Case of the moustached kingfisher pits those who think ‘collecting’ can save a species against those who believe we should never kill rare animalsFor Christopher Filardi of the American Museum of Natural History, there is nothing like the thrill of finding a mysterious species. Such animals live at the intersection of myth and biology – tantalising researchers with the prospect that they may be real, but eluding trustworthy documentation and closer study. Indeed, last month, Filardi waxed poetic on the hunt for the invisible beasts that none the less walk among us.“We search for them in earnest but they are seemingly beyond detection except by proxy and story,” he wrote. “They are ghosts, until they reveal themselves in a thrilling moment of clarity and then they are gone again. Maybe for another day, maybe a year, maybe a century.” Continue reading...

Doctors and scientists are amazed and appalled at the Scottish nurse’s relapse, which has worrying implications for the thousands of survivors in west AfricaSince 1976, when the Ebola virus was first identified, doctors racing to remote villages in African forests have thought they had a reasonable idea of what those infected were facing. The disease was grim – a hemorrhagic fever which caused copious bleeding and often death – but some people could and did fully recover. Now that is in question.When nurse Pauline Cafferkey was admitted back into the infectious diseases unit of the Royal Free hospital in London on 9 October, nine months after recovering from Ebola, and then became critically ill, all the previous assumptions about the long-term effects of this virus had to be torn up. Continue reading...

Beans locate their poles by echolocation, the mimosa shrub has a memory-span greater than that of a bee … New discoveries in botany support an older idea of plants as individuals – active agents in their own life storiesWhen the much-missed neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote that “there is nothing alive which is not individual”, he meant nothing which is alive. Sacks was promiscuously biophilic, and the rapt personal engagement he felt with his patients embraced most of the rest of creation too – cephalopods, spiders, Oaxacan ferns, and the hunched and scaly survivors of the Jurassic forests he had seen at Kew Gardens as a child. The cycads, especially, enthralled him as relics of the first experiments plants had made in using insects for fertilisation.In the 1990s, Sacks was investigating a rare form of colour blindness in the Pacific islands, caused possibly by eating flour made from cycad seeds. In one passage in his book The Island of the Colourblind, the Romantic botanist displaces the physician with a job to do. He sits on a beach under the cycads, watching fiddler crabs scissoring the kernels from the giant seeds, and notices a single seed, whipped up by the surf and starting to float out to sea. He ponders how its family – a group of highly variable, fire-resistant, suckering species that developed ways of fixing atmospheric nitrogen 100m years before beans did – had outlived the dinosaurs, and whether this individual seed, endowed with who-knows-what genetic quirks, might make landfall on a distant island, find a partner and begin the evolution of a new species. Life goes on and forward, but often dips into its back catalogue. Continue reading...

This week’s apparent discovery of a megastructure orbiting a star surely means extraterrestrial tourists will soon start arriving. They’ll need this handy guide ...A number of media sources are reporting that astronomers have spotted what may be a giant megastructure orbiting a distant star. Such a thing could only be the work of advanced aliens, capable of engineering and building on such a scale that it becomes visible from light years away.In fairness, it’s probably not that. That’s just one interpretation of the unusual readings from a certain star, and an unlikely one at that. But it’s the most interesting interpretation, so obviously it’s getting the most attention. Continue reading...

A new scientific review suggests the relentless barrage of food images we see might be affecting our attitude to food. Is it time for the government to get involved?

New research links the onset of psychosis to the brain’s inflammatory response

Getting to see aurora borealis is down to the whims of space weather, which is almost as unreliable as British weather

Koko the gorilla gets her birthday wish on 4 July when a litter of kittens pays her a visit at a sanctuary in Redwood City, California. Her keepers say Koko communicates with them using sign language, asking for one of the kittens to be put on her head

Are we witnessing a renaissance of crying? Do men now blub? A nuanced emotional history explodes the myth of the stiff upper lipWhat to do with the tears of the past? Tears matter because they’re everywhere, from the ecstatic religious narratives of the middle ages to the diaries of 20th-century cinemagoers who enjoyed a good blub in the dark. The problem is that tears don’t speak a universal language. People who lived centuries ago didn’t necessarily cry in the way we do, or at the same things, or even understand the act of weeping in a way that makes sense to us. This can be confusing, even infuriating – what were these people doing? – but, looked at another way, it can be an opportunity. Like reading an old document and coming across a joke you don’t get, digging into how, when and why people wept can offer surprising new insights into the lives, beliefs and assumptions of past centuries.Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia takes as its central premise that the British “stiff upper lip”, far from being the defining characteristic of the nation throughout its history, was in fact the creation of a particular historical moment, out of which has grown a transhistorical myth of national restraint. British history, Dixon argues, was far more tearful – and far more interesting – than the myth of the stiff upper lip would suggest. Returning again and again to William Blake’s assertion that “a tear is an intellectual thing”, and thus something that can be interrogated and understood, Dixon presents a wide-ranging, enjoyable and accessible history of British weeping. Continue reading...

