The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in perilIn theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics has become one of the key schisms that have opened up in western liberal democracies. Shortly before the November presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68% of Trump supporters distrusted the economic data published by the federal government. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55% of the population believes that the government “is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here”.Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency. Continue reading...

Instagram bans female nipples, but closeup images make it difficult – if not impossible – to tell whether they are male or female

Lassa, Mers and Nipah will be first diseases targeted by programme announced at Davos by coalition of governments, philanthropists and businessA coalition of governments, philanthropists and business is pledging to put money and effort into making vaccines to stop the spread of diseases that could threaten mankind – and to prevent another outbreak as devastating as the Ebola epidemic.At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Norwegian, Japanese and German governments, the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation announced they were putting in $460 million – half of what is needed for the first five years of the initiative. Three diseases will initially be targeted: Lassa, Mers and Nipah. All three are caused by viruses that have come from animals to infect humans and could trigger dangerous global epidemics. Continue reading...

The president-elect should understand that America needs to shoulder global responsibilities, and that in doing so America will benefit by owning the technologies of the futureOn climate change, like so many other things, the world is going one way and Donald Trump is going the other. On Twitter the president-elect has claimed manmade global warming was a hoax invented by China to increase its trade surplus with the US. However, for most Americans, like most other people on the globe, daily life is increasingly impacted by extreme weather. In 2016, for the third year running, the world exceeded the previous record temperature. A remarkable 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have been this century, which scientists attribute to human activities.President Obama did much to roll back the pre-enlightenment approach to climate science that had polluted political discourse in America – giving global warming top billing during his second term, and even calling it an immediate threat to national security. His parting shot was to send $500m to prop up the Paris international accord to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Mr Trump vowed to renege on the Paris agreement and said he would cancel further payments. Continue reading...

Researchers warn of approaching ‘major extinction event’ if action is not taken to protect around 300 species, including gorillas, chimps, lemurs and lorisesMore than half of the world’s apes, monkeys, lemurs and lorises are now threatened with extinction as agriculture and industrial activities destroy forest habitats and the animals’ populations are hit by hunting and trade.In the most bleak assessment of primates to date, conservationists found that 60% of the wild species are on course to die out, with three quarters already in steady decline. The report casts doubt on the future of about 300 primate species, including gorillas, chimps, gibbons, marmosets, tarsiers, lemurs and lorises.

Using computer models, ecologists think they have finally hit upon the reason for the strange polka dot patches scattered across the Namib desertThe marks on the ground in the Namib desert resemble a vast sheet of polka dots, or to the less romantic observer, perhaps a bad case of chickenpox.In local myths, the bare, red circles fringed with grass are footprints of the gods, or patches of land once poisoned by the breath of a subterranean dragon. But even among scientists, who strive for more convincing theories, the curious, repetitive patterns have proved hard to explain. Continue reading...

• Final data confirms record-breaking temperatures for third year in a row• Earth has not been this warm for 115,000 years2016 was the hottest year on record, setting a new high for the third year in a row, with scientists firmly putting the blame on human activities that drive climate change.The final data for 2016 was released on Wednesday by the three key agencies – the UK Met Office and Nasa and Noaa in the US – and showed 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have been this century. Continue reading...

Exceptionally preserved fossils have enabled researchers to place a tricky group of extinct marine animals on the tree of lifeThere are some fossils it’s difficult to get enthusiastic about. Don’t get me wrong: as someone whose PhD focussed on the fossil equivalent of tea-leaves, my threshold for getting excited is a lot lower than most people. But when you’re studying undergraduate palaeontology there’s an awful lot of extinct shelly things you must learn about. Contrary to the popular conception of what palaeontologists study (dinosaurs!), marine invertebrates with mineralised hard parts are the mainstay of working with fossils.There are some familiar groups that, although they are extinct, we do know a fair bit about. Trilobites and ammonites fall into this category: we have a good sense of their evolution and diversity through time, and have inferred a fair bit about their biology. There are other groups that are less well understood. We’ve got lots of shells, but we don’t know what the soft bits of the animal looked like, and we don’t know where they fit on the tree of life. In short, they are a bit of an embarrassment. Luckily, there are palaeontologists who rise to the challenge.

