AstroSat may be 10 times smaller than Hubble but will be first space telescope launched by a developing countryIndia is to launch a mini Hubble-type space observatory, a major step forward for the emerging power’s increasingly capable space programme.Last year, the south Asian nation became the first country to launch a successful Mars orbital mission on its first attempt. At £50m, the robotic probe, which is still circling the red planet, cost a fraction of earlier similar missions by the US, Russia and European countries. Continue reading...

Overlapping lunar eclipse and supermoon have some religious leaders warning of a major turning point on Earth, though the details varyOn Sunday, millions of people around the world will enjoy the sight of a “blood moon”, as a lunar eclipse combined with a “supermoon” combines to make our natural satellite appear red in colour.Related: Mormon church issues call for calm as 'blood moon' sparks apocalypse fears Continue reading...

Computers are immensely capable, but certain things we humans do almost effortlessly an artificial intelligence has immense difficulty achievingArtificial intelligence seems to be the neighborhood menace these days: in the presence of responsible adults, it smiles, is polite and offers to do the dishes. With a less responsible crowd – of the Pentagon or Volkswagen variety – it firebombs your flowerbed and sabotages your environmental fundraiser. And just when you think the menace could not be any more existential, you realize it’s inextricably implicated in the fabric of your life, so much so that you’ll likely never be rid of it.The menace of artificial intelligence is very real in most respects. As a lock pick for the infiltration of the private sphere, a method of control in the public sphere or a weapon, artificial intelligence poses a substantial threat. But there is at least one aspect of that threat that our dystopian generation, including the most elite of our technocratic vanguard, may tend to exaggerate: namely, the ability for artificial intelligence to become “self-aware” to the extent that it could, as Elon Musk suggests it might “press the delete key” on humanity. Continue reading...

Are you going to be observing the supermoon lunar eclipse on Sunday night? Share your images via GuardianWitness

Take the Observer personality quiz and find out who you – or your partner – really areRead the paragraph below – imagining Alex to be the same gender as you – then answer the questions that follow. (Fair warning: the results might be incendiary if you’re with your partner at the time.)Alex is a 20-year-old student at your local university. She (or he) is studying English and is thinking of also taking a couple of history modules. She lives in a house share with three other people near the university and has a part-time job working at the students’ union. One of her favourite things is trying new food; she also enjoys TV, the gym, and live music. Alex is single. Today is Valentine’s Day. Continue reading...

Breaking up can be devastating, but there are ways to limit the damage. Elizabeth Day hears from an expertKatherine Woodward Thomas was on a yoga retreat last March in Costa Rica, trying to get away from it all to work on a new book proposal. What she didn’t know was that, thousands of miles across the globe, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin were in the process of announcing their divorce. As Woodward Thomas was perfecting her downward dog, a statement was being posted on Paltrow’s Goop website outlining the couple’s decision. It was headed “Conscious Uncoupling”.Woodward Thomas, a psychologist based in Los Angeles, had never met Paltrow or Martin, but she had coined that same term some years earlier when the experience of going through her own divorce had led her to examine the ways in which separation could be made as amicable as possible. Continue reading...

Nutricosmetics are dietary powders, pills and drinks designed to reverse signs of skin-ageing. It’s predicted to become a £5bn industry by 2020 – but is it just a spoonful of pseudoscience?For the past few weeks my breakfast has taken an unusual twist. Before I crack on with work, I unscrew a small glass vial with a gold lid and down the contents. The bottle has the air of Alice in Wonderland’s “drink me” potion, but the only thing it promises to shrink is my wrinkles. Continue reading...

Science is often misrepresented in the movies, but The Martian is an exception, and the hero’s a botanist to boot“Movies are entertainment; if you want a message, call Western Union,” as the Hollywood golden age producer Samuel Goldwyn said. Actually, he almost certainly never said it, which kind of illustrates the point. But I am interested in the message. Everyone thinks their own profession is the least well represented in Hollywood, as if films have some obligation to tell the truth. Scientists frequently bleat that movies don’t get scientists or science right. Spoiler alert: there’s no engine noise in space. There’s no such thing as truth serum. We can’t resurrect dinosaurs. Wormholes, so heavily relied upon by screenwriters for interstellar travel, don’t exist.I mostly don’t care. Mostly. Tell a good story. Explore ideas. Entertain us. Movies do profoundly influence how we think about things and can become culturally ubiquitous. The flat-headed, neck-bolted image of Frankenstein belongs entirely to Universal Studios and Boris Karloff, and not to Mary Shelley. There’s a robust body of research about the perception of science and scientists, some of which indicates children form negative images young, and then develop them. The results of the Draw a Scientist Test – which is fairly self-explanatory – are always disappointing. Children draw white, white-coated, bespectacled, crazy-haired men. Girls very occasionally draw women, but boys only draw men. There’s a paucity of data on how movies depict science and whether that influences how we culturally regard research and experimentation. Continue reading...