Technology writer Steve Silberman's new book charts the evolution of autismHow have our attitudes to autism changed since the disorder's first definition in 1943?Steve Silberman is an American journalist who writes about technology for Wired magazine and the New Yorker. His new book Neurotribes is a thorough study of how autism has evolved. Silberman's new book charts the evolution of autism, from its origins in the shadows of the second world war, up to the current campaign to reframe autism as something to be accepted and accommodated, rather than eradicated. Continue reading...

Jeison Orlando Rodriguez Hernandez, a 20-year-old man from Venezuela has broken the Guinness world record for the largest feet. His right foot measures 40.1cm (1ft 3.79in), and his left half a centimetre less. He takes US size 26 shoes. Even though Hernandez is shorter, his feet beat those of the world’s tallest man, Sultan Kosen, whose shoe size is US 24

Common procedures and chemotherapy will be virtually impossible if problem is not tackled urgently, researchers sayRoutine surgery and chemotherapy may become all but impossible unless urgent action is taken to halt the waning efficacy of antibiotic drugs, according to research.

Researchers present collection of New Horizons data, revealing water icebergs on ‘a surface unlike any planetary surface we’ve ever seen before’The moment Pluto was transformed from a fuzzy spot on the edge of the solar system to an exotic world with a spectacular landscape will be recorded by historians as 15 July 2015.When Nasa’s New Horizons spacecraft barrelled past Pluto the day before, it became the first mission to visit the object. A day later, the probe made contact with Earth. Since then, scientists on the team have released one breathtaking image after another, revealing vast, smooth plains, towering ice mountains and an inviting blue haze of hydrocarbons.

Study of sleep patterns of groups living in Tanzania, Namibia and Bolivia with lifestyles similar to our paleolithic ancestors shows similar late-night habits to humans with internet and TV-based routines

People who have tattoos report higher levels of verbal aggression and reactive rebelliousness – and the more tattoos they have, the angrier they areWhen it emerged that Samantha Cameron, the wife of the prime minister, had an image of a dolphin etched on her ankle, it seemed the link between tattoos, aggression and rebellion had been well and truly severed.But research has found that people with tattoos report higher levels of verbal aggression, anger and rebelliousness. And the more tattoos they have, it found, the more angry and rebellious they are. Continue reading...

Scientists studying survivors of recent outbreak in west Africa say some women never contracted the virus despite having Ebola antibodiesA study of Ebola survivors in west Africa has found a group of women who appear to be immune to the deadly virus.The discovery was made by a team of British and European scientists who are studying Ebola survivors in Guinea. Continue reading...

Spinolestes xenarthrosus’s 125m-year-old remains, found in Cuenca, Spain, with earlobe, lung, liver and furry pelt, is 60m years older any other mammal found with soft tissues preserved

Study predicts plants will start budding three weeks sooner by end of century as climate change exerts direct effect on seasonal calendarScientists have confirmed what gardeners have long suspected: spring is coming much earlier in the US, with plants projected to bud three weeks earlier by the end of the century because of climate change.

Research into genetically encoded sex differences could tell us not just about sexuality, but also about how we learn thingsIt is said – often as if it’s a bad thing – that a man thinks about sex every 7 seconds. Even if the reality is slightly less fantastical, it’s not too difficult, from an evolutionary standpoint, to understand why this might be. The most successful organisms are those that are able to reproduce most prolifically in their given ecological niche. The plants and animals you seen around you today exist because they are the ones whose genomes were able to survive better than their competitors in the fight for limited resources.It’s not a major stretch to think that if an animal invests a significant chunk of its daily routine into seeking out opportunities to reproduce – to have sex – it’s more likely to succeed in that aim, and therefore be more evolutionarily successful. And an animal with even a rudimentary neural system would therefore be expected to use a substantial proportion of its processing ability to find a sexual partner — up to a point of course. Some neurons are presumably always going to be necessary for obtaining food, avoiding predators, checking iPhones, etc. (What plants think is still a mystery of course – I guess nobody’s yet asked a cabbage about sex). Continue reading...

Our bodies naturally adapt to cold, dark winter conditions. Scientists think the rise of warm houses and bright lights has baffled our immune systemsIt’s time to turn down the heating and switch off the lights – all this cosiness is making us ill. At least that sounds like the advice from new research which suggests the “endless summer” we have created in our homes could be playing havoc with our health, and even causing early deaths.Scientists now believe that up to a quarter of our genes are seasonal – and that those controlling our immunity become more active in cold months than during summer days, helping us to fight off diseases such as flu. Continue reading...