The psychologist provides more evidence that the inequality of the sexes in society is cultural not naturalCordelia Fine is an optimistic writer. In her two earlier books of popular neuroscience (A Mind of Its Own and Delusions of Gender), the psychologist established a reputation for exemplary clarity on complex topics, pleasing wit, feminist principle – and beneath it all, the animating faith that people can be improved through knowledge. Testosterone Rex starts with a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists that establishes the Fine approach perfectly: “But in addition to being angry, I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of humans to make and remake themselves for the better.”“Testosterone Rex”, Fine’s target, is the name she gives to “that familiar, plausible, pervasive and powerful story of sex and society”, which holds that inequality of the sexes is natural, not cultural. After all, testosterone makes men tall, hairy and deep-voiced; it makes a certain superficial sense to imagine it also produces other characteristics we think of as masculine, such as leadership, violence and horniness. For example, neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen (the Alien to Fine’s Ripley in the dispute over brain sex) calls the hormone “that special substance”, and credits it with inducing all manner of adaptive qualities in those creatures fortunate enough to produce large amounts of it. T is the king. Continue reading...

The 19th-century Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, was one of the first people to unravel the mysteries of the structure of the brain – and he made stunning drawings to describe and explain his discoveries Continue reading...

The word “So”, used as a “Well, …” or “Um, …” at the start of a sentence (Letters, 16 January) has been current in America for quite some time.I guess it is another of many examples of US English usage that originated with German immigrants before travelling back over the Atlantic to us. It’s very common in German to begin a sentence with an “Also …” pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable and meaning “Well, …”. Sometimes the meaning of a German-influenced word or phrase undergoes a subtle or even radical alteration on its way into the English language. The oddest example that I can think of is our use of “half two” to mean “half past two”. In German “halb zwei” is 1.30 not 2.30.

Red meat cancer link | Charges against Lula | Robots as people | Ring pull safety | Peanut butter on WeetabixNaomi Elster writes: “There isn’t currently any strong evidence that eating too much red meat causes cancer”, before noting that Cancer Research UK is a “reliable source … for advice and support” (The truth about cancer diets, G2, 16 January). However, responding to the WHO’s October 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer report which classified red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans”, Professor Tim Key, Cancer Research UK’s epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, said: “Cancer Research UK supports IARC’s decision that there’s strong enough evidence to classify … red meat as a probable cause of cancer.”

American astronaut who was the last human being to walk on the moonAt 1.54pm on 11 December 1972, Gene Cernan piloted Challenger, Apollo 17’s lunar module, into the Taurus-Littrow valley, near the Sea of Serenity, on the surface of the moon. In later years Cernan, who has died aged 82, would describe the valley where he had landed accompanied by the geologist Jack Schmitt as “our own private little Camelot”.Three days later, having travelled to such locations as the Sculptured Hills, and the Van Serg and Sherlock craters, the astronauts prepared to leave. Cernan marked out his daughter Teresa’s initials in the dust, where they remain. Before climbing back into the lunar module, he paused and spoke to Mission Control back in Houston: “As we leave the moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” Continue reading...

More than 600 wooden coffins at Egyptian Museum in Cairo to be documented and restored by team of conservationistsEgypt will restore hundreds of coffins dating back thousands of years to the time of the pharaohs as part of an American-Egyptian project to preserve and document one of the world’s oldest civilisations, a director of the project said.The conservation effort, funded by a US grant, will restore more than 600 wooden coffins that date to various eras of ancient Egypt and which are currently stored at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

A surprising number of people experience a form of sensory cross wiring in which light flashes and visual movements are ‘heard’, research findsOne in five people is affected by a synaesthesia-like phenomenon in which visual movements or flashes of light are “heard” as faint sounds, according to scientists.The findings suggest that far more people than initially thought experience some form of sensory cross-wiring – which could explain the appeal of flashing musical baby toys and strobed lighting at raves. Continue reading...

