ISS circles planet once every 90 minutes and has now travelled about the distance of 10 return trips to MarsThe International Space Station, the space laboratory that showcases cooperation between Russia and the US, has orbited Earth for the 100,000th time, Russian mission control said.“Today the ISS made its 100,000th orbit around Earth,” the mission control centre based in Moscow said in a statement. Continue reading...

A 64-year-old man, who became the first person in the US to undergo a successful penis transplant, is recovering well, doctors said. Thomas Manning of Halifax, Massachusetts, had his penis amputated in 2012 when he was diagnosed with penile cancer. He recently underwent a 15-hour surgery at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston, during which a penis provided by a donor was attached

Words have a way of gaining wisdom when their speaker ceases to exist, writes novelist Julia Pierpont as she looks back at an unsettling relationshipThe day I found out my therapist killed himself I’d taken a cab to the appointment, feeling myself in a hurry. Dr H had a way of holding it against you when you were late. A block from his office, we hit traffic and I ran the rest of the way, sweating under my heavy coat (it was January). But the young doorman stopped me in the lobby. He gestured toward a stiff leather armchair and had me sit while he stayed standing.“So listen, uh, I’m sorry no one told you,” he started. “But, uh.” Dr H was dead. He’d, uh, taken his life. Even as he faltered, it was clear that the doorman had been doing this all week. He had little deli napkins at the ready when I found myself suddenly, surprisingly tearful. Continue reading...

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea minima culpa: Michael Bulley (Letters, 10 May) is right to correct me – Latin does have the modal verbs he names, which cover possibility (possum), permission (licet) and obligation (debeo, oportet); these and other aspects of modality can also be expressed through the (fusional) subjunctive mood. I should have been more specific: Latin does not have modal auxiliary verbs such as English can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would; the only auxiliary (but non-modal) verb in Latin is esse (to be) which is used to form the present perfect, future perfect and past perfect passive tenses of regular transitive verbs, and corresponding forms of deponent and semi-deponent verbs.

Insiders say oil firm’s New Energies renewables arm could grow very big, but not for a decade or moreShell, Europe’s largest oil company, has established a separate division, New Energies, to invest in renewable and low-carbon power.The move emerged days after experts at Chatham House warned international oil companies they must transform their business or face a “short, brutal” end within 10 years. Continue reading...

Designer Thomas Thwaites took to the Alps to mix it with a herd of bovids. This is what he discovered ...Building an exoskeleton of a goat and a prosthetic stomach to digest grass before attempting to cross the Alps on all fours must rank as one of the weirder research projects funded by the Wellcome Trust. But London designer Thomas Thwaites has turned his bizarre mission to bridge the boundary between Homo sapiens and other species by becoming “GoatMan” into an enlightening and funny book. Informed by advice from a Danish shaman, neuroscientists, prosthetists, animal behaviourists and Swiss goat herders, it explores what connects and separates us from other animals. Here are 10 things Thwaites learned. Continue reading...

Mortality is at the heart of this powerful new novel set in a cryonics lab – Don DeLillo’s best work since UnderworldDon DeLillo’s late period work, which we can date from 2001’s The Body Artist, has been marked by novels that are slim, stark, conceptual, and that seem designed to provide as few of the traditional satisfactions of the form as possible. Endings are left untied, characters nameless and one-dimensional, plots thin and haphazard. After maximalist, wholehearted novels such as Libra, White Noise and Underworld, DeLillo’s austere, mindful, laconic late novellas feel, like those of Philip Roth, as if they’re trying to deconstruct the machinery of fiction, to back away from the world.Zero K initially seems like a break from the abstruse and impressionistic recent work. We are plunged into a vividly realised world: an underground cryonics laboratory called the Convergence, situated in a place where Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan meet, a “harsh geography, beyond the limits of believability or law”. The narrator of nine-tenths of the novel, Jeffrey Lockhart, is the 34-year-old son of one of the Convergence’s backers, Ross, who’s in his 60s and a financier of fabulous wealth. Ross’s second wife, Artis Martineau, was an archaeologist, but is now dying of complications from MS and has come to the Convergence to be frozen. Continue reading...

