With over-the-counter sales under scrutiny, National Drug and Alcohol Centre researchers find increase was driven largely by accidental overdosesDeaths related to codeine, which soon could be available only on prescription, more than doubled in Australia between 2000 and 2009.Related: Doctors and pharmacists at odds over plan to make codeine prescription-only Continue reading...

My friend Roger Hughes, who has died of pulmonary fibrosis aged 71, was the Lloyd Roberts professor of zoology at Bangor University.Youngest of three children of Caroline (nee Lingard) and Robert Hughes, both schoolteachers, Roger was born in Padiham, Lancashire. From an early age he was interested in ponds, streams and woods, and fishing in the local streams for trout. He attended Accrington grammar school, then the University College of North Wales (now known as Bangor University) and was awarded first-class honours in zoology in 1965. At the university’s marine laboratories he gained a PhD for research into the feeding and reproduction of a bivalve mollusc. Continue reading...

Major discoveries and colourful characters are helping the agency launch a public-relations offensive as it seeks to maintain a record of impressive achievements on a shoestring budgetAs space exploration goes, it looked like a good week for Nasa.The revelation that scientists had discovered water on Mars – or, more accurately, uncovered evidence of certain chemicals in rocks that suggested recent liquid flows – piqued interest in the Red Planet ahead of this weekend’s launch of the sci-fi blockbuster The Martian. Continue reading...

Performance anxiety doesn’t just hold you back – it’s contagious. Sara Solovitch learns how to deal with hersA few weeks ago I was due to play the first movement of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata at my piano teacher’s student recital. I had worked on the piece for months. Sitting in my teacher’s studio, I told myself I wasn’t nervous – I was excited. This distinction came by way of a Harvard Business School study, which found that people who view their anxiety as excitement actually perform better on all kinds of tasks, from public speaking to karaoke singing. In other words, it’s about rebranding your fear.Two years earlier I had set out on a quest to overcome a lifetime of performance anxiety. I had studied the piano seriously as a girl but quit when I was 19, in large part due to stage fright. When I returned to the piano 30 years later, I discovered that while my fingers could no longer fly across the keys, my fear was right where I’d left it. Continue reading...

A close examination of Celtic craftsmanship reveals a scientifically sophisticated people with good links to the rest of EuropeA farmer, ploughing a field near Snettisham in Norfolk in 1948, turned up what he thought was a bit of an old brass bedstead. But it was gold, not brass, which he’d discovered and this was just the first piece of the richest iron age hoard ever discovered in Europe, including more than 200 torcs and fragments of torcs: neck rings made of gold, silver and bronze. Today, the collection is in the British Museum, and earlier this year, I was lucky enough to get a close look at some of these beautiful treasures.These objects amply demonstrate the artistic flair and impressive technical abilities of iron age artisans Continue reading...

Private companies argue they’re democratizing space exploration by offering it to celebrities and millionaires. But in New Mexico, locals are footing the billThe craft broke up in the clear sky 45,000 feet over the Mojave desert. During a VirginGalactic test flight on a still October morning, pilot Michael Alsbury accidentally pulled a lever, prematurely deploying Spaceshiptwo’s silver scissor wings. With a sound “like paper fluttering in the wind” the drag tore apart the fuselage and its logos for Land Rover and Grey Goose.What was left was a flowering of red fabric in the scraggly bushes, the chute marking the site where co-pilot Peter Siebold floated 10 miles to earth. Alsbury did not survive. Continue reading...

Met police exhibition shows how Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the father of forensics, transformed detective workIn the summer of 1924, onlookers crowded around an infamous seaside murder scene, peering over the gate of the cottage near Eastbourne where typist Emily Kaye had been lured to her death by a man she thought was the answer to her romantic prayers. Amid a fever of national interest, the cottage’s leaseholders sold tickets and offered cold drinks to coachloads of tourists.This week the details of this historic crime, a case that changed police investigations for ever, will be revealed to an even wider public at the Museum of London. Known as “the Crumbles murder”, after the quiet coastal area where it took place, the crime and its lurid details will form a central part of the first exhibition to display the grim contents of the Metropolitan police archives, known as the Black Museum. Continue reading...

Space engineers bid to launch missions to explore oceans on moons of Jupiter and Saturn, including Titan and EuropaWithout water, life as we understand it would be impossible. It is the one substance upon which our existence depends. And now it has been found streaking down the red, dusty slopes of the hills of Mars.The discovery, announced by Nasa last week , that the Red Planet has running water has provided scientists who are seeking life there with a major boost. As Jim Green, Nasa’s director of planetary science, put it: “If you look at Earth, water is an essential ingredient. Wherever we find water, we find life.” Continue reading...