Halley VI station moved to safer location but staff to be brought home during southern winter as ‘prudent precaution’A British research station on an ice shelf in Antarctica is being shut down over the southern hemisphere winter because of fears it could float off on an iceberg.

As Theresa May prepares to announce a ‘clean Brexit’, researchers must provide government, parliament and the country with a clear picture of the risks facing negotiatorsThanks in no small part to its close links to our neighbours in the EU and a longstanding reputation as a welcoming destination overseas scientists, Britain has consolidated its position as one of the most productive centres for research in the world – a necessary foundation on which to build a thriving knowledge economy.But “Brexit means Brexit”, which means that those links and that reputation are now under threat. Continue reading...

Not far from the mouth of the river Tyne, fabulously-coloured nudibranchs and corals can be spotted amongst rusting sunken shipsAs I finned alongside the bulky remnants of the ship’s boilers - three massive blocks of northern iron – the light had almost gone. The gently rusting masses were riddled with fire-tubes, each seemingly host to a wary crab. In some, the red eyes of a velvet swimming crab (Necora puber) reflected my light; in others edible crabs (Cancer pagurus) retreated from my gaze. Small prawns and a few well-camouflaged fish moved to avoid me, drab browns revealed as reds and oranges under my torch light. And there, on a piece of deck plate, covered by a bright red encrusting sponge, was one of the jewel-like animals I’d set out to capture on film. Continue reading...

More than half of deaths from bites and stings between 2000 and 2013 the result of anaphylactic shock, analysis showsOf all Australia’s venomous animals, bees and wasps pose the biggest threat to public health, causing more than twice the number of admissions to hospital as snake bites and the same number of deaths.The first national analysis of 13 years’ data on bites and stings from venomous creatures has found that just over one-third (33%) of almost 42,000 admissions were caused by bees and wasps, compared with 30% by spiders and 15% by snakes. Continue reading...

Former astronaut was final person to leave footprints on lunar surface as commander of Apollo 17 in 1972The last man to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan, has died at the age of 82. The American travelled into space three times, and became the 11th person to walk on the moon and the last to leave his footprints on its surface as commander of Apollo 17, the final manned lunar landing.His death was confirmed by Nasa in a statement on Twitter that read: “We are saddened by the loss of retired Nasa astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon.”

Researchers say that while the effect corresponds to a small drop in IQ per decade, over centuries the impact could be profoundTempting as it may be, it would be wrong to claim that with each generation humans are becoming more stupid. As scientists are often so keen to point out, it is a bit more complicated than that.A study from Iceland is the latest to raise the prospect of a downwards spiral into imbecility. The research from deCODE, a genetics firm in Reykjavik, finds that groups of genes that predispose people to spend more years in education became a little rarer in the country from 1910 to 1975.

The answer to today’s snifterEarlier today I set you the following puzzle:A full whisky bottle has a height of 27cm and a diameter of 7cm, and contains 750 cubic centimetres of whisky. It has a dome-like indentation at the bottom like many bottles do. Continue reading...

Pressure wave in planet’s atmosphere was one of the largest ever seen in the solar system, stretching over 10,000 kilometresA Japanese spacecraft that is circling Venus has beamed home pictures of one of the largest waves ever seen in the solar system.The Akatsuki probe captured images of the giant wave in the Venusian cloud tops where it became one of the most prominent features in the planet’s atmosphere for four days in December 2015.

Hamilton Morris is on a mind-altering mission to reveal the truth about psychoactive stimulants – from secret government drug experiments in South Africa to the joys of salvia divinorum. So why do people assume he’s a waster?When people tell Hamilton Morris that he “gets high for a living” – and when I say “people” I mean “devilish Guardian headline writers” – it leaves him exasperated.“It’s funny, but it’s also reductive,” he says. “It feeds into the biases and more hateful interpretation of what I do. It would be completely unacceptable for you to say that someone who writes about relationships gets fucked for a living!” Continue reading...