The Ebola outbreak has killed about 11,312 people in west Africa, and affected the US and Spain, where people returning from the region have died and transmitted the infection to several nurses. We examine the background to the disease, its spread and its impactWest Africa experienced the biggest outbreak of the Ebola virus ever known, causing thousands of deaths, devastating fragile healthcare systems and damaging the economies of countries, some of which were still recovering from civil war. At the peak of the epidemic, in autumn 2014, infections were doubling every few weeks. The World Health Organisation said there had been 28,457 officially recorded cases by 4 October 2015, almost all in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, with about 11,312 deaths, but many go unrecorded and the true figure is thought to be two to three times higher. However the forecast by the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in September 2014 that if nothing changed there could be 1.4 million cases by late January proved to be unduly pessimistic. For the first time since the outbreak began, there were no new cases officially recorded in the week to 7 October. Serious concerns about the spread of the virus to countries bordering the epidemic region intensified when a child died of Ebola in Mali, having travelled while sick for hundreds of miles by bus, but Mali, just like Nigeria, managed to close down the outbreak. Outside Africa, two nurses were infected while caring for a patient in Texas, who flew from Liberia before exhibiting symptoms, as was a nurse who treated a missionary repatriated to Madrid. In both cases, the patients died but the nurses recovered. A doctor returning to New York from Liberia fell sick and British nurse Pauline Cafferkey, who had volunteered in Sierra Leone, was also diagnosed, but both survived. Cafferkey fell ill again last week and is being treated at the Royal Free Hospital, in London, where she is “critically ill”.

Charles Darwin is vying with Immanuel Kant and Plato in a poll to decide on the most influential scholarly book of all timeMary Wollstonecraft, Stephen Hawking and Charles Darwin are jostling for the top spot on a line-up of the top 20 academic books that changed the world.Put together by a panel of expert academic booksellers, librarians and publishers from a list of 200 titles submitted by UK publishers, the top 20 ranges from Wollstonecraft’s 1792 feminist manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to Hawking’s exploration of the universe, A Brief History of Time, and Darwin’s transformative laying out of his theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species. Continue reading...

The truth of Exxon’s complicity in global warming must to be told - how they knew about climate change decades ago but chose to help kill our planetI’m well aware that with Paris looming it’s time to be hopeful, and I’m willing to try. Even amid the record heat and flooding of the present, there are good signs for the future in the rising climate movement and the falling cost of solar.But before we get to past and present there’s some past to be reckoned with, and before we get to hope there’s some deep, blood-red anger. Continue reading...

Ravens spontaneously cooperate to solve problems, but prefer to do so with some individuals over othersWe often use the phrase ‘birdbrain’ as a mild insult, to mean someone who is dim-witted or acts stupidly. Birds’ brains are indeed much smaller, and far less convoluted, than our own, but our feathered friends have had a bad press, and some of them – the corvids, in particular – are capable of remarkable feats of intelligence.Crows, for example, can apparently contemplate death, and have tool-making abilities that are at least as sophisticated as, or may even surpass, those of monkeys. And Clarke’s nutcrackers can harvest tens of thousands of pine seeds, and cache them in thousands of different locations. If they notice another nutcracker watching them burying their food supply, they return later on to hide that cache elsewhere. When winter sets in, they can retrieve the seeds from all the locations, relying solely on spatial memory. Continue reading...

Nasa’s Hubble space telescope shows never-before-seen details of Jupiter. The high-resolution imagery and maps are the first results from a programme to investigate the solar system’s outer planets. The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry Continue reading...

70 years ago, America’s first successful liquid-fuelled rocket was launched. But politics prevented its designer, Frank Malina, becoming a hero of the space raceThe recent announcement of a discovery on Mars may have been big news but NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were still a little coy about calling it “water”. A pattern of hydrated salts called “recurring slope lineae” doesn’t, to be honest, sound quite so refreshing. But this kind of careful language runs deep in JPL’s institutional history – starting with its own name. Few people these days talk of “jet propulsion”; even when the phrase emerged in 1943, it was a euphemism for a word that engineers worried might get the public a little too excited: “rocket”.The problem with “rocket” was that the word was so often synonymous with cranks and fantasists, people who were more into sci-fi than sober science. The founders of JPL – Caltech aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán and his PhD student Frank Malina – wanted none of the cultural baggage of the R-word, they just wanted to get into space without breathless media speculation. And there’s the problem. JPL may be well known but its founder Frank Malina is not the household name he deserves to be. His achievements are central to the birth of the Space Age yet at the moment when his contribution to astronautics should have been recognised, he was rewarded instead with years of FBI harassment. Continue reading...

Researchers claim deaths could be reduced if UK GPs were given a greater awareness of cancer symptoms in order to reduce late diagnosisAt least 2,400 cancer patients die needlessly every year because their GP does not refer them to a specialist quickly enough, research has suggested.The two-week wait means patients should see a specialist for their first appointment within two weeks of seeing a GP with suspected cancer symptoms. Continue reading...

