After years of bit parts, low pay and a breakthrough role in Empire, Taraji P Henson is taking the lead as a Nasa scientistSome of the impact of Hidden Figures, a movie in which Taraji P Henson stars as Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician and one of the few African American women at Nasa during the early part of the space programme, comes from the assumption of progress. The film opens in the 1950s, with Johnson being harassed by a white cop when her car breaks down on the way to work, and closes with footage of President Obama giving the now 98-year-old the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The implication is clear: just look how far we’ve come.Today, Henson is in a New York hotel room, shimmering with exhaustion and the thrill, after years of playing second and third fiddle in movies, of assuming a starring role. If you know her, it’s probably from Empire, the hit TV show in which she plays Cookie Lyon, a fiercely ambitious hip-hop impresario and a woman who, Henson says with some understatement, “if you say something wrong to, is going to come back and have her rebuttal”. If you don’t know her, you may still recognise Henson’s face from years of spadework on shows such as CSI, Boston Legal and ER. In 2009, she won an Oscar nomination for her supporting role as Queenie in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, a movie for which she was paid a fraction of the salary of her more famous co-stars, and for years that is how it went: small parts, bad pay – at least relative to the Hollywood average – and the scramble for too few roles in which an African American woman might be cast. Meanwhile, Henson learned to bite her tongue and pick her battles. “What am I going to do?” she says. “Am I going to complain, or am I going to do something about it?” Continue reading...

Unlicensed medicines used in obesity or erection remedies could lower blood pressure or raise chances of heart attackMany herbal supplements, including for obesity and erectile dysfunction, contain hidden unlicensed pharmaceutical ingredients that could endanger people’s health, experts have warned.The research team, from Queen’s University Belfast, Kingston University in London and the life sciences testing company LGC, concluded that not only do such supplements often make unverified claims as to their benefits but some have illegal ingredients which could pose a threat – potentially causing low blood pressure or an increased risk of heart attacks. Continue reading...

Technique aims to help smokers ‘unlearn’ associations that drive addiction by exposing them to triggers, such as footage of people smokingIt sounds like torment for the smoker attempting to quit: handling packets of cigarettes and watching footage of people smoking, without being allowed to light up.However, scientists believe that lengthy exposure to environmental triggers for cravings could be precisely what smokers need to help them quit. The technique, known as extinction therapy, targets the harmful Pavlovian associations that drive addiction with the aim of rapidly “unlearning” them. Continue reading...

It looks like a hell-beast from the depth of Lovecraft’s imagination, but this creature with its huge mouth and no anus this could be our earliest known ancestor. Thought to have lived 540 million years ago, the discovery of Saccorhytus coronarious fossils sheds light on the early stages of evolution. And if you need more nighttime fear-fuel, how about contemplating what makes a frog’s tongue a near inescapable trap. Apparently frog saliva has special properties: it switches between being thin and watery as the whip-like tongue hits its target, to thick and sticky as the insect is reeled in. Yum. But if understanding frog tongues doesn’t seem like a big deal, here’s something that definitely is. A groundbreaking “brain reading” system has allowed patients with completely locked-in syndrome to communicate for the first time in years. Patients paralysed by ALS were able to answer “yes” or “no” – and told doctors they are happy with life. Far out, right? And speaking of which, have you seen these amazing pics of Saturn’s rings? The new images from Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft are the most detailed ever taken and raise the possibility that the rings could contain millions of “moonlets”. And if that doesn’t blow your mind, there’s news about our home galaxy too. It is known that the Milky Way is being pulled through space, but cosmologists suspected it was being pushed as well. New research points to a cosmic dead zone that might be providing that push. Continue reading...

Zakynthos has some fascinating wildlife, but the Greek island’s biggest stars, its loggerhead turtles, are dying out – partly because of their popularity“See turtles or your money back,” says the sign on the beach. A smiling local hands out fliers and shakes the hands of passersby; occasionally they stop and a few Euros change hands. Looking across the bay, there are five or six more operations that either rent out small boats with 20hp outboard motors to “visit Marathonisi - Turtle Island” or will book you aboard a glass bottom boat to: “see Caretta caretta”. Saying “no” is quite difficult as the hard sell tactics kick in.This is Laganas, the main tourist town in the Ionian island of Zakynthos. As the name suggests, Laganas was once a lagoon, and thirty years ago supported one of the largest flamingo colonies in Europe. Now it’s a depressing strip of poor quality apartments and tourist clutter; all moped rental places, tacky bars and run down clubs. The decline of the Greek economy lends a sense of desperation and the turtles are one of the few things the town still has going for it. Continue reading...