Despite multiple attempts to debunk it, Blue Monday still hasn’t gone away. So, what the hell, here’s a song about it instead. Maybe that’ll work.A song about Blue Monday, to the tune of New Order’s Blue Monday. Because you can never have enough Blue Monday. Apparently.Dear Blue Monday… [Clears throat]

A peaty poser for a dry January! The solution is now live: did you solve it, or will you be trying to drown your sorrows?Hello guzzlers.If you are now abstaining from alcohol, as many end-of-year over-indulgers do, today’s puzzle is for you. Here’s a full whisky bottle. It has a height of 27cm and a diameter of 7cm, and contains 750 cubic centimetres of whisky. It has a dome-like indentation at the bottom like many bottles have. Continue reading...

Scientists warn Trump may ‘severely weaken’ climate research, but say UK ready to expand its work in area, offering jobs to disaffected US researchersLeading scientists have asked the prime minister to urge president-elect Donald Trump to acknowledge the risks of climate change and declare his support for international efforts to combat global warming.One hundred researchers, including many of the most prominent climate scientists in Britain, have written to Theresa May to warn her of the potential threats posed by Donald Trump, who has made clear he does not accept the scientific consensus on warming driven by human activities. Continue reading...

Cancer Research UK and the broadcaster team up for live colonoscopy to raise awareness about the impact of research on cancer treatment and preventionSqueamish viewers tuning into Channel 4 on Wednesday afternoon might want to look away as the broadcaster airs the first TV ad showing a live surgical procedure.Channel 4 and Cancer Research UK have teamed up to air a colonoscopy being performed live on a patient in what the two organisations claim is a world first in broadcasting. Continue reading...

A detailed look at the Hunter who rules the sky for the next few weeks, plus a brief look at the planetary year ahead and August’s solar eclipseOrion is now in prime position in everyone’s evening sky. Lying across the celestial equator, with his main stars slotting neatly between 10° N and 10° S of the celestial equator, the Hunter’s figure is visible from all parts of the Earth bar the central regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. I accept, of course, that most of the latter currently enjoys 24-hour daylight and is hardly the place to go for visual star-watching in January. Continue reading...

My father, Archie Norman, who has died aged 104, was an eminent paediatrician who pioneered research into cystic fibrosis and asthma at Great Ormond Street hospital, in London, and neonatal care at Queen Charlotte’s.The son of George Norman, a radiologist, and his wife, Mary (nee MacCallum), a nurse, he was born in Oban, Argyll and Bute, and watched his father march off to the first world war. He grew up in the soot-covered mill town of Shaw in Lancashire (now part of Greater Manchester), and remembered the “waker” coming down the street and the sirens summoning workers to the morning shift. Continue reading...

Prince teams up with campaigners Tony Juniper and Emily Shuckburgh to create peer-reviewed ‘basic guide’ for adultsPrince Charles, a vocal critic of climate change sceptics, has penned a Ladybird book on the subject after lamenting with experts the lack of a basic guide to the subject.The prince has joined forces with two leading environmental campaigners to produce The Ladybird Book on Climate Change, the first in a new series aimed at adults, The Ladybird Expert, is to be published later this month.

From the chin-jut to the zipped smile, we examine the president-elect’s signature facial expressions and what they tell us about himA great deal of Donald Trump’s political success can be put down to his body language and the unusual ways he uses his face. The first thing we notice about Trump’s facial expressions is the sheer variety. The second is their dramatic, often over-stated character. This was evident before and during the presidential election. While the other candidates – Hillary Clinton included – were struggling to appear likeable and restrained, Trump was busy performing grimaces that would not have looked out of place in Japanese Noh theatre. But what are Trump’s signature facial expressions, and what do they tell us about him? Continue reading...

A study of the whales, one of only three species whose older females stop reproducing, claims competition between offspring may be the causeKiller whales and humans would seem to have little in common. We inhabit very different ecosystems, after all. Yet the two species share one unexpected biological attribute. Females of Orcinus orca and Homo sapiens both go through the menopause.It an extraordinary aspect of our development. In contrast to the vast majority of animals on our planet, women and female killer whales stop reproducing halfway through their lives. Only one other species – the short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus) – behaves this way. Continue reading...