Bosses say revamp is vital to cope with increasing visitor numbersA long-simmering row over plans to overhaul a corner of one of Britain’s best loved museums has burst into the open, with its director publicly defending the move.Sir Michael Dixon, head of the Natural History Museum in London, has come under fire over plans to transform a wildlife garden in the museum’s grounds. He says the change will allow for the creation of a new entrance to the museum, necessary because visitor numbers have soared since free admission was introduced in 2001. Continue reading...

Animals may suffer ‘horrific impairments’ as a result of genetic editing techniques developed at Beijing genomics insititute, claims RSPCATiny pigs, created by genetic editing techniques pioneered at a Chinese science centre, are to be sold as pets in the near future. The prospect has triggered a furious row between animal rights groups and scientists.Some say the creation of pet micro-pigs could cause considerable pain to the animals. Others say the use of gene editing techniques would be an improvement in standard animal breeding methods and cause less suffering. Continue reading...

Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero says he will change medical history as soon as 2017 – he even has a volunteer. Can it be done?Outside a large concrete hospital in Turin, Sergio Canavero speaks in formal Italian, trying to persuade a pair of security guards to let us use the staff car park. It is hot. The guards sit inside a shaded hut and peer out at Canavero, who is 51, short and fit, dressed in T-shirt and sandals, tufts of grey hair around his head giving way to a bald, caramel-coloured dome on top. “Allora,” Canavero begins, explaining to the guards that he used to be employed at the hospital, a surgeon in the neurology department, and is back for a visit.At the end of his speech, he moves a stiff hand across his neck, a cut-throat gesture that would represent a threat if made by almost anyone else. The guards grin in recognition and wave us through. “I told them I’m the guy who’s going to do the first human head transplant,” Canavero tells me. “Italians are suckers for a celeb.” Continue reading...

Marine iguanas found by Darwin on the Galapagos Islands confirm the existence of sea-dwelling dinosaursThe following passage from Lyell’s Elements of Geology may startle many - an account of miniature primaeval monsters yet existing in

A Michigan soy farmer made the astonishing discovery while he and a friend were digging in his soy field. James Bristle, from Lima township just south-west of Anne Arbor, told media that what he initally thought was a fence post turned out to be a rib bone and the first part of a woolly mammoth skeleton, including its skull and tusks Continue reading...

James Bristle and a friend were digging in his southern Michigan soybean field when they unearthed, a skull and two tusks, along with numerous vertebraeJames Bristle and a friend were digging in his southern Michigan soybean field when they unearthed what looked like a bent fence post, caked with mud. Instead, it was part of a pelvis from an ancient woolly mammoth that lived up to 15,000 years ago.A team of paleontologists from the University of Michigan and an excavator recovered about 20% of the animal’s skeleton this week in Washtenaw County’s Lima Township. Aside from the pelvis, they found the skull and two tusks, along with numerous vertebrae, ribs and both shoulder blades. Continue reading...

City links: We track down havens of stability, Canada’s weird ghost town and the German city nestled in Brazil in this week’s best city storiesThe best city stories from around the web this week include a ranking of the most and least emotionally stable places in the US and UK, a peek inside a bizarre Canadian ghost town, noise maps of busy US cities and a look at a traditional German city in the heart of southern Brazil. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories: just share your thoughts in the comments below. Continue reading...

‘That Smeg fridge expresses something about who you want to be. So you buy it’Sometimes it’s nice to learn that a psychological phenomenon has a name, if only so I no longer have to think of it as Me Being Uniquely Irrational And Self-Defeating. So it is with the Diderot effect – which, I learned recently (via Lifehacker), is the term for when you buy something new, but then it makes your other possessions look timeworn by comparison, so you end up replacing them, too. The inspiration here is Denis Diderot’s 1769 essay Regrets For My Old Dressing Gown, in which he recounts being given a luxurious replacement. “My old robe was one with the other rags that surrounded me,” Diderot laments. But “all is now discordant”. Before long, he’s obliged to replace his furniture and paintings as well: “I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of the new one.”You already knew, of course, that consumerism exploits psychological weaknesses to get us to buy stuff we don’t need. We fall victim to “hedonic adaptation” (the way new possessions become part of the backdrop), along with “upward social comparison” (if you succeed in keeping up with the Joneses, you’ll just pick new Joneses to try to keep up with). But the Diderot effect adds a twist. We use possessions to help construct our identities, and we need those identities to feel consistent. A consistently shabbily dressed person might be signalling that her mind’s on higher matters; a consistently smart one that she values good taste. But someone who’s a random mixture of both just seems weird. In the words of the anthropologist Grant McCracken, products are deliberately marketed in “Diderot unities” – groups whereby, once you’ve purchased one, you’ll feel you need the others. Now that you’re ordering that new dining table from the catalogue, shouldn’t you consider those glasses and plates, too? Continue reading...