Proposals to be unveiled on Wednesday will help create jobs, according to DfTDriverless cars, drones and a proposed first commercial spaceport for the UK will feature in the Queen’s speech.The Department for Transport has said such cutting-edge technologies are crucial to the country’s economy and that its proposals, to be unveiled on Wednesday, will help deliver jobs. Continue reading...

The Democratic frontrunner has said she would look into alleged spottings as president – but there may not be much to investigateHillary Clinton is entering uncharted territory in this presidential election.

Coating applied to everyday objects such as smartphones, tablets and door handles reportedly has 99.99% success in preventing spread of MRSA and E coliGeorge Osborne was just one of the latest people to warn about the growing threat of antibiotic resistant superbugs, telling the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington last month that without urgent action the bugs would soon kill more people every year than cancer.The chancellor’s warning echoed the sentiments of many within the medical community. Infections such as MRSA which have developed resistance to drugs have become a notorious threat in hospitals, where the bacteria can survive on surfaces for up to seven months. Continue reading...

Most of us are wary of change, but it can be the making of us, according to this persuasive studyA 2013 psychology study asked 19,000 people between the ages of 18 and 68 two questions: first, how much have you changed in the last decade? And, second, how much do you expect to change in the decade ahead?In nearly all cases the subjects of the study believed they and their lives had changed a great deal in the 10 years just ended. But when they looked to the future, they generally anticipated far less alteration in their circumstance and outlook. “Across the board,” Polly Morland points out in this wonderfully wide-ranging study of the principle of inconstancy, “people seemed to regard the present as some kind of defining moment in which they had become the person they would be for the rest of their lives. They saw themselves as changed but with little capacity for changing.” Continue reading...

Efforts to treat Huntington’s disease involve costly drugs way beyond the reach of the poor communities in South America who take part in research studiesAs the small motorboat chugs to a halt, three travellers, wind-beaten from the three-hour journey along the Atrato river, step on to the muddy banks of Bellavista, an otherwise inaccessible town in the heart of the heavily forested north-west of Colombia. They swing their hessian bags – stuffed with bedsheets, dried beans and cuddly toys – to their shoulders and clamber up a dusty path. Tucked inside the bag of one of the travellers, neuropsychologist Sonia Moreno, is the reason they are here: a wad of unfinished, hand-drawn charts of family trees. Continue reading...

Do you and your partner think in opposing ways? And does that make you more compatible? Find out with our testBoth you and your partner rate the following statements on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree):a) Anyone who works hard usually succeeds

South Australian Museum researchers confounded by mysterious teeth previously unseen in beaked whalesScientists believe they have an uncovered an evolutionary throwback in a rare deep ocean whale that washed ashore on a South Australian beach.The beaked whale, found dead on Waitpinga beach in February, confounded examiners from the South Australian Museum who discovered two mysterious teeth previously unseen in that family of deep diving mammals. Continue reading...

If the work is properly monitored, there is no reason not to trust the resultsCorporate funding of multiple vaccine research was “exposed” again recently. This time it was in the latest round of MMR-causes-autism allegations, which we exported to the US.We’ve seen the same “exposés” in the UK, on fracking, on genetically modified plants and on sugar. Last year, some of the best-regarded nutrition researchers were taken out and given a public beating when it was revealed that the food industry funds research in their institutes. Continue reading...

Knife, bone, and dung cast doubt on Bering Strait theory and indicate humans spread through Americas 1,500 years earlier than thought, researchers sayA stone knife, mastodon bones and fossilized dung found in an underwater sinkhole show that humans lived in north Florida about 14,500 years ago, according to new research that suggests the colonization of the Americas was far more complex than originally believed.Archaeologists have known of the sinkhole in the Aucilla river, south of Tallahassee, for years. But they recently dived back into the hole to excavate what they call clear evidence that ancient mankind spread throughout the Americas about 1,500 years earlier than previously thought. Continue reading...

