HemmersChess

Robin McKie on how scientists aim to bring back the aurochs, wild ancestor of modern cows

"They are a little below the elephant in size and… their strength and speed are extraordinary. They spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied." Thus Julius Caesar described the aurochs, an ancient ancestor of domestic cattle which inhabited much of Europe before being wiped out hundreds of years ago.

Today, the only evidence we have for the existence of these great bovines, which stood more than 2m high and weighed more than a tonne, are a few skeletons in museums and several dramatic cave paintings made by Cro-Magnon people tens of thousands of years ago. The latter show how these giant creatures – which had giant forward-facing horns and a white stripe down their spines – dominated the landscape and the imaginations of early human beings.

But now scientists are attempting to turn back the clock – by resurrecting the aurochs. A European project has been set up to bring these wild ancestors of modern domestic cattle back from the dead, though the scientists involved stress this will be achieved not by cloning them from ancient DNA, but by crossing existing breeds.

"Basically, it [the aurochs] was a big cow – nearly 2m high at the shoulder, and built vaguely like the love child of the Spanish fighting bull with a dash of Highland cow thrown in to make it hardier," says researcher Magdalena Michalak of Bryn Mawr college, Pennsylvania. By taking DNA from these breeds and others, and by examining the ancient DNA of aurochs, preserved in their bones, researchers aim to pinpoint promising species of modern cattle which carry aurochs genes and which can be bred selectively to reproduce an aurochs, a process known as back-breeding.

Project Tauros has been set up at universities in Germany, Poland and Spain where scientists are now sifting through the DNA of modern cattle breeds to find the most promising sections. "Then we will use a mathematical program to mix the cattle breeds so that the crossbreeds will end up like aurochs," said Henri Kerkdijk, the project's manager. "The goal is to breed a type of cattle that is not physically but genetically similar to the aurochs."

It will be a remarkable achievement if successful: the first animal to be brought back from extinction and returned to the wild.

The ghost slug, discovered in south Wales, is named after its appearance and nocturnal habits

The ghost slug, Selenochlamys ysbryda, is a species new to science discovered in a garden in Glamorgan, south Wales. Like about one-third of British species of slugs, this one may have been accidentally introduced to the UK by human commerce. The residence where it was found sits on land that was once a horticultural nursery. Since its initial discovery, this species has been collected from a number of urban environments in south Wales and neighbouring England. The size of the slug, up to 110mm when fully extended, illustrates gaps in our knowledge of species, literally in our own gardens. The name is a Latinised form of the Welsh ysbryd (meaning ghost or spirit), referring to its appearance and nocturnal habits.

International Institute for Species Exploration, Arizona State University

The new breed of commercial spacecraft

The SpaceX founder is convinced that humanity's survival rests on its ability to move to the red planet. He tells Paul Harris how his company is making the leap to the stars an affordable dream

The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to Mars. Not now, but when he's older and ready to swap life on Earth for one on the red planet. "It would be a good place to retire," he says in all seriousness. Normally, this would be the time to make one's excuses and leave the company of a lunatic. Or to smile politely and humour a space nerd's unlikely fantasies. But this man needs to be taken seriously for one compelling reason: he already has his own spaceship.

This is Elon Musk, a brilliant entrepreneur who made a fortune from the internet and has invested vast amounts of it in building his own private space rocket company, SpaceX. Indeed, far from being crazy, Musk is the real-life inspiration for the movie character Tony Stark, the playboy scientist hero of the Iron Man franchise.

There are some similarities. Outside the SpaceX plant in the baking southern California sun, Musk's sexy electric sports car sits in a reserved parking space (he co-founded Tesla, the firm which makes the vehicle), resembling the sort of motor Stark would drive. Musk is also engaged to the beautiful British actress Talulah Riley, star of St Trinian's and St Trinian's 2, and he used to get thrills from flying his own private military jet fighter.

