Jim Thomas: ‘Gene drives’ seem to be the ultimate high-leverage technology. Yesterday’s report from the US National Academies begun the job of describing what is at stake, but it missed some important questions.

Fifty years ago, a priest started searching for the ‘hobbits’ of the Indonesian island. Now a research team has finally found themArchaeological research on Flores began in 1950 by Father Theodor Verhoeven, a Dutch Jesuit priest who had been stationed on the island since 1948 as a missionary at the local Catholic seminary. Having been trained as a classicist and with a keen interest in archaeology, he used his spare time to explore the many caves on the island. In 1956, his attention was drawn to the So’a Basin, a hot and dry area in the central part of the island, by the discovery of a fossilized tusk from the ancient elephant Stegodon near the abandoned village of Ola Bula. Intrigued, Verhoeven undertook excavations at the nearby sites, Mata Menge, Bo’a Leza and Lembah Menge, where he unearthed more Stegodon remains with stone artifacts in close association.Now, finding stone tools next to a fossil elephant is not unusual. Scientists had been finding stone tools next to the bones of extinct megafauna all across Europe, Africa and North America. But Flores was different. Located in eastern Indonesia, it is part of Wallacea, the group of islands in between the Australian and Asian continental shelves. Whereas other Indonesian islands, such as Java and Borneo, sit comfortably on the Sunda continental shelf, most Wallacean islands arose from the ocean floor and are surrounded by deep sea straits. During glacial periods, when sea levels dropped, the Sunda shelf would become exposed, and dry land would connect Sumatra, Java and Borneo to mainland Asia. Yet anything beyond the eastern edge of the continental shelf remained surrounded by water at all times. Continue reading...

Only Prozac found to show measurable benefit, though authors caution their findings are not comprehensive due to a lack of available unbiased dataMost available antidepressants do not help children and teenagers with serious mental health problems and some may be unsafe, experts have warned.

Discovery that there are more categories of disease than previously thought could aid diagnosis and lead to new treatmentsThe blood cancer known as acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is not one disease but at least 11 different types, scientists have concluded by studying the genes that cause the condition.Scientists say the discovery could aid diagnosis and lead to new treatments geared towards tackling the different types of the disease. Continue reading...

The observation, made accidentally by astronomers in Chile, provides the first direct evidence for the theory that black holes feed on clouds of gasAstronomers in Chile have caught the first-ever glimpse of a “supermassive” black hole preparing to gorge itself on gas clouds about a billion light years from Earth.Using the ALMA telescope in the Atacama desert, the international team spotted three clouds streaming towards a black hole at speeds of up to 800,000 miles (1.3m km) per hour. Continue reading...

Experts preaching the ‘truth’ on healthy eating or cancer cures are not immune to the murky worlds of politics and commerceI am not obese or dying of cancer. Nor am I a hypochondriac. But not a day passes without my absorbing news of imminent salvation or disaster from some branch of science. And whereas the panjandrums of big science used to maintain an aura of lofty objectivity as they demand our attention and cash, they now seem all over the shop, fighting like rats in a sack.Take obesity. I am reeling from last month’s BBC knuckle fight between the dietician Aseem Malhotra and the government obesity tsar, Susan Jebb, over whether fat makes you fat. As they hurled accusations of deceit and corruption back and forth, there seemed only one fact. Whatever we had been told on this subject before no longer applied. I was left with a nasty sense that the phrase “the science” should now read “the money”. The following week a television programme advised me to avoid “healthy breakfasts” and tuck into bacon and eggs instead. I buried my head in a pillow. Continue reading...

Report by US committee warns it is too early to rely on genetic engineering technology that could eventually be used to tackle multiple diseasesThe US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine have warned that it is too early to roll out a controversial technology that could help tackle malaria and other mosquito-born diseases, but backs further research.Scientists say the approach, known as gene drive, could be used to solve a host of problems, from controlling agricultural pests to eliminating invasive species and tackling diseases such Zika, dengue and malaria.

Conservationists raise serious questions about the widespread incineration of ivory stockpiles confiscated from poachersAt the end of April, Kenya incinerated 105 tonnes of confiscated elephant ivory, aiming to send a clear signal to the poachers and public alike: killing elephants for their tusks and buying ivory-based products is simply not acceptable.But do such spectacles really help conserve elephants? Or could they, in fact, be counterproductive? Continue reading...

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry says names will pay tribute to Japan, Moscow, Tennessee and a Russian scientistThere will soon be four new names on the periodic table after scientists decided to use recently discovered elements to pay tribute to Japan, Moscow, Tennessee and a Russian scientist.The names moscovium, nihonium, tennessine and oganesson were recommended on Wednesday by an international scientific group. Continue reading...