A video from the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, showing how the images we make of subatomic particles have changed over the years

Big pharma says high prices fund research and development, but costly drugs hit poor people hard and divert money needed to build clinics and pay nursesOver the past year, high medicine prices have made the headlines. In the UK, two cancer treatments were dropped because they were deemed too expensive. A US Senate subcommittee criticised pharmaceutical company Gilead for charging $84,000 (£57,000) for a full course of its new hepatitis C treatments and found that fostering broad, affordable access for other drugs was not a major concern for the firm.This is all without even mentioning the antics of everyone’s favourite villain, the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martin Shkreli, who was called the most hated man in America for hiking the price of Daraprim, a malaria drug. Continue reading...

The European Medical Corps set up after the Ebola crisis is being sent to tackle the yellow fever outbreak that has claimed nearly 300 lives in AngolaThe European Medical Corps (EMC) recently set up by the EU is being sent on its first mission – to help tackle the outbreak of yellow fever in Angola.Since the first case of the mosquito-transmitted disease was reported in the capital, Luanda, in December 2015, 293 people have died, amid some 2,267 reported cases. Continue reading...

A US ruling says that that companies aren’t allowed to pressure staff to be relentlessly positive. That’s good news, because haters can helpRejoice, haters! The law now says that you don’t have to be happy about coming to work.In April, the National Labor Relations Board presided over a conflict between T-Mobile and some employees who felt that the company was asking too much by demanding that workers maintain a “positive work environment” at all times. Continue reading...

Study into the ecosystem of microbes on scalps suggests that nurturing a type of bacteria, called Propionibacterium, could help prevent dandruffThe next time dandruff dots your shoulders, you might want to reach for yogurt, not shampoo. The latest study into scaly scalps has found that nurturing particular bacteria on the skin could keep the white flakes at bay.Researchers in Shanghai took on the dandruff problem with an unprecedented investigation into flaky scalps and the ecosystem of microbes that set up home on the human head, feeding on the lavish menu of dead skin and oily secretions called sebum.

Postgraduate students from the University of Nottingham’s MSc in Biological Photography and Imaging are staging 7 Magpies, an exhibition of their most striking images, from 13 May Continue reading...

As we continue to discover new species of this huge dinosaur, is our understanding of it changing?Why does the tyrannosaurus continue to fascinate us?Joining Ian Sample in the studio this week is David Hone, a palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of The Tyrannosaur Chronicles. Continue reading...

Russia has launched the first rocket from its new spaceport. Although not yet finished, the Vostochny cosmodrome has cost £2bn and taken five years to build so far. When completed in the 2020s, it will launch cosmonauts and Russia’s new Angara rocket, which could eventually take people to the moon.The spaceport became operational on 28 April when a Soyuz-2.1 rocket lifted off carrying three satellites into orbit. Vladimir Putin attended the launch and had words of both congratulation and warning. Continue reading...

Scientists accuse government of failing to release data disproving claims that burial site contains Nefertiti’s remainsThe world of archaeology was electrified last year by the news that Tutankhamun’s tomb could contain hidden chambers possibly containing the remains and riches of Queen Nefertiti. It was a story that seemed to have everything: false walls, buried treasure, at least one mummy – and new hope for Egypt’s ailing tourist industry.Related: Tutankhamun's secret? Experts hope new chambers could contain tomb of Nefertiti Continue reading...

Academics are queuing up to make the case for staying in the EU. But almost all the larger R&D-intensive companies have kept their heads down. Why?Science is a vital part of the UK’s relationship with the rest of Europe. Some eighteen per cent of EU funding returned to the UK is for research. The UK is a net contributor to the EU across the board, but a net beneficiary in science. Businesses are responsible for around two-thirds of research and development (R&D) investment in the UK, with firms headquartered overseas making up half of that figure – by far the highest proportion among G7 countries.Against that background, I expected business to have plenty to say during the recent inquiry into ‘EU membership and UK science’ by the House of Lords Committee on Science and Technology, for which I was the specialist advisor. Amidst lively exchanges between pro-leave and pro-remain campaign groups, the House of Lords conducted a calm analysis of the evidence on the scientific dimensions of the EU debate. Around eighty written submissions and thirty expert witnesses set out arguments and analysis. Continue reading...