New research provides evidence for the idea that sleep restores cellular homeostasis in the brain and helps us to forget irrelevant informationWe spend one third of our lives sleeping, but we still do not know exactly why we sleep. Recent research shows that that the brain does its housekeeping while we sleep, and clears away its waste. According to another hypothesis, sleep plays the vital role of restoring the right balance of brain synapses to enhance learning, and two studies published in today’s issue of Science now provide the most direct evidence yet for this idea.We do know that sleep is important for consolidating newly formed memories. During waking hours, we learn all kinds of new information, both consciously and unconsciously. To store it, the brain modifies large numbers of synaptic connections, making some of them stronger and larger, and it’s now thought that as we sleep other synapses are weakened or destroyed, so that the important new information is stored for later use, while irrelevant material, which could interfere with learning, is not. Continue reading...

The fashion world has bought into the idea that wearing La La Land yellow and head-to-toe colour will act as an antidote to these dark days. Now here comes the science part …So-called dopamine dressing is everywhere this season. Based on the idea that wearing overtly fun clothes can help lift your mood in depressing times, it begs the question: can wearing “happy clothes” really make us more happy?The fashion industry is certainly trying to convince us that it can be done. The catwalks have been a Skittles packet of brights – from Fanta orange at Armani and scarlet at Maison Margiela to Beauty and the Beast yellow and candyfloss pink at Giambattista Valli. Accidentism is in full flow; eyeshadows are fizzy tangerines and lemons; and hair’s gone blorange. Grazia magazine is encouraging us to test the power of positive thinking in Bella Freud Good Times tops. And elsewhere it’s all about head-to-toe green and rainbow bags in the shape of elephants. Continue reading...

Anti-inflammatory drugs are not much more effective than placebo and patients taking them 2.5 times more likely to suffer from stomach problemsWidely used anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen have little more benefit than a placebo when it comes to treating back pain, a comprehensive review has found.Researchers analysed 35 peer-reviewed trials on the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs [NSAIDs] such as ibuprofen for back pain, reviewing data from 6,065 patients. Continue reading...

Governments are investing millions in quantum in the hope it might help save lives. But will this gamble on subatomic particles pay off?Governments around the world are taking a leap into the future by investing heavily in quantum technology research. The UK alone has pledged £270m over five years, with the more cautious Australian government promising a AU$25m (£15m) investment over the same period, and the Canadians putting in $50m (£31m).So just what are they investing in, and why? While the end product may be some way off, quantum technologies promise to deliver multibillion-pound industries across multiple sectors in return for that investment. Continue reading...

Climate science denier and veteran lobbyist Fred Palmer is proud of getting Australia to adopt the sector’s arguments on climate and povertyIf you’re a lobbyist or an industry advocate, then you know you’re winning when you hear your own talking points coming back at you through the mouths of ministers.Better still, if it’s the Australian prime minister. Continue reading...

Citizen scientists are being sought for a project which will see tens of thousands of teabags buried in wetlands to monitor carbon sequestrationAustralian scientists have launched a project to bury tens of thousands of teabags in wetlands around the world. They are hoping others will sacrifice a few cups of tea and join in to discover how efficient different wetlands are at capturing and storing carbon dioxide.Lipton green tea and red tea “rooibos” varieties will be used in the project, which already involves more than 500 scientists in every continent except Antarctica. Continue reading...

Campers fell asleep about two hours earlier than usual when denied access to their gadgets and electrical lighting, study showed

An 18th-century automaton admired by US writer to be star attraction at London museum’s Robots exhibitionA robotic swan that entranced Mark Twain and generations of other viewers will be a star attraction at the Science Museum’s Robots exhibition when it opens next week.The banal truth behind the piece – the nuts and bolts, levers and cogwheels that for almost 250 years have powered a lifesize silver swan to play music and catch a golden fish out of a crystal stream – has been laid bare in a workroom at the west London museum. Continue reading...

Fortitude Series 2 opened with a sinister and spectacular ‘blood aurora’. So what is it, and why has it long been considered a bad omen?The red glow in the sky grew and lengthened, the lower edge twisting into a bright band against the darkness. Slowly the colours rippled and broke and reappeared elsewhere. Pillars of red streaked down from above like blood dripping from the heavens. The aurora borealis had made an appearance in rare and spectacular form: the blood aurora.So opened series two of Fortitude last week, a popular TV series set in a fictional town in Arctic Norway. But a red aurora is a real and spectacular scientific phenomenon, and one steeped in mythology.

