Parasitic wasp larvae drug their orb spider hosts into altering their normal webs to create a perfect nest for them to transform into adult waspsPeople associate wasps with memories of picnic invasions, BBQs under siege, and painful stings. There is a lot more to these much-maligned insects though, and with more than 100,000 different species, their life histories range from the quietly unobtrusive to the bizarre and gruesome. A new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology documents one such disturbing example of wasp larvae that takes control of their unfortunate spider hosts.The Japanese scientists behind the study thought the host-parasite relationship between the wasp Reclinervellus nielseni (most wasps have only a scientific name) and its orb-weaver spider host Cyclosa argenteoalba could help us understand how parasitic organisms alter their host’s behaviour. Continue reading...

From a million miles away, a Nasa camera shows the moon crossing the Earth. The lesser-seen ‘dark side of the moon’ is dimly illuminated by the sun as it passes over the Pacific Ocean near North America. The north pole is in the upper left corner. The images were taken by the Dscovr spacecraft’s Earth polychromatic imaging camera (Epic) and telescope.Read more here Continue reading...

The US space agency has released a picture taken from its Deep Space Climate Observatory showing the moon as it moves in front of the sunlit side of EarthIn an unusual treat for astronomers, and perhaps Pink Floyd fans, what is often known as the dark side of the moon has been captured, fully illuminated, by a camera aboard a Nasa satellite.

Wild Sea keeper Claire Anderson talks about how Melbourne zoo celebrates the birthdays of its animals. Petre the pygmy hippo, who turned 31 on Tuesday, may now be considered a senior pygmy hippo but she didn’t hold back in devouring a fruit and vegetable treat. Her calf, Obi, was the first of this endangered species born at the zoo since 1981 Continue reading...

Funding shortfall in programme to replace space shuttle means Soyuz remains the only way Americans can get to International Space Station, says Nasa chiefNasa has said it is being forced to extended its contract with Russia to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars, because budget cuts have delayed commercial US alternatives.

Amid the grocery chain’s flavored water fiasco, the Guardian interviewed nutritionists for expert opinions on the trend that will never be worth $6 a bottleThe latest craze of flavored water reached a new level this week when a Whole Foods store placed three stalks of asparagus in water and threw a $6 price tag on the side. Shortly after, they admitted the product was a mistake.Related: 'Asparagus water' and $8 eggs: Whole Foods proves it knows its customers Continue reading...

Poaching has driven the Isfahan mouflon close to extinction in Iran, where scientists are hailing the rare successful example of interspecies cloningA domestic sheep has given birth to a baby mouflon in a rare successful example of interspecies cloning, according to scientists in Iran.The wild Isfahan mouflon – or ovis orientalis isphahanica – was cloned by researchers at Iran’s Royan Institute, which is dedicated to reproductive biomedicine and stem cell research, using the domestic sheep as a surrogate mother. Continue reading...

I feel the need to express my opinion on the stories I so often read about Kids Company. I was eight when I first met Kids Company staff at my school in south London. I was then introduced to other staff and attended a centre in Camberwell every day after school.The support, warmth, care and love I received helped me escape my reality, which consisted of sexual, physical and emotional abuse from members of my own family. Continue reading...

New study has identified 17 discrete expressions in horses (three more than chimpanzees) which may give researchers insight into their emotional statesA horse doesn’t have to pull a long face, it has one already. But it can and does look down its nose at you. It can be insistent, if not a nag. Horses are expressive, but those who want to decipher their expressions have a few hurdles yet to jump.But the chase is on. Scientists at the University of Sussex have compiled a directory of facial expression in one of humanity’s oldest four-legged friends. Their Equine Facial Action Coding System (EquiFACS for short) has identified 17 discrete facial movements in horses that may indicate mood or intention or just bafflement. Continue reading...