Studies on embryos made with extra DNA showed majority were indistinguishable from standard IVF embryosDoctors are a step closer to creating babies with DNA from three people after research on healthy embryos found the procedure was likely to produce normal pregnancies.Studies on embryos made with extra DNA showed that the majority were indistinguishable from standard IVF embryos, although further tests hinted that the procedure still carried risks.

Approximately 700,000-year-old fossils from Indonesian island of Flores reveal long history of enigmatic ‘hobbits’It was August 2003 and we were at the Hotel Sindha in Ruteng on the Indonesian island of Flores. We were sitting on the verandah drinking tea and passing around a strange tooth that had just been unearthed from nearby Liang Bua cave. It was clearly human in origin, but unlike the tooth of any person living or dead. We had no idea that this fossil was from a creature that would soon rewrite our understanding of human evolution.A few weeks later, on the 2nd of September 2003, the dig at Liang Bua uncovered the partial skeleton of a tiny, small-brained human adult. Now it was clear where the mystery tooth had come from. That fossil had been unusual, but the remains of this individual were truly extraordinary. A year later, the world was introduced to a previously undiscovered human species: Homo floresiensis, the Flores ‘hobbit’. Continue reading...

Researchers find what appears to be predecessors of tiny humans whose bones were first unearthed on Indonesian island in 2004More than a decade ago, researchers in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores unearthed the bones of an ancient race of tiny humans. Now, in sandstone laid down by a stream 700,000 years ago, they have found what appear to be the creatures’ ancestors.The new fossils are not extensive. A partial lower jaw and six teeth, belonging to at least one adult and two children, are all researchers have. But the importance of the remains outweighs their number. They suggest that dwarf humans roamed the island - hunting pigmy elephants and fending off komodo dragons - for more than half a million years. Continue reading...

The number of people trying to register to vote in the EU referendum, moments before the deadline, caused the site to crash. Why do some of us procrastinate – and can it ever be helpful?It’s been three years coming, yet on Tuesday night, thousands of us had spent too long chillin and chattin to get registerin for #votin; the government’s online voter registration site for the EU referendum crashed as midnight approached, leaving many unsure whether they would have a say on 23 June.Like a kindly but not disinterested teacher in need of good results, David Cameron has extended the deadline, allowing the mainly youthful (and, he might quietly hope, more EU-friendly) late surge to register. It’s safe to assume most of them were aware of the deadline but had just put things off. Continue reading...

After almost six months floating aboard the International Space Station and ten days before his scheduled to return to Earth, British astronaut Tim Peake says on Wednesday it will take several months to fully adjust to life back on earth. He also admits he missed the rain and comments on the EU Referendum Continue reading...

One of the world’s foremost theoretical physicistsSir Tom Kibble, who has died aged 83, was one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists and, with the Nobel laureate Peter Higgs, discoverer of the “Higgs-Kibble mechanism” for giving mass to the fundamental particles of the universe. Kibble’s specific contribution to this breakthrough, half a century ago, underpinned Nobel physics prizes on at least three occasions, although he never attained this singular honour himself. But he had a distinguished career in research that has applications to all scales of size and temperature: from the microscopic constituent particles that seed matter to the large-scale structure of the entire cosmos, and from near the absolute zero of temperature to the searing heat of the hot big-bang.He was born in Madras (now Chennai), India, the son of missionaries, Walter and Janet (nee Bannerman). In 1944, Tom went as a boarder to Melville college, Edinburgh. He entered Edinburgh University as an undergraduate in 1951, and remained there until his PhD in 1958. After a year at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology), as a Commonwealth fund fellow, in 1959 he joined the theoretical physics department at Imperial College London, newly formed under Abdus Salam. Five years later, Kibble would be at the centre of an annus mirabilis in the department. Continue reading...

Jerome Ravetz has been one of the UK’s foremost philosophers of science for more than 50 years. Here, he reflects on the troubles facing contemporary science. He argues that the roots of science’s crisis have been ignored for too long. Quality control has failed to keep pace with the growth of science.As noted already in the Guardian’s science pages, there is no lack of initiatives to tackle science’s crisis in all its aspects, from reproducibility to the abuse of metrics, to the problems of peer review. This gives good grounds for hope that the crisis will eventually be resolved, and that it will not become a general crisis of trust in science. Should that occur, and ‘science’ ceases to be a key cultural symbol of both truth and probity, along with material beneficence, then the consequences could be far-reaching. To that end, we should consider what lies behind the malpractices whose exposure has triggered the crisis over the last decade.It is clear that a combination of circumstances can go far to explain what has gone wrong. Systems of controls and rewards that had evolved under earlier conditions have in many ways become counterproductive, producing perverse incentives that become increasingly difficult for scientists to withstand. Our present problems can be explained partly by the transformation from the ‘little science’ of the past to the ‘big science’ or ‘industrialised science’ of the present. But this explanation raises a problem: if the corrupting pressures are the result of the structural conditions of contemporary science, can they be nullified in the absence of a significant change in those conditions? Continue reading...