In the late 1960s the scientist behind the world’s most successful antiviral vaccines took on his employer and the US government in a fight for custody of the cells that he called his ‘children’On 9 October 1964, a baby girl was born at Philadelphia general hospital. She arrived early, when her mother was about 32 weeks pregnant. The baby weighed 3.2lb and was noted to be blue, floppy and not breathing. The only sign of life was her slow heartbeat. Nonetheless, she clung on, and her 17-year-old mother named her.One month later, the baby was still in the hospital, and a doctor listening with a stethoscope heard a harsh heart murmur. A chest X-ray showed that she had a massively enlarged heart because a hole in the organ was preventing it from pumping blood efficiently. It also emerged that the baby had cataracts blinding both eyes. Later, other signs indicated that she was profoundly deaf. Continue reading...

With a new set of principles for artificial intelligence, tech pioneers seem to be developing a conscience. Good – but the discussion must include more voicesToday in Washington DC, leading US and UK scientists are meeting to share dispatches from the frontiers of machine learning – an area of research that is creating new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). Their meeting follows the publication of a set of principles for beneficial AI that emerged from a conference earlier this year at a place with an important history.In February 1975, 140 people – mostly scientists, with a few assorted lawyers, journalists and others – gathered at a conference centre on the California coast. A magazine article from the time by Michael Rogers, one of the few journalists allowed in, reported that most of the four days’ discussion was about the scientific possibilities of genetic modification. Two years earlier, scientists had begun using recombinant DNA to genetically modify viruses. The Promethean nature of this new tool prompted scientists to impose a moratorium on such experiments until they had worked out the risks. By the time of the Asilomar conference, the pent-up excitement was ready to burst. It was only towards the end of the conference when a lawyer stood up to raise the possibility of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that the scientists focussed on the task at hand – creating a set of principles to govern their experiments. Continue reading...

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano has produced a rare ‘firehose’ of lava which is flowing into the Pacific Ocean. Footage captured by the US Geological Survey on 28 January shows a steady stream of molten lava creating littoral explosions as it impacts the cold sea water Continue reading...

Our nuclear energy, safety and research must not be subjugated to already chaotic Brexit negotiations – the government must put the national interest firstLast week we learned just how hard and how ill-conceived Brexit looks like being. The two line parliamentary bill published by the government last Thursday contained no detail, no plan, and no check or balance on the prime minister’s possible negotiation as it progresses.One thing that was included, albeit buried in the explanation notes, is a brief reference to also ending Britain’s membership of Euratom – an entirely separate treaty. The implications of this will be deep and far-reaching for the future of UK’s energy supply, science, industry and workers. There is no political or legal mandate for the UK to leave Euratom, in fact it was barely even a footnote in the referendum campaign, and yet we are heading for a nuclear Brexit. Continue reading...

British Heart Foundation says most people affected have not been diagnosed, and true number could be higherMore than 620,000 people in the UK have a faulty gene that puts them at risk of heart disease and sudden death from heart attacks or cardiac arrests, and most of them are unaware of the risk, a charity has warned.The British Heart Foundation (BHF), which released the figure, said it was 100,000 more than previous estimates. But the true figure could be even higher because of under-diagnosis and the presence of other, as yet unknown, faulty genes, it said. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific conceptsDreaming that one can levitate or even fly seem to be near universal. Can anyone throw light on why something that presumably cannot have any basis in our evolutionary past should be so common to our unconscious selves? For me at least, when I have such dreams they always seem completely real (though my dreaming self is always suprised at discovering the ability).Francis Blake, London N17 Continue reading...

You’d think scientists could answer simple questions like ‘when did the dinosaurs live?’. But the truth about science is bad news for those seeking certaintyWith controversy about science communication, facts and alternative facts hitting the headlines recently, I’ve been having a number of conversations with colleagues from all over the world about why science seems to be losing in the current war on reason.This isn’t in the usual fringe battle fronts like creationism or flat-Earthers. It’s on topics deep behind our lines, in areas like whether climate change exists or not, how many people were present at a given time at a given place and whether one man with a questionable grasp on reality should be the only source people get their news from. Continue reading...