Awful as it is to have to admit, we’re more likely to find microbes than a Martian iguana or a mist of sentient atoms – and that’s only if we manage to analyse the evidence without contaminating itThis week Nasa announced it had found evidence of liquid water on the surface of Mars. The space agency said the “dark streaks” on the walls of the Garni crater were proof of flowing water on the planet, evidence that a habitable environment was “at least possible”; and they might show them the most likely sites for finding life on Mars.This was huge news, prompting headlines around the world and excitable, scientifically undereducated types like myself to believe the first interplanetary BBQ with our new friends was just decades away. Continue reading...

Nasa’s discovery of water on the red planet are like Xs on a treasure map – and bring us a small step closer to discovering Martian life

Every Friday, we review things that desperately need appraising but seldom receive the critical treatment they deserve. We also review things that really don’t need appraising at all. We’ll review your suggestions, too – suggest in the comments or @guideguardianMars – REVIEWED Continue reading...

As The Martian opens, we celebrate the greatest space heroes in culture Continue reading...

Astronaut Instagrams, ship plumes and kettle lakes are among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last monthAstronaut Scott Kelly posted this picture of the Bahamas taken from the International Space Station on Twitter on 19 July with the caption: “#Bahamas, the strokes of your watercolors are always a refreshing sight.” Continue reading...

Research on the Deccan Traps in India reveals massive rise in lava flows around time of impact of Mexico’s Chicxulub crater 65m years ago, increasing the catastrophe for ecosystemsThe asteroid that slammed into Earth and heralded the doom of the dinosaurs triggered a surge in volcanic eruptions that made the catastrophe even worse, researchers claim.Scientists analysed prehistoric lava flows in India and found that soon after the massive impact, volcanic eruptions became twice as intense, throwing out a deadly cocktail of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide.

Humans are amazing. We can fly a spaceship to Mars but we can’t clean the Mars Rover – or Earth, for that matter Continue reading...

Swedish study sheds new light on link between height and disease – but smoking, obesity and poor diet are still greater risksTaller men and women are more likely to develop cancer than their shorter peers, according to a major study that sheds new light on the link between height and the disease.Related: Underweight people face significantly higher risk of dementia, study suggests Continue reading...

Is there life on Mars? What’s in the woodshed? Is there a secret lover? What’s in your pocket? Universal to personal, discover and uncover music that captures a eureka moment

Your article (How bronze age Britons dragged ancient dead into land disputes, 1 October), reminds me of Norman Lewis, in An Empire of the East, describing his encounter with the stone age culture of the Dani people of Irian Jaya in the early 1990s. “Persons of great power and influence … were not cremated in the usual way but smoked over a slow fire for several months and thereafter hung from the eaves of their houses.

US research analysing 35,000 volunteers’ preferences for wide variety of different faces finds sexual attraction is not based on genetics or other influences

Bid for exclusion by 14 countries and three regions would make two-thirds of Europe’s population and arable land GM-freeHalf of the European Union’s 28 countries and three of its regions have opted out of a new GM crop scheme, in a blow to biotech industry hopes.Under new EU rules agreed in March, 14 countries have now told Brussels they will send territorial exclusion requests to the big agricultural multinationals including Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta and Pioneer. Continue reading...

Timelapse of a ‘supermoon’ rising over a hill in Wellington, New Zealand. Astrophotographer Mark Gee captured the footage on Sunday. At its closest point, known as perigee, the moon was 225,622 miles (363,104 km) from Earth. At the moon’s most distant point, known as apogee, it is 252,088 miles (406,696 km) awaySuper blood moon: red lunar eclipse seen around the world Continue reading...