‘The best science writers can move and thrill us just as much as Austen or Dickens’, said judge Sarah Waters when announcing the shortlistWorried about your maths skills? Obsessed by the Higgs boson? Or the genetic code? Or anxious about your feeble grasp on the role of quantum physics in biology? Or what humans are doing to the planet? Or are you just worried to distraction full stop? Like science itself, all six shortlisted books in the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books are chronicles of the hunt for answers.Or are you worried about how many Guardian bloggers, contributors or former staff journalists you can identify in one single shortlist? Below are the candidates for the 2015 prize in alphabetical order, with links to reviews of their shortlisted work: Continue reading...

A report from the British Academy throws our lack of numeracy skills into sharp reliefIn June this year The British Academy (BA) published a report titled Count us in: Quantitative skills for a new generation. The report calls on the Government to face up to the problem of young people dropping maths too early. Currently, only about 20% of students stick with maths after the age of 16. This is one of the lowest rates in developed nations: in Japan, Korea, Finland, Germany and New Zealand for example, close to 100% of students take maths up to age 18.The report, described as “a vision of how the UK can rise to the potentially transformational challenge of becoming a data-literate nation” also pressed for improvements in the quality of quantitative skills teaching in schools and colleges. What surprises me is that the report wasn’t issued by any of the usual suspects – the Royal Society perhaps, or the Royal Academy of Engineering. No, the BA is the National Academy for the Arts and Social Sciences. Continue reading...

After doubt was cast on an influential scientific study two weeks ago, trenches were dug for the ‘worm wars’. Whose side are you on?It was supposed to be a magic bullet that would get under-privileged children in full health and into school. But in the last few weeks a row has broken out over just how useful mass ‘de-worming’ really is. Continue reading...

Fact checking? Based on sound evidence? The latest Radio 4 episode of What’s the point of ... the Met Office? not so much ignores the editorial guidelines as burns them to cindersQuentin Letts, the Daily Mail diarist, sporadically regales BBC Radio 4 listeners with programmes that ask ‘What’s the point ...’ of various national institutions. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the MCC and even the pub have come under his “witty but thought-provoking” gaze.This week’s offering purports to ask what is the point of the Met Office. But it actually poses a different question: What’s the point of the BBC editorial guidelines? Continue reading...

Seven-year study of adults in China matches regular consumption of spicy foods, such as chilli peppers, to 14% reduced risk of deathPeople who request an extra kick to their curry could also be adding years to their life, according to a large study which linked frequent consumption of spicy food to longevity.Researchers examining the diets of almost 500,000 people in China over seven years recorded that those who ate spicy foods one or two days a week had a 10% reduced risk of death compared with those who ate such meals less than once a week. The risk was 14% lower for those who ate spicy food between three and seven days a week. Continue reading...

Tauric Chersonesos archaeological site in Sevastopol, Crimea, to come under Russian control after anger at decision to put Orthodox priest in chargeThe Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has moved to put a key archaeological site in Crimea under federal control amid academics’ outrage that an Orthodox priest was appointed to run it.The Interfax news agency said the Tauric Chersonesos national preserve in Sevastopol – the port city taken by Russia when it seized Crimea in 2014 –would be placed on a list of the cultural heritage of the Russian people and transferred to federal control from 1 September. Continue reading...

Acclaimed science-theatre writer-performer John Hinton talks about impersonating scientists as his award-winning ‘Scientrilogy’ comes to the Edinburgh FringeIf at first you don’t succeed, pretend.I adored science at school. But my coursework assignments bewildered my teachers. Details of experimentations were often accompanied by personal anecdotes and quotes from obscure song lyrics. Irrelevant clip-art was rife. So when I had to pick a path through the labyrinth of life, i.e. select my A-levels, science fell away in favour of subjects where personal anecdoture and obscure lyricalism are paramount.

All plants contain toxins which continue to work after leaf fall, so how worms are able to stomach dead grass and leaf litter has long been a mysteryBritish scientists have cracked the global earthworm mystery: they have worked out how the planet’s great subterranean reprocessing system copes with the poisons that would choke most herbivores.Earthworms underwrite almost all life on earth: they drag fallen leaves below the soil and digest them, to excrete that rich mix of loam and living things called topsoil. Every year, 35 billion tons of dead grass and leaf litter get turned over by the worms and other soil fauna. But the catch is that some plants are really poisonous, and all plants contain some toxins designed by evolution to discourage demolition by herbivores, and these toxins carry on working even after leaf fall. Continue reading...