There is a thriving charity sector developing new drugs – let them work on antibiotic resistanceSeventy years ago Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, in his Nobel prize acceptance speech warned that inappropriate use of antibiotics would give rise to resistance (“Time for world to act on antibiotic resistance”, leader, Comment). Fleming’s prediction has come to pass and antibiotic resistance is now threatening modern medicine.Routine procedures including heart bypass surgery, hip and knee replacements, cancer treatments, childbirth, trauma surgery and intensive care treatments all depend on functioning antibiotics. Some patients such as those with cystic fibrosis have to be on regular antibiotic administration – for these patients and many others antibiotic-resistant infections can kill. Continue reading...

Sales are up at emergency-preparedness retailers ahead of a combination of a lunar eclipse and a supermoon, but church says not to get carried awayA rare confluence of a lunar eclipse and a supermoon to happen this weekend has prompted such widespread fear of an impending apocalypse that the Mormon church was compelled to issue a statement cautioning the faithful to not get caught up in speculation about a major calamity.Sunday night’s “blood moon” and recent natural disasters and political unrest around the world have led to a rise in sales at emergency-preparedness retailers. Continue reading...

This beautiful display captures the Soviet space programme as a place for licensed dreaming, and features space relics never before allowed out of RussiaThe Science Museum’s new exhibition Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age moves from the actual events, spacecraft and personalities of the USSR’s post-Sputnik decade of triumph, into cosmonaut culture more widely – cosmonauts as the political heroes of Khrushchev’s renewed communism, as embodiments of both science and mystical philosophy; in art and film; and as a design cue for a vast amount of Soviet kitsch, from table lamps to cigarette cases to cocktail cabinets. Cosmonauts, too, as the centre of their own tiny, insular world of privilege and test-pilot superstition: because Gagarin had stopped on the way out to the launchpad and urinated on the right-back wheel of the bus, every cosmonaut on their way aloft did so ever after, and watched the same lucky film the night before, and listened to the same songs.Related: Red plenty: lessons from the Soviet dream Continue reading...

‘I know I’m courting fury by revealing that I still follow the rule and that I think you should, too. Come at me, debunkers’We live in unsettling times. Old certainties crumble daily: Jeremy Corbyn leads the Labour party; colouring books for adults are bestsellers; man-buns exist. And now, most disorienting of all, it’s apparently not even true that you’re supposed to drink eight glasses of water a day. This bombshell comes from Aaron Carroll, a US paediatrician who’s researched hydration and who rounded up the evidence in the New York Times: the notion that most of us walk around dehydrated, he showed, is a myth. The web, which loves a good debunking only slightly less than a good shaming, went wild. So I know I’m courting fury by revealing that I still follow the eight-glass rule, and that I think you should, too. Come at me, debunkers! Although on second thoughts, could you hold on a minute while I run to the bathroom?Here’s the argument for my radical stance: there is no suggestion eight glasses is bad; you’ll probably drink fewer sugary drinks; and those toilet trips will stop you sitting, unhealthily, at your desk all day. Plus following any such rule makes you more attentive to what you’re putting into your system. In other words: the eight-glass rule is wrong, on its own terms, but still useful. And I’m convinced all sorts of “rules for living” work this way. Continue reading...

With some daters now adding their Myers-Briggs type to their profile, here’s a handy guide to the types looking for love – or something else – onlineA recent piece in nymag.com reported that 5% of OkCupid hopefuls looking for love now put their Myers-Briggs type into their profile information. This is despite the writer Roman Krznaric reporting that psychologists have doubted their efficacy for decades. Indeed, if we retake a Myers-Briggs test just five weeks after the first test, 50% of us will come out with a different result. These types of personality tests are also guilty of being reductive, putting us in categories such as “extrovert” or “introvert” when in reality we are mixtures of both. So I really do not recommend over-simplifying human nature, which is always in flux, by putting people in boxes and slapping on labels. Except it’s so fun to do – so with that in mind, I’ve come up with my own labels for internet daters. I hope you find them useful. Continue reading...

