Is there life on the red planet? Could you colonise it? Inspire students across the curriculum with our lesson resourcesMars has been the subject of human fascination for a long time, and we’re closer now than ever to sending humans to explore its surface. With the revelations that there could be flowing water (and possibly life) on it – and the release of Matt Damon’s new film, The Martian – now is a great time to engage your students in the red planet.Here are some out-of-this-world lesson ideas to help you. Continue reading...

Women who took HRT for up to 25 years no more likely to develop breast cancer, heart disease or diabetes, US scientists foundUsing hormone replacement therapy to treat uncomfortable symptoms of menopause is completely safe, according to the authors of a decade-long study.The research by New York University, presented to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Baltimore, suggests the risks of serious side-effects have been overstated. Continue reading...

Photographs taken by astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station are beautiful – but could a robot do better?What makes astronaut Scott Kelly’s photographs so special? Kelly, the commander of the International Space Station, has just become the US astronaut who has spent the longest time in space. Up there sitting in a tin can far above the earth, his hobby is taking photographs of the incredible planet below him – and it’s more than a hobby. Kelly calls his pictures “Earth art”. Is that right? He may be a brave astronaut, but is he an artist? Continue reading...

Breakthrough by researchers at Stanford University could lead to therapy that would coax heart cells into forming new arteries

People who took capsules containing Bifidobacterium longum 1714 reported less stress and fared better on memory tests, study findsA daily capsule of probiotic bacteria may help people cope with mild anxiety and memory problems, according to a small study of healthy men.Those who took the bug-bearing capsules for a month reported less stress and anxiety, and had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the morning, than when they took a placebo instead. Continue reading...

In the social media age, we know how to connect: but are we forgetting how to talk to each other? Leading US psychologist Sherry Turkle wants to fight backFor nearly 30 years now, Sherry Turkle, professor of social psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been exploring the effects of digital worlds on human behaviour. Her books, Life on the Screen, The Second Self and Alone Together, have charted the seductions of “intimate machines”, the advance of social media and virtual realities and the all-pervasive internet, and the effect these things have had on our culture and our lives. Her latest book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age, is a call to arms to arrest what she sees as the damaging consequences of never being far from email or text or Twitter or Facebook, in particular the impact it has on family life, on education, on romance and on the possibilities of solitude. Using extensive interviews and half a lifetime of research, she suggests – with reference to the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s – that we are at a “Silent Spring” moment in our infatuation with life on screens rather than life in the real world, never wholly in one or the other. She measures these effects in a breakdown of empathy between children, in the consequences of increasingly distracted family interaction and a growing need for constant stimulus. Her antidote is a simple one: we need to talk more to each other. This interview took place by telephone last week.You have been writing about these issues for a long time now. Has it always felt like a losing battle?

Visionary scientist Alfred Wegener was ridiculed for his radical theory of continental drift. A century later, his icy grave proves his pointOne hundred years ago, a German explorer and scientist published a work that would revolutionise our understanding of our planet. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Alfred Wegener proposed the radical idea that Earth’s continents had, hundreds of millions of years before, formed a vast single land mass that had subsequently broken apart, with those broken pieces eventually drifting to their current locations. Our world’s mountains, forests and civilisations rest on a bedrock that is not immutable but shifts, albeit very slowly, Wegener argued.David Attenborough recalls asking a lecturer in the 40s about continental drift. 'It was moonshine, I was informed.' Continue reading...

Cookery programmes put us in a hallucinatory state where we think we can smell the food we seeSince the The Great British Bake Off finished, you may miss the delicious cake smell that seemed to waft out of the television every time Nadiya opened the oven. Thinking about it right now may have a similar effect - you can almost taste the butter icing, can’t you? This isn’t smell-o-vision but a kind of hallucination. The smell of cooking is particularly enticing and memorable because it reminds humans that we were clever enough to create fire. This meant we didn’t need to evolve a second stomach to liberate energy from ingredients, like cows. So memories in the brain’s sensory cortex are stimulated when we see, hear or imagine a cake being baked on TV in a similar way to when we’re in an actual kitchen. It may not feel quite the same, and, of course, the inability to distinguish between the physical world and our sense memories is a form of mental illness. But as far as parts of your brain are concerned, as you watched the contestants put the finishing touches to their entries, there might as well have been a real cake in front of you. Just with far fewer calories and no washing-up. Maybe that’s why the show is so popular…Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London Continue reading...

We may put beautiful people on billboards, but it’s the average looking we’re drawn to, says Richard Stephens

Does it matter if you are left or right handed? Take this simple test to see what your level of ‘handedness’ reveals about youWe’re often told that left-handed people are more creative. When it comes to evidence, the jury’s still out, but the hand you prefer is less important than how much you prefer it: that is, whether you’re one-handed or ambidextrous. For each of these activities, which hand do you use – always left, usually left, both equally, usually right or always right?

There is still not enough money going into research and developmentAs a nation, our productivity has stalled. This stagnation directly affects the nation’s financial health and our citizens’ quality of life. As the government ponders where to wield the axe on departmental budgets in the run-up to the comprehensive spending review (CSR), the importance of government funding for research and development (R&D) needs to be kept in sharp focus.Last week, I had the pleasure of receiving an honorary degree from the University of Manchester, a university that sits at the very centre of the so-called northern powerhouse. As I waited to be honoured, I reflected on the patchiness of current government policy towards R&D investment. Continue reading...

Opponents of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership say EU negotiator has admitted to approving entry of banned goodsEU negotiators will resume controversial trade talks with the US on Monday amid claims that multinational companies have jumped the gun in advance of any agreement to import goods that are currently banned – including genetically modified crops and chemically washed beef – into European markets.

In Denmark, letting a child see zoo animals being cut up is normal - what can it teach a young child?My three-year-old daughter is transfixed by a bandage tied around the lion’s rear shin, there to hide the spot where the zoo has cut away a strip of fur from the ligaments in advance.“It’s got a big plaster,” she says over and over again. “Little lion, little lion. It’s got a big plaster.” She likes plasters, Eira. They’ve been an obsession ever since she gashed her forehead a year ago and sported one for several weeks. Continue reading...

Ancient teeth found in China suggest Homo sapiens was outwitted by its rivalsThe discovery of a hoard of ancient human teeth in a Chinese cave has forced scientists to reconsider our species’ relations with our closest evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. The find, revealed in the science journal Nature, shows modern humans must have left their African homeland and reached southern China more than 80,000 years ago.This unexpectedly early date contrasts with our ancestors’ far more recent arrival in Europe - about 45,000 years ago – and suggests Homo sapiens was prevented, for some reason, from moving there for tens of thousands of years. Anthropologist María Martinón-Torres, from University College London – a member of the team that made the discovery – is confident of the reason. She blames the Neanderthals. Continue reading...

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...