Greater uncertainty about climate change means bigger risks and more reason to act

Dr Evans–Galea, a leader in the field of gene therapy, talks about the challenges she has faced, but also the increasing visibility of female scientists in her field, and her professional mission: finding a cure for Friedrich ataxia

From single cells through lumbering amphibians to men with spears. We all know ‘the story of life on Earth’. But whose story is it?The scientific story of life on Earth, as told in palaeontology books for children, museum displays, documentaries and even on university courses is always the same. It begins with the creation of the universe, then the Earth, represented more often than not by exploding volcanoes. Microscopic single cells bob in the ocean, dividing and swelling, morphing into things with a noticeable front end and a back end.Skip forward a couple of billion years, and emblematic fossils, the trilobites, are scuttling around the ocean floor. Chances are that ammonites are floating around too. Then we get to the more familiar beats: the story proper finally starts. The Age of Fishes kicks off in the Devonian, 400 million years ago with fish that look a bit different to today’s fish, but not different enough for us to care. Fish-headed salamanders then triumphantly flop onto a green and verdant land. Then it’s the glorious Age of Reptiles, unanimously depicted by Tyrannosaurus rex locked in eternal conflict with mortal enemy Triceratops. From between the feet of stomping dinosaurs, ratty animals scurry about; cue an asteroid impact and the Age of Mammals begins. The rest you could fill in yourself, rat climbs a tree, becomes a monkey takes a few more steps and is then a man at last! Continue reading...

This week, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan takes over one of the biggest jobs in British science, as incoming president of the Royal Society. We asked his fellow Fellows what they hope to see during Venki’s five years at the helm.

Keeping Phobos and Deimos, which means ‘fear’ and ‘terror’, implies it’s totally cool to demonize our neighbor in the skyIn the last five months, Mars has become a whole lot more like … us. We have flowing water; Mars has flowing water. We have underground water; Mars has underground water. We have auroras in the night sky; so does Mars. In just the last five months, we and Mars have grown a whole lot closer, beyond our basic adjacency in the solar system. It’s reasonable to think that Matt Damon’s recent triumph of ingenuity and self-sufficiency over Martian inhospitality might soon come true.Related: Gravity will rip Martian moon apart to form dust and rubble ring Continue reading...

In the third in our series on STEM and humanitarian crises, a classic engineering solution uses cardboard to help homeless people in WolverhamptonThis time of year brings additional challenges to those living on the streets: the nights are longer and colder, and plummeting temperatures and wet weather increase the risk of illness.

Will our great-grandchildren effectively be a different species from us?Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans are co-founders of Excel Venture Management, which builds start-ups in synthetic biology, big data, and new genetic technologies.Juan was the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and Steve was a professor at Harvard Medical School for eighteen years, applying breakthrough technologies to diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. They join Nicola Davis down the line from Boston, Massachusetts to discuss the ideas featured in their new book, Evolving Ourselves - How Unnatural Selection is Changing Life on Earth. Continue reading...

The recipient of this year’s Wellcome Trust Screenwriting Fellowship, filmmaker Carol Morley talks science, magic and women in film“When I was at primary school, I was really interested in science. I even wrote to Jim’ll Fix It; I think I wanted to do an experiment with test tubes and a white coats and everything, but I never heard back.” says filmmaker Carol Morley. “Of course, looking back, that’s probably for the best ...”Morley, whose recent films include Dreams of a Life and The Falling, has just been named as the recipient of the Wellcome Trust Screenwriting Fellowship, which is awarded in partnership with BFI and Film4. Finally, without the dubious aid of a disgraced TV presenter, she’ll live her dream. From January she’ll have access to a treasure trove of scientific material and experiments galore. The fellowship, now in its third year, offers a huge prize: access to the trust’s library, archive and curio collection, visits to research institutions, a personal MRI brain scan and genome analysis, direct access to research trials and a space to work in at the Wellcome Collection. The £30,000 bursary also adds a sweetener to rival the coveted Jim Fixed It For Me medallion. Continue reading...

Portions of science seem to be collapsing into the entertainment industry, raising serious questions about accuracy, funding and credibilityImagine walking through a forest. You spy a wheelbarrow full of jumbled bones and teeth. After securing your selfie, who you gonna call? The Guardian? The Ghostbusters? The coroner? Just like Sherlock Holmes or CSI, all of those contacts would want answers to the same essential questions. To whom did these bones once belong? How long have they been here? How did they get here in the first place?It is easy to make up stories to account for the facts, but science and science fiction are different things. What about your wheelbarrow? If the coroner, after careful comparison, concludes that these bones are not modern human, “paleoanthropologists” might take over the investigation. This is where the fun invariably begins. We practitioners of this small and peculiar specialty are far outnumbered by scientists studying fruit fly embryogenesis, but we register media punches far above our meagre collective weight. Nothing excites us like a new bunch of old bones. And the public loves stories about human origins almost as much as those about crime, pyramids, dinosaurs, extraterrestrials, and the Kardashians.

With less than a month to go before Christmas Day, it’s time to start thinking about cards. Here Oxford maths don Vicky Neale explains how to impress your friends with these stunning geometrical designs. It’s Christ-maths time, and there’s no need to be afraid.Christmas is a fantastic opportunity for me to share some maths with friends and family. One of my favourite ways to do this is by stitching geometrical designs on cards. The magic is how the straight lines produce perfect curves.Here’s how it’s done. Draw two straight lines that intersect. Draw points along each of those lines at equal distances. When you join the dots from one line to the other, as in the star and tree above and in the four images below, you get a parabola. Strictly speaking, the curve is the envelope of the family of straight lines.

Bestselling physicist will hit the road in autumn 2016 with a show featuring his Infinite Monkey Cage pal Robin InceThe physicist and broadcaster Brian Cox is to tour the UK and Ireland with a live show in autumn 2016.

Bonfire night years ago was a cold and frosty time, when trees had lost their leaves. But this November plenty of trees were in full leaf, despite all the wind and rain, and there was an impressive show of autumn colour.This was all thanks to rains earlier in the year that kept trees in good heath, and plenty of sunshine and mild weather in the autumn, with hardly any frost before last weekend’s cold snap. Continue reading...