Scientists hope gene-editing could open the way to growing human organs in pigs. But where might it all lead? Continue reading...

Posthumous painting by artist Robert Ballagh celebrates scientist who, along with James Watson, made pioneering discoveryA posthumous portrait of the scientist Francis Crick, commissioned by James Watson, with whom he famously discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, has been revealed on Wednesday, the day that would have been his 100th birthday.The portrait by the Irish artist Robert Ballagh, who has previously painted Watson, will hang in the Francis Crick Institute, a new science centre named in his honour, when it opens in St Pancras, London, later this year. Continue reading...

Whether the Australian lizard grows up to be a male or a female depends not only on genetics but also on the temperature of its the nestDragon sex. It turns out it’s complicated.Whether the Australian central bearded dragon grows up to be a male or a female depends not only on its genetics but also on the temperature of the nest in which it is incubated. Continue reading...

We love to hear about talented women rescued from historical obscurity, but tend to be selective when it comes to which stories are sharedThe most recent update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) adds 93 new biographies, including 18 of women. At just under 20% of the total this is higher than for the Dictionary as a whole (11%, rising to 19.3% for those born after 1840) and reflects long-term changes in historical research. The media response – in particular to the biography of Sarah Guppy (1770-1852) – has also been revealing.Guppy, as a patent-holding female inventor, is a rare type for the early 19th century but one that we are clearly eager to hear about today. It is the kind of life that (mostly women) historians have been researching since the 1970s and, more recently, has been transformed into popular role model: the archetypical example is Ada Lovelace, whose name has been adopted for a day celebrating and encouraging women in science and technology. It is interesting to note, though, just what we do and don’t want to know about Guppy and women like her. Comparing the carefully compiled ODNB entry by Madge Dresser with other accounts reveals much about how we put past lives to use today. Continue reading...

Platypus fossils and DNA suggest all mammals started out as venomous egg-layersI like the duck-billed platypus

Oxford University study could shed light human brain function and whether facial recognition is an innate or learned abilityA tropical fish can tell one human face from another despite lacking a brain section that homo sapiens and other “smart” animals use for this task, scientists said Tuesday.

Study of prehistoric mammal teeth reveals variety of shapes, helping to overturn theory that diversity was kept in check by dominance of dinosaursMammals experienced a boom in diversity long before the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago, overturning the notion that their evolution was curbed by the success of the land-based reptiles, scientists have said.It has long been thought that dinosaurs kept diversity among mammals in check by dominating food and resources, with early mammals thought to be limited to small, insect-eating creatures. But recent fossil finds have called the idea into question, suggesting that they had a wider range of shapes and sizes than previously thought. Continue reading...

Study indicates that married people are 14% less likely to die from a heart attack than single patients, while divorced people fare worst of allMarried people may be more likely to survive a heart attack than those who are divorced or who never got married in the first place, researchers say.In a preliminary study based on the medical records of 25,000 people, the team found that married individuals were 14% less likely to die from a heart attack than those who were single. Continue reading...

Pension fund ringfencing | Greatest heavyweight champion | Names for alleysOnce again, a major company folds with a gaping hole in its pension fund (Former BHS owner agreed not to take cash out, 6 June). Like most people, when paying into my firm’s pension, I assumed all the money contributed by employees and the company would be ringfenced in a fund kept totally clear of the company to protect against the sort of situation now happening with terrible regularity. Why does this not happen. Is it simply a lack of political will?

Neolithic group found in silo appeared to have suffered violent deaths, with multiple injuries to legs, hands and skullsArchaeologists have discovered the remains of a 6,000-year-old massacre that took place in Alsace, in north-eastern France.Related: French student finds tooth dating back 560,000 years Continue reading...

Get a weekly round-up of the biggest stories in science, insider knowledge from our network of bloggers, and some distractingly good fun and gamesWhat’s going on in space? Has the world of medical research been rocked? And, good grief, hasn’t anyone found a dinosaur this week? For all the latest scientific breakthroughs, plus a bit of mucking about in the pursuit of knowledge, sign up for our weekly digest. Continue reading...

Noel Edmonds extolling the cancer-tackling properties of an electronic box reminds us that offers of cures in defiance of scientific understanding is nothing new. So here’s another one.Are you sick? Proper sick? As in, are you so sick that doctors and therapists and pharmacists and nurses and scientists don’t know what else to do to help you? Well, worry no more, because now the solution is at hand, with my revolutionary new miracle cure, Magic Beans!Developed at the top secret MacGuffin labs by research leader scientist Sue Doh, Magic Beans are a revolutionary new therapy that will DEFINITELY work with your body’s own natural healing processes to promote wellbeing and fight all manner of diseases. Continue reading...