“Merkeln’, which means being indecisive or failing to have an opinion, is topping a poll to choose Germany’s favourite new ‘youth words’It is, perhaps, a measure of just how powerful she has become: Angela Merkel now appears to be influencing youth slang.The compilers of Germany’s most popular dictionary say that the verb “merkeln” is on track to become the most popular “youth word” of the year. Media strategists around the chancellor who may have fleetingly thought they could seize on the opportunity to encourage more young people to support the German chancellor will, however, have been quickly disappointed. Continue reading...

‘If the first 10,000 pioneers to Mars can go without water for 10 years, everything should be hunky-dory’In the year 2027, two sleek spacecraft dubbed Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 will finally land on Mars after a gruelling 243-day journey. The following day a further 3,000 spacecraft – Raptors 3 to 3002 – will land next to them. This is a fact. The colonisation of Mars will have begun.Ever since Nasa stopped flying astronauts to the moon, many people have got a bit bored with space exploration. But manned space travel is now more than an ever a necessity as people are getting so fed up with the lack of Vodafone coverage. Earth is doomed to a slow death through climate change or a quick one through an invasion of Scientologists from Planet Theta, and the sooner we get the hell out of here the better. The good news is that Wernher von Braun has already designed the technology to get to Mars. Man got to the moon easily enough in 1969; all we need to do is build a rocket 1,000 times more powerful. Simples. Continue reading...

New observation of ‘peeping’ sounds made by humankind’s closest living relative suggest a possible evolutionary origin for human languageThe bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee – humankind’s closest living relative – has mastered the human art of babytalk. That is, it makes a range of sounds that must be interpreted in context. It may not be language, but it parallels those sounds that human infants make to communicate before they learn to use words, according to new research by Zanna Clay, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham. Continue reading...

Some treatments hold much promise, but they pale in the face of the realization that everyday life choices are altering gene activity all the timeMuch of the current research on treating disease and staying healthy has focused on our genetic makeup – from the Human Genome project, completed in 2003, to the newer field of epigenetics, which puts our 23,000 genes into the context of the chemical reactions that influence their activities. Though these are crucial areas of study, scientists are continually forced to confront how much human health is not dependent on our genetics.The original optimism about the potential of genetics has been dampened by the immense challenges of translating gene findings into drug discovery as well as a gross underestimation of the role of lifestyle on disease risk. Geneticists did not –and many still do not – fully appreciate the dynamic manner in which our genes interact with each other and our lifestyles, down to the level of our cells, eavesdropping on activities everywhere in the body and responding, often instantaneously, to a person’s experiences. Continue reading...

The UK has over 20,000 species of insect, but their numbers are declining sharply. Here are some of the many reasons we should protect themIf you ask the average person what their favourite insect is, chances are you may not receive an enthusiastic response. Insects are not necessarily something we are expected to have an opinion on, let alone a favourite. They are often lumped together as one entity, “bugs”, and are regularly overlooked, or considered a pest (which of course they can be).In many ways, however, this is extremely surprising. We have over 20,000 species of insect in the UK. They come in all sorts of wonderful shapes and sizes, with distinct characters, traits and glorious life histories. Continue reading...

Academics have learned to live with attempts to measure university research, but is this the best way to judge success or failure?Many academics now showcase their work on one or more “reputation” websites – Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia.edu … They are as familiar with their h-index – a number that measures the quality of a researcher’s output – as they are with their phone numbers, and they are not ashamed to quote them in job or research applications.They have learned to live with, if not love, these metrics, which rate the number of highly cited papers an academic has written. They seem solid compared with the old-fashioned peer review in which one lot of academics, anonymously of course, comments on the quality of the work of another lot. Continue reading...

