our slightly larger society for study and social events. Years later I met him again at Birmingham Progressive Synagogue, where his sister, Margaret, was rabbi. After that our paths continued to cross. Continue reading...

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN revealed the Higgs boson in 2012, but has led to no comparable discovery since. It is worth asking what we hope to learn from the new data coming soon – and indeed from any particle physics experiment in the near futureIn CERN, on the outskirts of Geneva, preparations are well underway for the next spate of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We are planning for a record year, starting in June. Last year was a bounteous one, but in 2017 we expect even more collisions, at the same record-breaking high energy.The detectors which will record the data have been under maintenance and refurbishment. Most notably, the vertex detector in the centre of the CMS experiment has been entirely replaced. The vertex detector is made of silicon; the electrons in the material only need a small nudge from a passing charged-particle to escape and carry an electric current. Those tiny currents allow us to track the path of the particle, and thus work out where it originated – the vertex. The vertex detector is a vital and complex component of the experiment. You can see a video of the (very careful) operation to insert the new one, below. Continue reading...

Psychotherapist Julia Samuel’s case studies provide vital and compelling insights into bereavement

Answer our questions to see what the link is between whether you issue complaints to official bodies and the political party you supportRightwingers love the stereotype of the ‘whining liberal’. Have they got a point? Or is it self-entitled conservatives who are more likely to complain? Find out by answering the following:How likely are you to complain to an official body (eg Ofcom) if you are unfairly treated by your bank or broadband provider? Continue reading...

A fascinating project is harnessing the power of the arts to unlock creativity and communicationHarvey’s reaction to his dementia is not what you might expect. “I’m so happy,” he says. “I wouldn’t reverse it for anything.”Harvey has a relatively rare dementia called posterior cortical atrophy or PCA, a variant of Alzheimer’s disease. Inasmuch as he has difficulty remembering things and can’t do basic arithmetic, his condition conforms to the stereotype of dementia. But PCA particularly affects spatial awareness: it can lead to disorientation, visual illusions, and problems with making your movements coincide with your perception of space. Harvey has trouble with vests; another person with PCA recounts how, aiming to sit in an empty seat, he found himself instead in his vicar’s lap. But for Harvey, who is 78, these are just inconveniences in a wonderful life. He has never, he says, felt so full of love for his wife, Diana, who confirms that his expressions of affection are much more frequent now than before his PCA developed. Continue reading...