Nicola Davis sits down with Professor Uta Frith to talk autism, passion, rebellion and the role of women in scienceSubscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & AcastIn a career that spans almost five decades, Uta Frith, now an emeritus professor of cognitive development at University College London, and chair of the Diversity Committee at the Royal Society, is a name synonymous with the leaps and bounds seen in recent research into autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. But what has kept her passionate throughout her long career? What is she most excited about when it comes to the future of autism research? And how important are mentors like Uta within the field of science? Continue reading...

The problem of fake data may go far deeper than scientists admit. Now a team of researchers has a controversial plan to root out the perpetratorsOne morning last summer, a German psychologist named Mathias Kauff woke up to find that he had been reprimanded by a robot. In an email, a computer program named Statcheck informed him that a 2013 paper he had published on multiculturalism and prejudice appeared to contain a number of incorrect calculations – which the program had catalogued and then posted on the internet for anyone to see. The problems turned out to be minor – just a few rounding errors – but the experience left Kauff feeling rattled. “At first I was a bit frightened,” he said. “I felt a bit exposed.”Kauff wasn’t alone. Statcheck had read some 50,000 published psychology papers and checked the maths behind every statistical result it encountered. In the space of 24 hours, virtually every academic active in the field in the past two decades had received an email from the program, informing them that their work had been reviewed. Nothing like this had ever been seen before: a massive, open, retroactive evaluation of scientific literature, conducted entirely by computer. Continue reading...

Frog saliva switches between being thin and watery as the whip-like tongue hits its target, to thick and sticky as the insect is reeled in, research showsScientists have discovered what makes the frog’s tongue uniquely sticky, allowing the amphibian to snag passing flies while squatting motionless by the water’s edge.Frog saliva, the study revealed, has a bizarre property of being able to switch between thin and watery as the whip-like tongue hits its target, to thick and sticky as the insect is reeled in, creating an almost inescapable trap. Continue reading...

Using a device which detects patterns in brain activity, patients paralysed by ALS can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – and tell doctors they are ‘happy’ with lifeDoctors have used a brain-reading device to hold simple conversations with “locked-in” patients in work that promises to transform the lives of people who are too disabled to communicate.

Justice minister hails ‘momentous day’ as so-called Turing’s law receives royal assent, but critics say move does not go far enoughThousands of men convicted of offences that once criminalised homosexuality but are no longer on the statute book have been posthumously pardoned under a new law.A clause in the policing and crime bill, which received royal assent on Tuesday, extends to those who are dead the existing process of purging past criminal records. Continue reading...

Scientists believe a mathematical model could explain the origins of the cosmos. Here’s what you need to know …

Forget practising for hours on end or cramming the night before an exam. Here are some pointers to help you get top resultsThe old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed: try, try again”, might need rewriting. Because, according to new research, even if you do succeed, you should still try, try again. “Overlearning”, scientists say, could be the key to remembering what you have learned.In a study of 183 volunteers, participants were asked to spot the orientation of a pattern in an image. It is a task that took eight 20-minute rounds of training to master. Some volunteers, however, were asked to carry on for a further 16 20-minute blocks to “overlearn” before being moved on to another task. When tested the next day, they had retained the ability better than those who had mastered it and then stopped learning. Continue reading...

An assault on “alt-right” figure Richard Spencer sparked the ‘punch a Nazi’ meme. Violence is bad, but so is racism – so where do we stand ethically?When a KKK-endorsed alleged sexual assaulter can be elected to the White House, many are rightfully fearful. People of colour are increasingly worried about the normalisation of racism. Many once thought racism would get no further than the lips of a racist relative or a poorly-worded Facebook post. Now these views are entering the Oval Office and federal buildings, given weight by chants and placards and verified Twitter accounts.On 20 January, Richard Spencer, a prominent figure in the “alt-right” movement, was punched in the face while giving an interview in Washington. The punch spawned a number of “punch a Nazi” memes. It could be said that seeing a prominent representative of racist views being punched brings catharsis in a world that appears to be slouching toward Nazism. Continue reading...

Orangutan Samboja will be shown males on a touchscreen in experiment aimed at learning more about mating choicesA Dutch zoo hopes to increase the breeding chances of a female orangutan by seeing if she will choose a preferred mate on a touchscreen before they are introduced.In a four-year experiment it has called “Tinder for orangutans”, the Apenheul primate park in Apeldoorn will show Samboja, an 11-year-old female, pictures of possible partners from an international great ape breeding programme. Continue reading...

