A female sand tiger shark will begin a pregnancy carrying multiple embryos. Only two – at most – ever emergeIt makes for gruesome but fascinating reading.

Tracey Brown delivers the 2015 Sense About Science lecture: The Ugly Truth - on the need to encourage accountability and support scrutiny over researchThis year's Sense About Science lecture focuses on the need to encourage accountability and the deployment of evidence in public life.Tracey Brown looks at how the truth can be an amorphous concept in science, with scientists more likely to hedge claims with caveats, whilst more bombastic statements are made in other disciplines. Continue reading...

Joides Resolution research vessel drilled to find seabed sediment holding climate records up to 5m years old but discovered some dated to 50m years agoKnowledge of Australia’s climate history has been expanded to the past 50m years, up from the past 500,000 years, via a major international scientific voyage from Fremantle to Darwin.

A study shows people are more likely to support climate action if they know about the many extra benefits of doing so.

A leaked consultation on the future of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has deepened concern that November’s spending review will be accompanied by a radical overhaul of the research funding system.Over the summer, George Osborne asked unprotected Whitehall departments to model cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent over the lifetime of this Parliament. Keen to burnish his austerity credentials, business secretary Sajid Javid has let it be known that he favours cuts to his department at the deeper end of this range. In July, as revealed in this blog, he controversially called on consultants McKinsey to help him identify where the axe might fall.In recent weeks, the likely direction of travel has become clearer. Last month, in an important speech to Universities UK, science minister Jo Johnson said that while he remained committed to the “principle” of the dual-funding support system (currently administered through the Research Councils on one side, and HEFCE on the other), he wanted to see a “simpler system” for allocating resources. Continue reading...

River Derwent, Northumberland The small copper butterfly flitted from flower to flower, then settled almost at my elbowDownstream from Blanchland bridge there were signs that the countryside was settling into autumn. In gardens on the edge of the village newly harvested onions had been left to dry in the early morning sun. A gentle rain of yellow birch leaves, spinning as they fell, settled on a footpath that was flanked by angelica umbels, and hogweed seeds festooned with dew-bedecked spider webs.Some stretches of the river, where the lowering arc of the sun fell below the crowns of pines on the far bank, would not be warmed again by direct sunlight until spring. Continue reading...

Video posted to YouTube by David Fritz, with the permission of the man featured, shows a gruelling G-force test carried out in a centrifuge. Aviators and astronauts undertake high-G training to learn how to withstand high levels of acceleration during flight, when loss of consciousness can occur owing to G-forces moving blood away from the brain Continue reading...

Ethical approval given for operations as part of local clinical trial following procedure’s success in SwedenThe UK’s first womb transplant is set to take place next year as part of a clinical trial in which 10 women will get the chance to carry their own babies.Following the birth of a baby boy last year after a successful procedure in Sweden, the Health Research Authority has granted ethical approval for 10 transplants. The first British baby born from a transplanted womb could arrive as soon as late 2017 or 2018. Continue reading...

Nasa helped make The Martian. But it also advised on Men in Black III. So what exactly is its relationship with movies? And can the truth survive blockbuster blast-off? The agency’s director of planetary science reveals allA rumour started a few years ago that Nasa routinely screened Armageddon to new recruits. Not because the asteroid-smashing Michael Bay epic was in any way edifying, but for the exact opposite reason: Armageddon got so much wrong that it was a showreel for how space doesn’t work. According to one estimate, the movie contains 168 scientific impossibilities and inaccuracies, which Nasa challenged its recruits to spot; they include space shuttles taking off like planes from asteroids, gravity working the wrong way on space stations and the fanciful notion that a nuclear blast could deflect an asteroid the size of Texas – they’d need a bomb a billion times bigger, physicists calculated.Related: The Martian and Nasa – a coincidence too good to be true? Continue reading...

Nasa astronaut Tracy Dyson coached actress Jessica Chastain for her role in The Martian, and no question was too silly – do astronauts wear their wedding rings in space? Continue reading...

Now the search is on to find living organisms on the red planet. Even traces of primitive microbes would rank among the most important discoveries in historyWhen ancient explorers set off from home they would follow the water, along rivers and coastlines, from lake to lake. There was little else they could do; for water is unique. The simple combination of hydrogen and oxygen is crucial for life as we know it. Without liquid water, cells fail, and so do those functions that define us.The US space agency put the same intuition at the heart of its exploration of Mars. On our home planet, where there is water, life is never far away. And it is this that makes Nasa’s latest discovery so exciting: that water may flow on Mars today, at least in the warmer months of summer. It is very likely that there is life on the red planet, said one of the scientists on the team. Continue reading...

A new claim that modern technology means boarding pupils no longer feel cut off from their parents ignores the deep and lasting effects of institutionalised abandonmentTwo things are infinite, suggested Einstein: the universe and mankind’s stupidity. Should we survive as a species, we will surely look back with horror on how we sanctioned the abandonment of children in boarding schools. We may wish we had outlawed publicity stunts such as an article in the Telegraph this week celebrating the fact that: “Today’s boarders are no longer cut off from their overprotective parents.” This is apparently due to the smartphone, which has “killed the ‘traditional’ boarding schools’ experience”, according to an “expert” who happens to be Hilary Moriarty, former director and marketing guru of the Boarding Schools Association.Moriarty seems unaware of the evidence: not one child development theory supports the British habit of sending children away from their homes. Leading neuroscientists and attachment theorists now conclude that the trauma of early boarding has severe repercussions in adult family life; the publisher Routledge has commissioned two new books on psychotherapy with ex-boarders in the past two years, as demand for informed therapeutic treatment outstrips supply. Continue reading...