What's more, like Stark, Musk is on a mission to save the world. But while Stark's aim was to battle evil-doers and achieve world peace, Musk's mission is a little grander. He wants to secure humanity's future by turning the human race into a space-faring people able to colonise other planets. It's the only way, Musk believes, that we can be saved, either from destroying ourselves or from some outside calamity. To put it mildly, Musk thinks big and takes the long view. "It's important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now," he says in an accent hinting at his childhood in South Africa. "It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it's been possible and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now."

SpaceX is Musk's attempt to do that something. Its headquarters are situated within earshot of the busy runways of Los Angeles International airport. The company's logo stands proudly on an otherwise nondescript hangar-sized building. But inside, a revolution in space travel could be taking place.

The factory floor has been roughly organised into an assembly line to make space rockets, part of a process of wresting the future of space travel out of the hands of government bodies, such as Nasa, and into the hands of private businesses. Using its hyper-efficient Merlin engines, SpaceX has successfully flown its first rocket, Falcon 1, up into space, where it put a satellite into orbit. Then it successfully flew the much bigger Falcon 9 rocket earlier this year. Now the company is working on Dragon, a space capsule that will sit on top of a Falcon 9 and deliver first cargo – and then, hopefully, astronauts – to the International Space Station.

That is stunning stuff. SpaceX, which was only founded in 2002, is not even a decade old. Yet it is doing things in space that some countries with their own national space programmes have not yet achieved. "When we launched the initial rocket actually leaving the launch pad, that was awesome," Musk says, gazing at the Dragon module being built. "Getting into orbit was when a lot of people thought: OK, it's real. That's something that South Korea tried a couple of times and they failed. Brazil tried three times and they failed. This is normally something a country does, and only a few countries have succeeded."

SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms have joined in a new space race. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is building a suborbital rocket called the Blue Origin New Shepard. John D Carmack, the man behind video games Doom and Quake, has his eyes on a lunar landing. Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson is aiming to kickstart space tourism with his Virgin Galactic project. Yet SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future voyages.

Incredibly, however, SpaceX does not feel like a huge operation. It defeats the received wisdom that only major world powers, or gigantic corporations such as Boeing, can truly set their sights on leaving the grip of Earth's gravity. Instead, SpaceX feels like a dotcom company. Inside the factory are all the accoutrements one expects of a booming Silicon Valley enterprise. All the office space is open-plan and even Musk has an open cubicle like everyone else. Employees – who dub themselves SpaceXers – wear casual T-shirts and are not afraid to sport goatee beards and a smattering of tattoos. They often travel around the assembly floor on tricycles and until recently, before SpaceX's employee roster topped 1,000 people, Musk was personally involved in every single appointment. He believes the "all in it together" work culture of a start-up is vital to achieve the firm's staggeringly ambitious agenda. "People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working."

In fact, SpaceX's Silicon Valley-style culture springs from Musk's own background as one of the most successful – and wealthy – figures to emerge from the internet. His interest in technology began early. He bought his first computer at the age of 10 when he was growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Musk taught himself to write computer programs and sold his first commercial software – fittingly, a space game called Blastar – when he was just 12. He left at 17 to work on a relative's farm in Canada, before going to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with two degrees, one in physics and the other in economics, before winning a place in 1995 at Stanford as a graduate student. He stayed there for two days before fleeing to start his first internet company, Zip2, which produced publishing software. In 1999, he sold it for more than $300m (£193m) and co-founded X.com, which eventually turned into PayPal. It was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn.

All of which left Musk wealthy beyond belief and could have led to a life of idle bliss. But besides being a very rich man, Musk is a determined one. Talking to him is a slightly unsettling experience. He is open and friendly, but there is a sense that – on some level – he is operating on a slightly higher plane. Asked why he does what he does, he gives an answer that seems rehearsed but rings totally sincere. "When I was in college there were three areas that I thought most would affect the future of humanity. Those were the internet, the transition to a sustainable energy economy, and space exploration and ultimately extending life beyond Earth and making it multi-planetary."