Try our quiz and discover a surprising link between worldwide travel and your moralsMoral values are notoriously tricky to measure. But the findings of a 2016 study conducted at INSEAD Business School suggest a surprisingly simple way to do so. From the list below tick off all the countries you have visited:France, USA, Spain, Italy, China, UK, Russia, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Greece, Morocco, South Africa, Tunisia, Algeria, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Hong Kong, India, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Turkey, Macau, Cyprus, Malaysia, Dominican Republic, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Senegal, Namibia, Australia. Continue reading...

SpaceX lands its first rocket since a previous attempt in September 2016 exploded before takeoff. The Falcon 9 rocket took approximately nine minutes to return to earth after launch, landing on a barge in the Pacific south of Vandenberg, California to the obvious delight of SpaceX employees Continue reading...

Many people are afraid of mice, but these ones really take the (cheese) biscuit: a study designed to examine the predatory instinct in mice successfully used optogenetics to switch their killer instincts off and on at will. In a slightly more romantic(? maybe not) vein, a male snow monkey was observed attempting to mate with female sika deer in Japan. This is only the second recorded example of sexual relations between two distantly related species, and could be down to “mate deprivation”, say researchers. In more heartwarming news, scientists have studied the impact of babytalk on dogs, concluding that that puppies respond well to it, but older dogs are unmoved. It might also shed light on the way humans communicate with actual babies. And if animals aren’t your thing, don’t despair: there’s some exciting knot news as well! Chemists have broken a world record, creating tightest knot ever made – a microscopic circular triple helix built from a strand of atoms, which could make a whole new world of materials possible. And if even that’s knot (aha!) enough to banish the January blues, perhaps the possibility of rare thundersnow might interest you. This video explains it all AND contains one of the most excitable reactions to weather I’ve ever witnessed. In more serious news, medical and legal specialists have warned that recent breakthroughs in fertility procedures could lead to “embryo farming” on a massive scale and drive parents to have only “ideal” future children – and that we must start to plan for the potential impact on society now. Continue reading...

Vaccines have been shown safe and effective. When he hints otherwise, the president-elect is gambling with young livesThis week, vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr announced that he’d been nominated by President Elect Donald Trump to chair a commission on vaccine safety. A few hours later, the transition team issued a statement saying that that Trump was “exploring the possibility of forming a committee on autism”. Last summer, Trump met with Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license and was found to have produced fraudulent research linking vaccines to autism. Whether Trump is creating a commission on vaccine safety or autism, the message is clear. Trump is offering prominent support to the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism.The science on vaccines is very clear: they are safe and effective. Vaccines do not cause autism. It’s a waste of our tax dollars to rehash this issue yet again. Vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine. Let’s consider measles, just one of many vaccine-preventable diseases. Before 1963, when the measles vaccine became widely available, 3-4 million Americans got measles each year, of whom 48,000 were hospitalized, 4000 developed encephalitis resulting in long-term brain damage, and 4-500 died. The country’s population has almost doubled since that time. Continue reading...

Theories around the death of Grigori Rasputin still abound 100 years after the event. We examine the scientific credibility of some of the claimsThe end of December marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Rasputin, the “mad monk of Russia”, or “lover of the Russian queen” if you believe the Boney M song, though you probably shouldn’t. While the song is undoubtedly a floor-filler, unsurprisingly it is not exactly a reliable historical account of Rasputin’s life.Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, a mystic and spiritual healer born in Pokrovskoe in Siberia, wielded huge influence over the Russian royal family, particularly Alexandra, the Tsarina, who looked to the spiritual healer to cure her haemophiliac son, Alexei. The life of Rasputin was certainly pretty strange but it is the stories surrounding his death that are the strangest of all. Continue reading...

Study of 10,000 reports into cannabis finds only enough evidence to support therapeutic use for chemotherapy patients, chronic pain and multiple sclerosisThere is not enough research to reach conclusive judgments on whether marijuana can effectively treat most of the symptoms and diseases it is advertised as helping, according to a wide-ranging US government study.The same is also true of many of the risks said to be associated with using cannabis, the study finds. Continue reading...