Any woman should be able to make good decisions about her body – and if Daljinder Kaur is strong enough to fulfil her parenting dream perhaps we should lay offThe birth of Armaan Singh Gill, a 2kg boy, to Daljinder Kaur was announced by Indian and international media this week. Though she has no birth certificate, Kaur, estimated to be 72, is thought to be the world’s oldest mother. Armaan was her first child. He was the result of her third round of IVF, using donor eggs and possibly donor sperm as well.Related: Indian woman in her 70s gives birth to healthy baby boy Continue reading...

Despite more than 90% of experts agreeing on the science, listeners hear incorrect and ridiculous claims from James Delingpole - all ‘in the interest of balance’Aside from the facial hair and the petrol-guzzling international airline, one thing Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson is known for is his passion for fighting climate change.“We need every person on Earth to acknowledge that climate change is real, and encourage each other and our leaders to address the challenge,” wrote billionaire Branson last year. Continue reading...

One of Science in Transition’s founders describes how his experience as a young HIV/AIDS researcher convinced him that science needs to changeHIV/AIDS research in the early 1980s was a new and exciting field of science. I had started working as a biomedical researcher in Amsterdam, a city with a large and visible gay community. The new disease was a threat to public health and was highly contagious. It was transmitted by sexual contact and in the developed world affected young healthy gay men and recipients of blood and blood products. It took some time to realise that a truly immense and devastating epidemic was going on in sub-Saharan Africa affecting men, women and children.This disease attracted bright scientific minds all over the world, working feverishly to understand the origin and biology of the virus. We wanted to know how the virus moved through the population, entered and killed immune cells and how to counteract it. AIDS patients were dying in the hospitals and we were working as fast as we could towards better therapies for HIV-positive patients. Continue reading...

Some argue that the claim that ‘women love bad boys’ is scientifically proven. However, this isn’t the case“Women always go for the bad boys.” “Nice guys finish last.” “Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.”There are so many variations on the idea that women brush off advances from lovely men and instead deliberately chase guys who are tall, dark and horrible. If it’s true, why is the crime rate not significantly higher, as straight guys compete with each other to look “badder” than their friends? In fact what do we mean by “bad” anyway? Are we talking bank robbers, or just your mate Clive who once dumped a girl via text? Continue reading...

Archaeologist Dr Andrew ‘Bone’ Jones recalls how he discovered the fabled Lloyds Bank turd – a 7-inch Viking coproliteOn reflection, the canteen was probably not the best place to loudly conduct an interview about poo and parasitic worms. The conversation was not intended to spill into the lunch hour, but Dr Andrew ‘Bone’ Jones, an enthusiastic paleoscatologist for over 30 years, had plenty to say. Continue reading...

New images from US space program Nasa show the path of the planet Mercury as it passed between the Earth and the sun on May 9. The event, which only happens 13 times every century, was recorded by Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which aims to help scientists understand the effect of the sun on Earth and the wider solar system Continue reading...

Scanning reveals coffin from 600BC, originally though by curators to contain preserved organs, holds a foetus of no more than 18 weeks gestationA miniature coffin from ancient Egypt that was thought to contain an individual’s preserved organs has been found to hold the youngest known mummified human foetus to be embalmed and buried by the civilisation.The 44cm-long coffin fell into the hands of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1907, after it was excavated from Giza in Egypt the same year. And while the cedar wood coffin from 600BC had deteriorated, the small, black bundle inside remained intact. Continue reading...

Discovery of genetic variants which shape number of years spent at school and university, and could pave the way for more personalised teachingA haul of genes that influence how long people spend in education has been uncovered by one of the largest studies conducted in the field.The international effort by more than 250 scientists found 74 genetic variants that shape the number of years people spend at school and university, with most of the variants involved in brain development, particularly in the womb.