A series of experiments has produced incredible results by giving young blood to old mice. Now the findings are being tested on humans. Ian Sample meets the scientists whose research could transform our livesOn an August morning in 2008, Tony Wyss-Coray sat in a conference room at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto, California, waiting for his lab’s weekly meeting to begin. Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, was leading a young group of researchers who studied ageing and neurodegeneration. As a rule, the gatherings were forgettable affairs – the incremental nature of scientific progress does not lend itself to big surprises. But a lab member scheduled to speak that day had taken on a radical project, and he had new results to share.Saul Villeda, an ebullient PhD student with slick black hair and a goatee, had spent the past year engrossed in research that called to mind the speculative medical science of the middle ages. He was investigating whether the old and frail could be rejuvenated by infusions of blood from the young. The hypothesis was not as absurd as it might sound. Continue reading...

Astrophysicist joins scientists and mathematicians to discuss climate change and extraterrestrial life – and the booing of Adam Goodes – without acrimonyPoliticians cherry-picking information to suit their own agenda is one of the great tragedies of modern civilisation, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said on Monday night’s Q&A.In a panel devoid of politicians, Tyson joined the oncologist and Guardian Australia columnist Ranjana Srivastava, the mathematician and CSIRO marine scientist Beth Fulton and the mathematics ambassador Adam Spencer to discuss climate change, extraterrestrial life and artificial intelligence. Continue reading...

Scientists develop test for three proteins which could give early warning of disease and help doctors distinguish symptoms from chronic pancreatitis

Michael Bywater (When a manly pat on the back won’t do, 1 August) correctly points to the salience of culture in shaping our responses to grief, but when he writes “We have grown to distrust rationality; feeling is the new thinking”, whom is he referring to? For some, grief has to be stowed away because, in rational terms, they cannot allow it to dominate their lives when earning a living and supporting children have priority. They are not in a position to cogitate on “the rewriting of what it means to be human”.Those who are at the forefront of this discourse, though, are not necessarily harbingers of change when it comes to responses to grief. Some years ago I was working in a Russell Group university and the response I received, on the death of my wife, from a female professor of sociology, was: “Oh, I wouldn’t like that.” Clearly indicating, as Bywater puts it, that the new message is “We’re all in it together”. Really?

The Apollo 11 astronaut who made the first lunar landing in 1969 has tweeted his official travel voucher and customs forms for the moon rock he brought backBuzz Aldrin’s 1969 trip to the moon was just like any other business trip, expenses forms and all.Related: Camera and souvenirs from Apollo 11 moon landing go on display Continue reading...

The procedure is increasingly being sought out by professional women looking to postpone motherhood, but it could have unintended consequencesIsobel Taylor laughs as she recalls her decision to freeze her eggs. “I joke to my friends that it’s douchebag insurance,” the 34-year-old art director from Los Angeles says, explaining that since the right man is not yet on the horizon, putting her eggs in storage feels like a reasonable backup plan. “It takes away a bit of the stress.”Taylor (not her real name) is far from alone in opting for egg freezing. There has been a surge in mainly professional women across the US going down the freezing route in an effort to preserve healthy eggs that can be thawed and fertilized later, if or when they decide to start a family. Continue reading...

Members of those communities may be uncomfortable sharing their sexual orientation with doctors. And doctors lack comprehensive statistics on their riskGay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer/questioning (LGBTQ) people may be at greater risk for seven different cancers than heterosexual and gender-aligned folks are, and a lot of the discrepancy is due to misinformation and lack of regular healthcare in those communities.These factors increase the likelihood that LGBTQ people, who make up some 12% of the population, will avoid important cancer screenings, or be unaware that they are necessary. The upshot is that anal, breast, cervical, colorectal, endometrial, lung and prostate cancers may disproportionately affect the LGBTQ community. For example, available data suggest the risk of dying from breast cancer is 3.2 times higher in lesbian women compared to heterosexual women. Continue reading...