Launch will be the crucial test of whether engineers have understood the cause of the blast enough to correct itSpace insiders will be watching events in California carefully on Saturday. If all goes well, SpaceX will attempt its first launch since the explosion of 1 September 2016, which grounded its rocket fleet.The accident destroyed not only the Falcon 9 rocket but also its payload, the Amos 6 communications satellite. It inflicted considerable damage on one of Cape Canaveral’s launch pads too. Continue reading...

A microscopic circular triple helix built from a strand of atoms could make a whole new world of materials possibleIn a feat that breaks one of the most obscure world records in science, a team of chemists has created a microscopic circular triple helix, or put in more simple terms, the tightest knot ever made.Researchers in Manchester in the UK built the knot from a strand of atoms which curls around in a triple loop and crosses itself eight times. Made from 192 atoms linked in a chain, the knot is only two millionths of a millimetre wide – around 200,000 times thinner than a human hair.

My father, Kenneth Carpenter, who has died aged 93, was an eminent nutritional scientist.Born in London, Kenneth was the son of James, managing director of a chain of hardware shops, and Dorothy (nee George), a teacher. As a boy he horrified his parents by wasting his pocket money – as they saw it – on collecting antiques; he had a particular passion for English Delftware, of which he later presented some specimens to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Continue reading...

Technique called optogenetics used to pinpoint and take control of brain circuits involved in predatory behaviourIt has all the trappings of a classic horror plot: a group of normally timid individuals are transformed by scientists into instinctive killers, programmed to pursue and sink their jaws into almost anything that crosses their path.However, this hair-raising scenario was recently played out in a study of laboratory mice, designed to uncover the brain circuits behind the predatory instinct. Continue reading...

M Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Split, stars James McAvoy as a character with 23 different personalities. And, like most screen portrayals of the disorder, it is seen as dangerous and violent. But what’s the truth behind the stigma?Tom Hanks played six different characters in Cloud Atlas, Eddie Murphy played seven in The Nutty Professor and Alec Guinness notched up eight in Kind Hearts and Coronets. But James McAvoy sets a new benchmark with his new movie, Split. He plays Kevin, a man with at least 23 distinct personalities – not all of them nice. This presents extra challenges for the young women Kevin has abducted and locked in his basement. Every time he walks into the cell, they have to work out who they are dealing with. Is it “Dennis”, the frowny, buttoned-up neat-freak? Is it “Patricia”, the prim, English-accented governess? Could it be “Hedwig”, the nine-year-old Kanye West fan? We don’t get to see all of Kevin’s alter egos, but enough to get the picture and to make this lurid little horror stand out from the crowd.Split’s writer and director, M Night Shyamalan, professes to having had a lifelong fascination with dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly known as split personality, or multiple personality disorder, and frequently mislabelled as schizophrenia (which is an entirely different condition). He is clearly not the only one. DID is relatively rare in real life, but we have all heard of it, and we all think we know what it entails because cinema and television seem to be obsessed with it. Continue reading...

Thundersnow is a rare weather phenomenon which looks set to make an appearance in the UK over the next couple of days. It occurs when the air closest to the ground is warm enough to rise and form a thunderstorm, but still cool enough that it’s able to freeze into snow. The results are brighter, but quieter, than we’ve come to expect from our usual doses of thunder and lightning Continue reading...

Stephen Hawking to open Belief and Beyond Belief, a year-long festival of events and performances at London arts complexAn ambitious year-long programme of lectures, debates, music and performances examining the meaning of life and death will be launched at the Southbank Centre in London on Monday with a talk by the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.The Belief and Beyond Belief festival is intended to explore what it means to be human in the 21st century with a wide range of participants from faith communities as well as those of no faith.

Recordings of New Zealand yellowhammer accents enable scientists to hear how their British relatives might have sounded 150 years agoA new study reveals that a type of native birdsong, now lost in Britain, can still be heard in New Zealand where the birds were introduced in the 19th century.By comparing recordings of yellowhammer accents in both countries scientists were able to hear how the birds’ song might have sounded in the UK 150 years ago. Continue reading...