The star’s view on the origins of the universe is certainly the most earthshaking revelation in his most recent interview – but Jesus and the reality of life behind bars aren’t far from his thoughts eitherIt is typically intriguing of Justin Bieber to choose cosmology for his first foray into scientific debunking, when many feel he could provide a more elegant rebuke to Darwinism. Either way, it’s bad news for Cern (Twitter followers: 1.24 million) as Justin (Twitter followers: 68 million) finally starts using his power for good – in this case, to explain how ludicrous the so-called origins of the universe are.“I’m the type of dude who always wants to figure it out,” explains the What Do U Mean hitmaker. “Science makes a lot of sense,” he concedes. Or does he? “Then I start thinking — wait, the ‘big bang’. For a ‘big bang’ to create all this is more wild to think about than thinking about there being a God. Imagine putting a bunch of gold into a box, shaking up the box, and out comes a Rolex. It’s so preposterous once people start saying it.” Continue reading...

A recent proposed microbe experiment based on Schrödinger’s counter-intuitive theory would have a scale so small as to be almost meaningless, and other challenges such as consciousness also come into play

Jeremy Corbyn has recently been criticised for saying he would never use nuclear weapons. Quite right! This stance clearly overlooks the many scientifically-proven benefits of plunging the world into a fiery radioactive hellJeremy Corbyn has said in an interview that, if he were prime minister, he would refuse to use the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system. This has caused much debate and controversy. And rightly so! This naive and blinkered stance clearly doesn’t take into account the many scientifically-proven benefits of widespread global nuclear destruction so would deny people the many advantageous offered by a world scoured of life and civilisation. Such as… Continue reading...

It was love at first sight for Brian and Malou … and she had realised I was the ‘other woman’She had glossy black hair and eyelashes that arrived a minute before she did. She sashayed past me, threaded her fingers through my husband’s hair, and let her eyes work their magic. He was gone. Her name was Malou, and she had been found stuffed in someone’s hand luggage on the x-ray machine at an airport in Paris. Bonobos fetch up to $15,000 on the black market, and Malou was on her way to end up as someone’s pet in a cage in Russia. When airport officials discovered her, they almost euthanised her. But luck was on her side, and she was sent back to where she came from, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her mother had been shot for bushmeat, so Malou could not have survived in the wild. Instead, she arrived at Lola Ya Bonobo, the only bonobo sanctuary in the world and home to more than 60 orphans just like her. My husband and I were there studying how their minds were both similar and different to ours.Related: Bonobos have mastered the art of babytalk, new research shows Continue reading...

New study of ancient death rituals reveals evidence how bodies were smoked over fire, kept in peat bogs, brought out for special occasions, or even cobbled together in partsBronze age Britons may have mummified their dead by tossing them into peat bogs or smoking them over a fire, according to archaeologists who have studied the bones of hundreds of ancient locals.The leathery corpses may have been kept in homes for decades and rolled out for special occasions, or used to assert families’ legal rights to the land their deceased ancestors had worked in the distant past, they said.

As someone within the profession who is directly affected, I can reveal many reasons why the proposed NHS junior doctor contracts are enraging medicsSome of you may have been following the news about junior doctor contracts. You may have heard about the recent protest in Westminster. It will be unsurprising if you haven’t - coverage has been fairly scanty. The term “junior doctor” encompasses all doctors who are not consultants or fully fledged GPs. I qualified in 2006 and have worked for the NHS for the last nine years, and am currently a paediatric registrar. I am a junior doctor and I am angry.

The $500m Ariane 5 rocket is the first of two national broadband network satellites designed to bring fast internet to rural and regional AustraliansThe first of two national broadband network satellites designed to bring fast internet to about 200,000 Australians in remote areas has been successfully launched.The $500m satellite was launched aboard a 780-tonne Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Thursday morning. The rocket reached speeds of more than three kilometres a second as it covered the first 450km of its 36,000km journey into orbit. Continue reading...

The Ariane 5 rocket carrying a satellite – nicknamed Sky Muster – launches from Guiana space centre in South America. The NBN Australia satellite is designed to deliver high-speed internet to 200,000 Australians living in remote locations, such as Christmas and Norfolk Island. The makers have acknowledged the risk that the satellite could fail in orbit before it is even tested Continue reading...

Elsa Fricker says she has had fever, dizziness and migraines since visiting In With the Spiders but London Zoo says species are docile and unlikely to biteLondon zoo is investigating claims by a woman who believes she was bitten by a spider while visiting a new exhibition designed to bring visitors face to face with arachnids.Elsa Fricker, 33, was reportedly admitted to hospital where surgeons were due to remove an abscess that she says was caused by the bite. Continue reading...

Two film makers recreate an accurate scale model of the solar system in Nevada’s sandy Black Rock Desert. Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh needed seven miles (11.2 km) for all the planets to successfully orbit around the sun. Once the planet models were in place, they captured the illuminated spheres rotating around the model sun at night with timelapse footage Continue reading...