In response to furor over undercover videos, the organization’s move is intended to take away any basis for attack ‘to advance an anti-abortion political agenda’Responding to a furor over undercover videos, Planned Parenthood says it will maintain programs at some of its clinics that make fetal tissue available for research, but will no longer accept any sort of payment to cover the costs of those programs.Anti-abortion activists who recently released a series of covertly filmed videos have contended that Planned Parenthood officials sought profits from their programs providing post-abortion fetal tissue to researchers. Planned Parenthood said the videos were deceptively edited and denied seeking any payments beyond legally permitted reimbursement of costs. Continue reading...

Survey of thousands of animal studies for drugs to combat disease finds majority not rigorous enough, leading to trials that waste time, money and sufferingThe search for new drugs to combat major diseases is being set back by shoddy animal research, according to work by two teams of scientists.An Edinburgh University survey of thousands of animal studies found that the majority were not rigorous enough to rule out effects that routinely inflate the benefits of new treatments. Continue reading...

Level of belief has increased seven percentage points in the past six months as climate change brings weather events closer to homeAround 70% of Americans believe in the science behind global warming - the highest level of acceptance in the US since 2008 - according to a new survey.The level of belief has increased seven percentage points in the past six months, the polling by the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College shows. Continue reading...

The aurora borealis is expected to be visible in Britain for the next few weeks. We’d like to see your pictures and videos

International Space Station astronaut Scott Kelly has been taking a series of remarkable images of Australia from his vantage point 400km above the Earth. His colour-enhanced images, shot with a Nikon D4 camera, portray a vivid and sometimes unrecognisable landscape. Kelly’s photographs, which he posts on Twitter, have been shared thousands of times since he began his year-long mission in March 2015 Continue reading...

Important ecosystems could be massively damaged by 2050 unless greenhouse gas emissions and localised pollution is drastically reduced, researchers sayThe food chains of the world’s oceans are at risk of collapse due to the release of greenhouse gases, overfishing and localised pollution, a stark new analysis shows.A study of 632 published experiments of the world’s oceans, from tropical to arctic waters, spanning coral reefs and the open seas, found that climate change is whittling away the diversity and abundance of marine species. Continue reading...

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in science, highlighting role models to inspire the next generationHappy Ada Lovelace Day everyone! Today is a day to celebrate inspirational women in science, technology, maths and engineering, in the hope that by shining a light on such people and increasing their visibility, they can inspire future generations.Ada Lovelace Day was founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, and part of her reason for doing this was a worry that women in tech were invisible. The idea was a positive one - rather than highlighting the problem, highlight the unseen women and shout from the rooftops about all the amazing things they’ve achieved. Ada Lovelace was an obvious choice of mascot for such an endeavour. Continue reading...

For every nine boys in international mathematics competitions, there is just one girl. But critics say a female-only olympiad risks making the division worseWhen Lisa Lokteva realised as a child that she was a maths whizz, her grandmother gave her a present. “Here is a book about female mathematicians,” her grandmother said. “Read it and learn how bad their lives are.”Now 18, Lokteva is a bronze medallist and the only female member of the Swedish maths team at the International Maths Olympiad (IMO) this year. Continue reading...

Were you checkmated or did you find the solution to the classic and other mutilated chessboard puzzle? The answer is hereWant to see the solution in a video? Click hereEarlier today I set you two mutilated chessboard puzzles.1) The classic: Continue reading...

The chessboard was mutilated in two ways, but did you solve how to cover it with dominoes or were you outmanoeuvred? Continue reading...

100 years ago today Edith Cavell was executed by a German firing squad for smuggling Allied soldiers out of occupied Belgium. Vanessa Heggie explains how a nurse became a spyAt dawn on 12 October 1915 the British nurse Edith Cavell was killed by a firing squad, after a German military court found her guilty of helping Allied soldiers escape from occupied Belgium. It was strongly implied that she was also involved in espionage, passing information about German military movements and plans back to the UK. The British Government denied that she was a spy, but recently the ex-head of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, has revealed new evidence that strongly suggests Cavell was involved in smuggling information as well as men.However much Cavell knew about the information being carried on the bodies of the men she saved – written on cloth and sewn into clothes, or hidden in shoes – her death made her a popular martyr, as her execution provoked a strong public reaction of horror. Author Arthur Conan Doyle said: Continue reading...

The mutilated chessboard is a classic puzzle. But can you square up a solution to the other problem?Want to see more? Watch a video explanation of the puzzle here

Can you cover a chopped into chessboard? Watch Alex setting a two-part problem needing some alternative thought and moves. The first involves the classic mutilated board problem, but then there’s also the other problem. Confused? Don’t be. Watch Alex setting it all up here.