From the pictures on her bedroom walls to the gender imbalance of her university teachers and book reviewers, sexism is everywhere for the female scientistYou can usually tell the sex of a baby being pushed in a pram. If it’s wearing a colourful outfit decorated with charismatic animals, it’s probably a boy; pink hearts and flowers means a girl. In fact, you don’t even need to see the child - just take a look at its bedroom: dinosaurs, wall-stickers of planets and astronauts, construction blocks, bugs, slime, “experimental” equipment, vehicles and machinery, rather than dolls, fairies, colouring books and crayons.... I think you can guess where I am going with this.What of the child’s other influences? Who will inspire her to take an interest in the natural world, to explore the chemistry, physics and biology all around her? Her teachers are more likely to be female, although her physics teachers will probably be male. But despite their smaller number, male teachers are better respected. Her books overwhelmingly depict scientists as men – usually old, white men. On television, scientists and engineers appearing on news and current affairs programmes are overwhelmingly male (although Channel 4 News has notably taken steps to change this). Despite some excellent female science presenters, documentaries largely continue to be presented by men, and the gender imbalance for experts appearing on panel shows – particularly in comedy – is infamous. Continue reading...

The new winner of the Winton prize for science books says humanity has become a geophysical force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoesWe live in epoch-making times. Literally. The changes humans have made in recent decades have been on such a scale that they have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5bn-year history. Our planet is crossing a geological boundary and we humans are the change-makers.Millions of years from now, a stripe in the accumulated layers of rock on Earth’s surface will reveal our human fingerprint, just as we can see evidence of dinosaurs in rocks of the Jurassic, or the explosion of life that marks the Cambrian or the glacial retreat scars of the Holocene. Our influence will show up as a mass of species going extinct, changes in the chemistry of the oceans, the loss of forests and the growth of deserts, the retreat of glaciers and the sinking of islands. Geologists of the far future will note in the fossil records the extinctions of wild animals and the abundance of domesticates, the chemical fingerprint of materials such as aluminium drinks cans and plastic carrier bags, and the footprint of projects such as the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca oil sands of north-west Canada, which moves 30bn tonnes of earth each year – twice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the world in that time. Continue reading...

The fate of industrially farmed animals is one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time. Tens of billions of sentient beings, each with complex sensations and emotions, live and die on a production line

According to a new study, ‘a non-invasive brain-to-brain interface (BBI) can be used to allow one human to guess what is on the mind of another human’Mind reading might not be as far-fetched as many people believe, says a study published by researchers at the University of Washington.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has embarked on an ambitious upgrade of its deep space tracking network. By 2018, communications will be possible with some spacecraft at urban fibre optic broadband speeds, a huge improvement on what is now possible.Currently, ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft communicates at just 228kbps from its orbit around the Red Planet. That’s about 200-450 times slower than many homes can access the internet using fibre optic cables, which run at between 50-100Mbps. Continue reading...

Hey baby ... it’s time to define what gender means through the medium of music. Slip us your suggestions, and in title, lyrics or style, it might be a sexy week …What makes a man a man? Does he have to be big and strong? Is that enough to turn you on? How about bold and brave? Humorous and humane? Moody and mysterious? How about pretty and boyish, or patient and perceptive? But then again, some of these qualities are equally attractive in a woman. So what defines gender? Beauty is in the eye and other senses of the beholder, and sometimes the beer-holder, for these definitions are constantly evolving, thanks to cultural shifts, fashion and hormones. And few genres address this perception so directly, and effectively as that of song. So where do you start?So is it best, in evolutionary terms, to a big hairy hunk of ape with a smooth, strong voice? Perhaps a Tom Jones type, a big Barry White or a hellraising Oliver Reed? Or, with film so much in parallel with popular music, how about a dashing David Niven? Or someone with fleet-footed finesse – Fred Astaire, or discreet charm of James Stewart, the bad boldness of Robert Mitchum, or show a quietly subtle and humorous style, like that of Alec Guinness? How aping a bare-chested Vladmir Putin on a horse? Careful - he might be reading this. Or a very different man of the people like the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen? Or do girls simply prefer Justin Bieber, David Essex, or indeed George Michael? And then there’s the Bee Gees. Manly chest wigs and medallions, anyone? Those tight trousers certainly did the trick with the vocals.

Amount spent on cancer research by the government-funded organisation has fallen sharply since David Cameron became prime minister, figures revealSpending by the Medical Research Council (MRC) on cancer research has fallen by a third since David Cameron became prime minister, according to figures released on Thursday.The amount spent by the organisation on projects relating to the treatment of cancer has fallen from a peak of £112m in 2011 to £76.2m in 2014, according to the data released by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. Continue reading...