New research provides the first direct evidence that Zika virus causes severe birth defects, and explains exactly how it does so“I lifted up my T-shirt to check on what I thought had just been a small heat rash,” writes BuzzFeed correspondent Ali Watkins. “It had shown up along the right of my back, extending out from a handful of mosquito bites I had picked up… it had seemed relatively tame [but] now, it was inching across the front of my stomach and down my legs... Meanwhile, my right eye was inflamed and bright red, almost akin to a busted blood vessel.”Watkins is describing the symptoms of a Zika virus infection that she contracted on a recent trip to Mexico. For many people, infection with this mosquito-borne virus causes an illness with symptoms just like those experienced by Watkins: fever, skin rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis. For others, these symptoms are so mild that they go completely unnoticed. Continue reading...

As new film Troublemakers explores the extremes of land art, from lightning fields to satanic jetties, Alex Needham braves rattlesnakes to visit a desert observatory that lets you travel 26,000 years in timeRelated: Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art review – sculptors who shaped the American wildernessSomewhere in the deserts of New Mexico, a nail is embedded into a type of flat-topped mountain known as a mesa. The positioning of this nail, shielded from the elements by a tin can, took days of trial and error, with astronomical measurements provided by the US Naval Observatory and the help of a surveyor. Finally, the correct spot was located: exactly in alignment with the axis of the Earth from the south pole to the north. Continue reading...

Study of different colours in black bears, barn owls, black sparrowhawks and crows finds online images can substitute for costly fieldworkStudying photographs of animals posted online by the general public has proven to be as valuable as traditional fieldwork in research on the locations of species that have evolved with different colours.Colour polymorphism - the occurrence of two or more colour types in the population of a species - has long fascinated biologists. These different colour types often vary geographically, providing a useful way of studying how different colour morphs evolve. Continue reading...

Staff given two weeks to explain why their jobs should be saved, followed by a two-month process in which management tries to find them another roleClimate scientists at the CSIRO who are earmarked for redundancy will learn their fate this week.Staff in the organisation’s oceans and atmosphere business unit began being told of their “potential” redundancies on Tuesday, and the process was expected to continue until Thursday. Last week a similar process occurred for scientists in the land and water business unit.

Staff given two weeks to explain why their jobs should be saved, followed by a two-month process in which management tries to find them another roleClimate scientists at the CSIRO who are earmarked for redundancy will learn their fate this week.Staff in the organisation’s oceans and atmosphere business unit began being told of their “potential” redundancies on Tuesday, and the process was expected to continue until Thursday. Last week a similar process occurred for scientists in the land and water business unit.

Small fragment found in cave believed to date from a tool created up to 49,000 years agoIt is about the size of a thumbnail and might look like any old piece of rock, but scientists say it is a fragment of the oldest axe ever discovered, created up to 49,000 years ago.Found in Australia, it further undermines ideas that Europe was the birthplace of technology, revealing people developed complex tools not long after they set foot in Australia.

More than doubling the number of confirmed planets orbiting alien stars, astronomers said that the discovery is a step toward finding Earth-like planets

Commons committee question Natural Environment Research Council head over ship-naming competition as part of inquiry into science communicationNo sooner had MPs taken their seats than it began. “Will the minister ask you to walk the plank?” asked Nicola Blackwood, chair of the Commons science and technology committee. Her question was directed at Duncan Wingham, head of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), who had been summoned to Westminster to answer questions on the Boaty McBoatface episode.The committee had long planned an inquiry into science communication, and NERC’s Name Our Ship competition - won with massive public support by Boaty McBoatface, only for the name to be vetoed by Science minister Jo Johnson in favour of the RRS Sir David Attenborough - was a natural place to start. Was it a PR triumph or a PR disaster? The MPs wanted to know.