Automated fact-checking is hard enough, but Trump’s ‘chaos by design’ threatens to render it obsolete. Can Artificial Intelligence keep our grip on reality?Imagine you’re the head of machine learning at a big social media company, and you’ve been asked to design a system that can detect “fake news”. Succeed and you’ll be in line for a fat bonus. Screw up and you could put democracy itself at risk. Where do you start?

A set of photographic prints from Nasa’s archives – selected by Barbara Hitchcock and Peter Riva and approved by several of the astronauts – that include the first moon landing, are up for auction in New York. Originally part of a 1985 Smithsonian Institution exhibition, Sightseeing: A Space Panorama, many of the photos had never before been published by the space agency, and are the only known Cibachrome prints made from original Nasa positives Continue reading...

Images from the Cassini spacecraft are most detailed ever taken, and include previously unseen features within the ringsNasa has released spectacular images of Saturn’s rings, revealing that the rings may be home to millions of orbiting “moonlets”.The images from the Cassini spacecraft resolve details on a scale of 550 metres – around the size of the tallest buildings on Earth. They include previously unseen features within the rings, including giant double-armed “propeller” structures that suggest a constellation of miniature moons are hidden within the planetary rings. Continue reading...

The answer to today’s puzzleEarlier today I set you the following puzzle: On the assumption that the following ten statements are true, what can you conclude?The only people in the cereal cafe are from Stoke.Every person would make a great Uber driver, if he or she is not allergic to gluten. Continue reading...

It is known that our galaxy is being pulled through space, but cosmologists suspected it was being pushed as well – and new research might confirm itThe Milky Way is being “pushed” through space by a cosmic dead zone that lurks half a billion light years from Earth, researchers claim.Located on the far side of the constellation of Lacerta, the Lizard, the vast patch of nothingness appears to have a striking dearth of galaxies compared to the rest of its cosmic neighbourhood.

Thought to have lived 540 million years ago, the discovery of Saccorhytus coronarious fossils sheds light on the early stages of evolutionYou won’t find it in your family album, but a tiny prehistoric creature with a bag-like body, a huge mouth and no anus has become the best candidate yet for our earliest known ancestor.

US congressmen are proposing a bill to restrict President Trump’s access to nuclear weapons. As ‘chaotic’ as he may be, is this fair or rational?As humans, we all make irrational decisions throughout the course of our lives, which have the potential for long-term consequences. We might drink too much or smoke. Perhaps, if we are millennials, we go for brunch instead of saving for a house. However, most of us do not have adequate power for the consequences of our irrationality to have wide-reaching impacts. Perhaps one of the hardest choices that the leader of a nuclear state can make is that of starting a nuclear war.Donald Trump wrote in his book The Art of the Deal that “a little hyperbole never hurt”, a mantra he has employed adeptly throughout his short and explosive political career. From suggesting that Obama and Hillary founded Isis, to insisting that he has big hands, Trump repeatedly makes irrational and unsubstantiated statements on his mission to Make America Great Again. However, few would accuse him of irrationality when he admitted last week that receiving the nuclear codes was “very, very, very scary”. Few might disagree. With his access to the nuclear button and the US arsenal of 975 nuclear warheads, small hands could one day cause big problems. Continue reading...

Carroll is best known as the author of Alice in Wonderland, but his mathematical work, Symbolic Logic, is the inspiration for today’s puzzleUPDATE: The solution is now up hereHello guzzlers.Lewis Carroll - whose birthday was on Friday - was a keen deviser of mathematical puzzles, such as this one: Continue reading...

What to look out for in the coming month, including a brilliant view of Venus and a penumbral lunar eclipseFebruary brings our best evening sky of 2017. Not only is Orion still resplendent but Venus blazes at its brightest and highest as an evening star. Continue reading...

How do brains and computers differ when it comes to memory storage? And what clues can we get from the ageing brain?Subscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & AcastThis week, Observer Magazine columnist and neuroscientist Dr Daniel Glaser delves into the complex world of episodic memory. With King’s College London neuropsychologist Dr Charlotte Russell as his guide, Daniel explores how and where memories are stored, how reliable these memories are and whether computers – like our brains – show ‘graceful degradation’ of memory. Continue reading...