In July, after travelling for 3bn miles and nine and a half years, Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto, giving us our first ever glimpse of the dwarf planet. What else is in store during this exciting year of space exploration?This special edition of Science Weekly is a recording of our Guardian Live event 'New Horizons - Pluto and beyond' which took place in London on Monday 21 September. To become a Guardian member and to find out more about all our events go to our member site.Guardian science correspondent was joined by an expert panel of scientists, including Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Andrew Coates, Kevin Fong and Monica Grady, to discuss the latest findings from the Rosetta mission and to ask what's next for New Horizons and other groundbreaking missions planned for the coming decade. And as Major Tim Peake, the first official British astronaut, prepares for his five-month mission to the International Space Station, the panel will discuss the future of human spaceflight. Continue reading...

Boss of controversial pharmaceutical company that increased price of life-saving drug overnight claims being forced to slash price again may force him to cut research and fire staffMartin Shkreli, boss of the controversial pharmaceutical company that increased the price of its life-saving drug 50-fold overnight, has claimed slashing the price of the drug may lead him to cut research for “lethal diseases” and force him to fire staff.

Although our digital identity is fragmented, research suggests that our various online personas lead back to the same personalityOur habits define us. But how true is this for our digital habits? Are we the same online as offline? In the early days of the internet, it was probably safe to assume that our online behaviours did not reveal much about our real-world personas. This notion was popularised by the “on the internet, nobody knows you’re dog” caption of a famous New Yorker cartoon.As the internet gained prominence in our lives, we gave up anonymity and also the desire to mask our real identity online. Indeed, online activities are no longer separable from our real lives, but an integral part of it. According to Ofcom, UK adults are now spending over 20 hours a week online: twice as much as 10 years ago. Similar metrics have been reported for the US, with the biggest chunk of online time (around 30%) devoted to social networking. Continue reading...

Rare arrangement of Earth, moon and sun has not occurred since 1982 and will not happen again until 2033The moon will loom large and turn coppery red on Sunday night as its closest approach to Earth coincides with a total lunar eclipse.The rare arrangement of the Earth, moon and sun has not occurred since Survivor topped the charts with Eye of the Tiger in 1982, and the same orbital display will not happen again until 2033.

Harmful foraging? So long as there’s cash in harvesting wild fungi they face being stripped away, so they need protectingPlenty of rain has brought out lots of mushrooms, including giant puffballs, psychedelic red and white fly agaric, field mushrooms and many more.One of the most prized edible fungi is the penny bun or cep, the classic mushroom with a brown cap and stumpy beige stalk you expect gnomes to sit on. Continue reading...

Spectacular views of the universe have been unveiled at the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2015 awards ceremony, held at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Which astronomy photograph are you most proud of taking this year? Continue reading...

Experimental physicist and founding member of the physics faculty at Sussex UniversityThe experimental physicist Mike Pendlebury, who has died aged 78, loved building equipment, making precision measurements and understanding their theoretical relevance. A founding member in 1962 of the faculty at the University of Sussex, he worked there for 50 years and was an early enthusiast for the use of new technology in general, and of computers for research and teaching in particular.At an early stage his Sussex research group transferred its expertise from atomic beams to neutrons, basic constituents of the nucleus that have no electric charge but do possess a magnetic moment. Norman Ramsey of Harvard University, a future Nobel laureate with whom Mike collaborated extensively, had suggested in 1950 that neutrons might also have an electric dipole moment (EDM), corresponding to the separation of positive and negative charges within an overall neutral system (analogous to the separation of north and south poles in magnetism). Continue reading...

Gaia Vince’s ambitious, all-embracing, compelling journey holds a mirror up to humanity’s epoch to reveal all we have destroyed, but may yet be able to save

Turing increased price of Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750, but now says it will make it more affordableTuring Pharmaceuticals, a small company that generated outrage by raising the cost of an old anti-infective drug by more than 5,000%, said it would roll back that increase to make sure it remains affordable.Turing and its chief executive officer, Martin Shkreli, became the new face of the US drug pricing controversy this week, after the New York Times reported that the company had raised the price of Daraprim, a 62-year-old treatment for a dangerous parasitic infection, to $750 (£488) a pill from $13.50 (£8.79) after acquiring it. The medicine once sold for $1 a pill. Continue reading...

Ridley Scott’s Toronto hit centres on a mission to the red planet which goes awry, leaving astronaut Matt Damon stranded and alone in spaceCritically acclaimed Ridley Scott science fiction thriller The Martian has been screened for astronauts on board the International Space Station.Related: Space experts challenge accuracy of The Martian Continue reading...