Social psychologist Dacher Keltner, author of The Power Paradox, says the key to success is changing. The Machiavellian rule of the Lannisters is less effective than ground-up collaborationIf you drive a Prius, Dacher Keltner believes, there is an above-average chance that you are not an especially pleasant person. He explains how he came to this conclusion as congenially as he can. It is not a hunch.One day, near the Greater Good Science Center that he runs in Berkeley, California, Keltner was riding his bicycle, minding his own business, when a black Mercedes almost hit him. Afterwards, he thought about that moment – the indomitable motorcar paying no heed to the fragile two-wheeler – as a miniature of the power dynamics in daily life, a subject that has occupied his attention for years. “It’s morality and it’s deadly – and there are laws,” he says. “It’s society in play. And I was like: That’s what we’re studying, right there.” Continue reading...

Social psychologist Dacher Keltner, author of The Power Paradox, says the key to success is changing. The Machiavellian rule of the Lannisters is less effective than ground-up collaborationIf you drive a Prius, Dacher Keltner believes, there is an above-average chance that you are not an especially pleasant person. He explains how he came to this conclusion as congenially as he can. It is not a hunch.One day, near the Greater Good Science Center that he runs in Berkeley, California, Keltner was riding his bicycle, minding his own business, when a black Mercedes almost hit him. Afterwards, he thought about that moment – the indomitable motorcar paying no heed to the fragile two-wheeler – as a miniature of the power dynamics in daily life, a subject that has occupied his attention for years. “It’s morality and it’s deadly – and there are laws,” he says. “It’s society in play. And I was like: That’s what we’re studying, right there.” Continue reading...

Personalised 3D heart models more effective than standard tests at identifying cardiac patients at risk of developing lethal arrhythmias, new study showsPersonalised virtual hearts have been created for cardiac patients to help doctors spot those who are most at risk of developing fatal arrhythmias.Related: Heart attacks kill thousands each year because of poor NHS aftercare, study says Continue reading...

Climate Central: A new graphic shows Earth’s temperatures spiralling toward the 2C global warming limitThe steady rise of Earth’s temperature as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere and trap more and more heat is sending the planet spiraling closer to the point where warming’s catastrophic consequences may be all but assured.

Often new technology or development is condemned as being “damaging to children”. Why not apply that approach to the disastrous government SATs?You may have noticed that it’s very common, particularly in the more right-wing leaning media, to suggest that something is bad because it’s potentially harmful to children, particularly their brains. Video games, smartphones and tablets, Facebook, the internet as a whole, screens in general, fizzy drinks, vaccines, and who knows what else. All of these have been condemned by many on the grounds that they have the potential to harm children’s brains.Susan Greenfield, for example, has made some alarming (and, some would say, evidence-light) claims about the dangers posed by new technology on the delicate, fragile minds of children Continue reading...

University of Copenhagen study finds no evidence that so-called friendly bacteria change the composition of faecal bacteriaFans of probiotic drinks and foods may be wasting their money, according to a review of current research into the supplements that suggests they may be of no benefit to healthy adults.A Danish team looked at the results of seven trials of the products – often sold as milk-based drinks, biscuits, sachets, or capsules – and found no evidence they changed the composition of faecal bacteria in healthy adults. Continue reading...

As my research shows, the quest for perfection can actually make providing sensitive, warm and consistent care more difficultEven armed with a PhD in developmental psychology, I remember the frightening first moments after bringing my newborn daughter home from the hospital. I wasn’t sure what to do – and not at all confident that I was capable of being the parent she needed me to be. Every little decision about feeding and caring for this helpless human seemed momentous and fraught with anxiety. What if I don’t make it a full year of breastfeeding? Should I turn off the TV whenever she is in the room to avoid passive screen exposure? Is it OK for her to enter full-time day care at five months?Popular press accounts of parenting and child development research were not particularly helpful, either. Even though as a scientist I knew better, the way the research was translated for the public lacked nuance and easily penetrated my vulnerable state of mind. I fretted that my daughter’s formula consumption would result in lower IQ. I worried that if I was too tired to read to her one evening before bed, she would never learn to read. And, since she’s started elementary school, I have slipped numerous times and called her “smart” instead of more appropriately praising her effort, as so many articles advise. Continue reading...