The European Space Agency’s technology-testing mission LISA Pathfinder is working five times better than its design specification, opening Einstein’s gravitational universe for investigation from spaceIt has taken just two months of space-based experimentation for scientists and engineers to know that the European Space Agency’s technology testing mission LISA Pathfinder is far exceeding its design requirements.The results mean that Europe could now begin building a mission to detect gravitational waves from space.

Ad watchdog ‘urgently’ investigating tweets, as presenter causes further outrage by suggesting patient’s cancer may have been caused by ‘negative attitude’Noel Edmonds, the TV presenter and enthusiast for “positive radio” projects, has become embroiled in a Twitter storm after claiming that a small box of electronics has all manner of health benefits.The host of Deal or No Deal and former acquaintance of Mr Blobby, announced on Twitter that the “simple box” slowed ageing, reduced pain, lifted depression and stress, and even tackled cancer. “Yep tackles cancer!” he emphasised. Continue reading...

It’s 30 years since DNA fingerprinting was first used in a police investigation. The technique has since put millions of criminals behind bars – and it all began when one scientist stumbled on the idea in a failed experimentThirty years ago this summer, at 4.30 one Thursday afternoon, a 15-year-old schoolgirl called Dawn Ashworth set off from a friend’s house in the village of Narborough, Leicestershire, and began to walk home. Dawn lived in the nearby village of Enderby, a few minutes’ walk away, and chose to take a short-cut along a footpath known locally as Ten Pound Lane. And then she vanished. It was not until two days later that Dawn’s body was found in the corner of a nearby field, covered in twigs, branches and torn-up nettles. The pathologist established that she had put up a considerable struggle before being raped and strangled.The hunt for Dawn’s killer was unlike any previous murder investigation, however: it was conducted with the help of a new science. The technique known as DNA fingerprinting was employed in a criminal investigation for the first time. Not only did this revolutionary technique lead, indirectly, to the killer being caught; it also prevented a grave miscarriage of justice. And it was employed in a manner that would, today, be likely to face resistance from some members of the public. Continue reading...

Unlike people, algorithms are rarely prejudiced, which has important implications for assessing our personalityWe live in a reputation economy. Decisions about work, relationships, finances and health are based on what other people think of us. Our reputation is increasingly easy to crowdsource and retrieve online, though unlike Uber drivers there is no single rating to illustrate how competent we are. But we are not far off.Imagine an algorithm that synthesises all of our consumer, social network and browsing data – what we buy and sell on Amazon and eBay, what we watch on Netflix and listen to on Spotify and the internet pages we visit most (as well as our Google searches). Imagine that same algorithm inferring our likability and popularity from our interactions with our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn friends. Continue reading...

Apart from being scientifically baseless, the disease model undermines hope, fails to end stigma and doesn’t always get addicts the help they needIs addiction a disease? Most people think so. The idea has become entrenched in our news media, our treatment facilities, our courts and in the hearts and minds of addicts themselves. It’s a potent concept: if you’re an alcoholic or a drug addict, then you’re ill. And you’re going to remain ill. According to Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease,” and that definition has been adopted by medical researchers and policy makers everywhere.Two huge benefits of the disease concept are frequently touted by Volkow and others. First, addicts need treatment, and if we don’t define addiction as a disease, they won’t get the help they require. Second, addicts don’t deserve to be scorned or denigrated: they have a disease, and we don’t put people down for being sick. Continue reading...

Neurologist who improved the diagnosis and treatment of muscular dystrophyJohn Walton, Lord Walton of Detchant, who has died aged 93, was a neurologist who improved the diagnosis and treatment of muscular dystrophy. He headed several medical charities and raised substantial funds for them; and was a popular medical politician, as head variously of the General Medical Council, Royal Society of Medicine and the British Medical Association. His publications included a classic textbook, Essentials of Neurology (1961), and books on disorders of voluntary muscle, brain haemorrhage, and the history of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the commonest form of the condition. He also co-edited the Oxford Companion to Medicine (1986).Walton was born in a Durham mining village, Rowlands Gill, to Eleanor (nee Watson) and Herbert, both Methodist teachers, who taught him the value of hard work. At medical school in Newcastle upon Tyne he was active in student politics, graduating in 1945 with a first and most of the prizes. After two years’ national service as an army doctor he returned to Newcastle, where he was inspired by two neurology greats, Fred Nattrass and Henry Miller, to study muscular dystrophy, at first thought to be a single condition that caused muscle wasting, but now known to be a group of linked genetic diseases. Continue reading...

Researchers in California have been trying to grow human organs inside pigs in attempt to tackle donor shortageScientists trying to grow human organs inside pigs in an attempt to tackle a shortage of donors have successfully created part-human, part-pig embryos.Researchers at the University of California, Davis combined human stem cells and pig DNA and allowed the embryos to mature for 28 days, before terminating the experiment and analysing the tissue.