From ‘feefle’ to ‘flindrikin’, Scottish words for the white stuff put longstanding Inuit claim of 50 words for snow in the shadeThe claim that the Inuit have 50 words for snow has endured for decades, but it now looks as if the Scots have beaten that figure. Researchers on a new Scots thesaurus say they have found more than 400 Scots words for the white stuff, from “feefle” to “flindrikin”, “spitters” to “snaw-pouther”.Academics compiling the first Historical Thesaurus of Scots, which will include every word in the Scots language from earliest records until today, claim they have found 421 Scots words for snow. Other examples include “snaw” and “sneesl”, meaning to begin to rain or snow, and “skelf”, a large snowflake. Continue reading...

University of Glasgow researchers have compiled 421 words relating to snow for a Historical Thesaurus of Scots, ranging from ‘snaw’ to ‘flindrikin’The Inuit of the Arctic know a lot about snow, and their wide vocabulary for the white stuff is legendary. But they may face a challenge in snow-describing ability – from Scotland.Researchers at the University of Glasgow have compiled 421 words relating to snow for a new Historical Thesaurus of Scots. They range from “snaw” – plain old snow – to “spitters”, small drops of wind-driven snow, and “flindrikin”, a slight snow shower. Continue reading...

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire Blackberries, earthy, gritty or fermenting into wine – the scrub is bearing fruit as a reward for neglectBlackberries: they dangle temptingly, insinuating themselves. Wild fruit is evocative. What was once a donkey paddock between two arms of woodland has, over the past 10 years or so, become a bramble patch.There are also tangles of dog rose, thickets of hawthorn and scattered poles of ash saplings among the grass. The paddock is being reclaimed by woodland. There are irresistible forces at work here that make all those years of human labour count for nothing. Continue reading...

Latest finding supports a theory of a ‘lost world of dinosaurs’ that lived in a far cooler climate than most people associated with the creaturesFossils from a unique plant eating dinosaur found in the high Arctic of Alaska may change how scientists view dinosaur physiology, Alaska and Florida university researchers have said.A paper published on Tuesday concluded that fossilized bones found along Alaska’s Colville river were from a distinct species of hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur not connected to hadrosaurs previously identified in Canada and the Lower 48 states. Continue reading...

Remains of at least 50 people, all believed to date from 11th and early 12th century, discovered during demolition work to make space for new towerThe bones of men who may have witnessed the tumultuous events of 1066 in Westminster Abbey, when one king was buried and two were crowned in a year, have been discovered along with the skeleton of a three-year-old child buried under Victorian drainage pipes just outside the wall of Poet’s Corner.“What the child is doing there is one of the many unanswered questions,” abbey archaeologist Warwick Rodwell said, “but it is a feature of many ecclesiastical sites that you find the remains of women and children in places where you might not quite expect them.” Continue reading...

The Natural History Museum, London, will be displaying a piece of the Ivuna meteorite, which dates back some 4.6bn years to before the Earth was formedAn extremely rare meteorite that has the same make-up as the primordial solar system goes on public display for the first time on Friday at the Natural History Museum in London.The Ivuna meteorite landed in Tanzania in 1938 and has since been broken up into samples, the rest of which remain in the hands of private collectors. The Natural History Museum bought the largest lump in 2008 from a private enthusiast in the US.

The Nazca booby is a snazzy bird with a white glossy body and a Zorro-like mask around its eyes. Is it hiding something? Yes.Nazca boobies (Sula granti) are beautiful birds, but with a very dark side.A female lays two eggs days apart, the second as insurance against the death of the first. But if both eggs hatch, chick A will expel chick B from the nest to face certain death. Continue reading...

Children get told a lot of things that aren’t exactly true. Generally, there’s no harm in that. But some are so scientifically inaccurate it’s potentially traumaticYesterday, allegations surfaced that Prime Minister David Cameron once inserted a private part of his anatomy into the mouth of a dead pig. Among the veritable supernova of pig-based mockery that occurred on Twitter and beyond, many referenced Peppa Pig, Piglet, Miss Piggy and more. So now countless people have associations between beloved childhood characters and the Prime Minister’s private regions, souring many a fond memory.But you don’t need debauchery of world leaders to soil happy childhood memories, not when you’ve got science. And with that blatant shoehorning of a topical reference into a preconceived article, here are seven popular things aimed at children that are absolutely ruined by the application of scientific reality. Continue reading...

The Nevada Test Site was established a few years after the end of the second world war, against the fear of an all-out nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. As the cold war took hold, America needed a convenient place to design and build its nuclear arsenal. From 1951, over four decades, the US government carried out almost a thousand nuclear tests at this test site, earning it the nickname of the “most bombed place on Earth”. Continue reading...