A combination of fossils and sophisticated statistical techniques has allowed scientists to reconstruct how Fractofusus reproduced 565 million years agoThey looked like plants but were almost certainly animals; they drifted back and forth in in the deep ocean currents 565 million years ago; and by 540 million years ago, they were gone.And yet, in one of palaeontology’s triumphs, researchers at Cambridge now know how these mysterious organisms spread themselves around the pre-Cambrian world. And the answer is one that every gardener would recognise: they sent out runners, and established new growths. Just like strawberries.

There were a whopping four puzzles to solve this week, each an area plan with a missing value. Did you manage it? Alex explains the solutions to two of them – click here to discover if you've cracked the other two. See you in two weeks for the next puzzle! Continue reading...

New study claims tendencies, which pediatricians have long advised children will ‘grow out of’, are associated with more serious conditionsFor many in the toddler-rearing parent population,dinner-time can be a battle: their children are picky eaters, and have divined what seems like a both arbitrary and immovable set of guidelines for their foods.The foods they can’t touch, the crusts that have to be cut off or the ketchup that has to be a certain brand. Continue reading...

Look out for alien skin, astronauts and UV-related anguish in the alt-pop band’s latest music video

Alex Bellos sets a mind-bending puzzle – the area maze. Originally invented for schoolchildren, it's become a big hit with adults in Japan. Can you find the missing values in the four puzzles Alex has set? He goes through an example to help you along! For a written version, click here. Continue reading...

A success rate of 100% in trials is spectacular. There is no excuse for inertia on other diseases nowFor more than a year and a half, three of the world’s poorest countries have struggled against the most devastating Ebola epidemic in human history. Containing this unprecedented outbreak would have been a huge challenge for Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone under any conditions. But the scale of the task was far greater because of the absence of the most effective possible defence: a vaccine.Related: Ebola vaccine trial proves 100% successful in Guinea Continue reading...

Today scientists use sophisticated technology to catalogue treasures such as fossils. Items can be laser scanned, enabling us to view the object from any angle, without even touching the specimen. But sometimes you can’t beat an old fashioned illustration. Continue reading...

Intake should be boosted with supplements, say official health advisors in draft recommendations that could lead to new guidancePeople in Britain should boost their vitamin D intake with supplements because of a lack of bright sunshine to provide it naturally, government health advisers have suggested. The British weather prevents much of the population from receiving healthy amounts of the essential vitamin from sunlight, and natural food sources alone are not enough to boost levels, according to the scientific advisory committee on nutrition (SACN).The SACN, an independent advisory body to the government, made the recommendation after studying the links between vitamin D levels and a range of health problems, including musculoskeletal health, heart disease, type 1 diabetes, cancer and multiple sclerosis. Continue reading...

Artefacts discovered amid submerged ruins of cities of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus to be unveiled in major Paris exhibitionSpectacular ancient Egyptian treasures are to be exhibited for the first time having been discovered underwater in the submerged ruins of the near-legendary cities of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus.A finely sculpted statuette of a pharaoh and a golden-eyed depiction of god Osiris are among antiquities to be unveiled in a major exhibition in Paris from next month.

Last week I was in a hotel in Edinburgh where the whole bedroom was vibrating for some unexplained reason, at an almost imperceptible level. The Bessel functions in my glass of water were a key part of the evidence that persuaded the manager to move us

In February, football’s lawmakers approved the analysis of a player’s performance during live matches, via a tracking device in the shirt. So what impact will this have on a player’s health, game management – and the half-time team talk?The Fifa Women’s World Cup final this summer was remarkable, and not just because England came within one game of playing in it. One in 12 Americans watched at least part of the game live, making it the most watched football game in US history, while Team USA secured a record third title, thanks in no small part to their midfielder Carli Lloyd scoring a 13-minute hat-trick. The third of these saw her lob the Japanese goalkeeper from the halfway line.Less obvious, but possibly of more significance, were the small black gadgets about the size of an old Nokia mobile phone that the winning players were wearing between their shoulder blades. The final was the first major international match since the laws of the game were changed in February to allow players to wear performance-tracking devices during a match. Continue reading...