The Nobel winner says keeping telomeres – the ends of our chromosomes – in prime condition can stave off diseases associated with ageingYou won your Nobel prize for medicine for your discoveries concerning telomeres, found at the ends of chromosomes. What are telomeres and what happens to them as we age?

Lack of faith is no impediment to a decent death – or to helping another through theirs, says Johannes KlabbersIn the secular age you don’t need special authorisation to console a dying person. Just learning what it means to be there for someone is enough.“Death literacy” is officially a thing. People go to death cafés; books about death are in demand… and around 55 million people worldwide do it every year. But how do you actually do dying well? And who can the dying turn to for support? Continue reading...

An appreciation of ‘sick jokes’ equates with high IQ and low aggressionWho needs Mensa? If you want to find out if someone has a high IQ, just tell them a string of sick jokes and then gauge their reaction.A new study in the journal Cognitive Processing has found that intelligence plays a key role in the appreciation of black humour – as well as several other factors, notably a person’s aggression levels. Continue reading...

Research shows price of 14 treatments that should cost pennies has risen by up to 1,000%Drug companies have been accused of profiteering by raising the prices of out-of-patent cancer medicines that cost just pence to make, inflating the bills of the cash-strapped NHS by hundreds of millions of pounds.Academics say the prices of 14 cancer drugs have increased by between 100% and nearly 1,000% over the past five years in the UK. These are all generic drugs where the patent has expired, which means they can be made for little more than the cost of the raw ingredients. Continue reading...

Drug firms say leaving EMA could mean Britons having to wait a year longer than EU citizens for newly-developed medicinesMinisters are coming under growing pressure to scrap plans to quit Europe’s medicines regulator as part of Brexit, with drug firms saying doing so could force Britons to wait a year longer than patients in the EU to access new drugs.Labour and leaders of the UK’s pharmaceutical industry fear that patients and the NHS will lose out if Britain gives up its membership of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, told MPs last week that he did not expect the UK to continue as a member once it left the EU. Continue reading...

Starving rodents in north-eastern France are suffering from vitamin deficiencies that prompt them to eat their own youngA diet of corn is turning wild hamsters in north-eastern France into deranged cannibals that devour their offspring, researchers have reported.

Advice that overcooked starchy foods can contain acrylamide, a chemical liked to cancer, has caused a furore this week. Is it just another health scare?In October 1997, something troubling was happened around the HallandsaÌŠs ridge in southwestern Sweden. Farmers had found cows paralysed or dead in their fields, lifeless fish were spotted floating in a local river and workers at a construction site began suffering from nausea and prickling sensations in their fingers.Suspicion fell on a major construction project to drill a railway tunnel through the ridge. The project had been plagued by leaks and the construction company had resorted to injecting 1,400 tons of a sealant called Rhoca-Gil into tunnel walls. Tests confirmed that the sealant had leaked high levels of a toxic chemical into surrounding ground and surface water. The chemical was acrylamide. Continue reading...

Amid growing concerns over the anti-science stance of the Trump administration, I spoke to US scientists planning to join the March for ScienceScientists in the United States are mobilising to organise a March for Science. What originated online as a discussion about how to push back against the anti-science stance of Donald Trump’s administration rapidly gathered support from concerned scientists and non-scientists alike. A march on Washington similar to the Women’s March was proposed, and within 24 hours the group’s Twitter account had gained an additional 124,000 followers. Over half a million people have also joined a new Facebook page, which has become a hive of comments, suggestions and coordination. An event in the US capital is planned for March, with activities occurring in other countries.Related: EPA staff experiencing stress and fears Trump will suppress climate science Continue reading...

After exhaustive studies, an international team of scientists has worked out why tomatoes don’t taste like they used toAn international team of scientists claims finally to have cracked one of the most common consumer conundrums: why don’t tomatoes taste like they used to?

Harryplax severus takes name from secretive Hogwarts teacher Severus SnapeA species of crab that managed to elude capture for 20 years after it was first identified from remains has become the latest real-life creature to be named after a Harry Potter character. Harryplax severus takes its name from Harry’s notorious teacher Severus Snape, who managed to keep the secret that he was a double agent working for Hogwarts headmaster Professor Dumbledore until he died.Discovered 20 years ago in Guam by collector Harry Conley, who was digging in rubble fields at low tide, biologists have only now identified it as a new species. It was Conley’s first name, rather than the beloved boy wizard’s, that provided the genus name – in honour of his prolific rummaging for crustaceans, deep in the Micronesian island’s mud. Continue reading...