For Musk, the best way to achieve that third goal was to popularise space travel and make it affordable. Thus SpaceX and its fleet of rockets were born. He investigated the science behind rocket launching and concluded that there was no real reason why it was so expensive. He believed the space industry was dominated by inefficient government bodies. By starting afresh, and going back to basics, Musk believed getting into space could be done quickly and cheaply. He was right. SpaceX's Merlin engines are beautifully engineered and powerful, but simply made. They run on highly refined kerosene that costs less than petrol. The rockets they power – in the shape of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 – are also simple. They have fewer stages (where one bit of the rocket separates from the other) than their rivals and are mostly re-usable. Thus they can put cargo into space for a fraction of the cost.

The Dragon module is also a throwback. It looks nothing like the space shuttle, which it essentially hopes to replace as the "taxi" service to the International Space Station. Instead, it resembles something from the 60s, being shaped like a shuttlecock. Not that Musk cares about looks. He just cares about the fact that it is being designed with windows: a sign of his commitment to one day put astronauts, including himself, inside it. "I would like to go up in a Dragon at some point," he says. A few years after its first flying. I think it would be great, huge amounts of fun. A very life-changing experience."

Of course, Musk's life has already changed. You can't be a real-life Tony Stark with plans to retire to Mars and not generate publicity. But it has not been easy for him. Musk, beneath his shell of otherworldliness, is charming and funny, but he finds being in the public eye difficult. He would prefer to spend his time happily working on his rockets, not giving interviews. "I had to learn to be a little more extroverted," he says. "Ordinarily, I would sit in design meetings all day, exchanging ideas with people. But if I don't tell the story then it doesn't get out, and I want to try and get public support for extending life beyond Earth."

Unfortunately, Musk has discovered that celebrity has a dark side. In his case, that was a painful divorce from his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Musk, with whom he has five children. The split generated its fair share of media attention, not least because Justine has blogged extensively about the epic legal tussles over the terms of their settlement. As more details emerged, Musk decided to publish his version of events on the Huffington Post. The lengthy piece, in which he wrote about his finances and his relationship with Talulah Riley, began with the words, "Given the choice, I'd rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life."

Musk's desire for privacy is perhaps surprising in a man so driven and successful. "I hate writing about personal stuff," he says. "I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don't use them."

Outside work, where he spends up to 100 hours a week, Musk says he devotes nearly all his spare time to being a good dad. His children are the reason he gave up flying his military jet. "I have five kids and Iron Man does not have any kids," he says. "After having kids and running companies, I had so many responsibilities I decided it was not wise to take personal risks."

So are Musk and his entrepreneurial kin the future of space travel? As Nasa, the big daddy of the global space business, struggles with reduced budgets and a sceptical public, it seems perfectly possible. SpaceX is getting into orbit for a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle programme. It aims to make money as an ongoing business concern, rather than draining an ever-tightening public purse. It wants to drive the costs down and improve reliability and make space travel something that is open to everyone. Only private business, Musk thinks, can do that. "The fundamental barriers are improving reliability and reducing cost, and the government is not that good at either. Would you prefer to fly Virgin Atlantic or Soviet-era Aeroflot?"

But Musk remains a dreamer, not just a businessman. He did not create SpaceX to get rich for the second time. Instead, he is risking his fortune to start a company in a field most people said could not support a project like SpaceX. Again and again, he returns to the themes that keep him going. He sees what SpaceX is doing as part of humanity's destiny. "I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It's got to be something inspiring even if it is vicarious. When the US landed on the moon it was for all humanity. We count that as a human achievement. Anyone who could get near a TV got near a TV. If there was one TV in an African village and you had to walk 50 miles to get there, you'd do it," he says.

And through it all is the desire to colonise Mars. Musk insists that his most powerful Falcon 9 rockets could already launch missions to Mars if assembled in Earth's orbit. He wants SpaceX to help humanity spread into space, just like the first European explorers setting out for the New World. "One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so."

Musk's belief that this can be achieved in two decades is something that most experts would scoff at but Musk, characteristically, finds it frustratingly slow. "Twenty years seems like semi-infinity to me. That's a long time," he says, as if surprised that anyone could doubt his aims. It is certainly tempting to dismiss it as a flight of fancy. Except, behind him on SpaceX's factory floor, Musk's nascent fleet of working space rockets are already being built.

Space race: the private firms aiming to fly you to the stars

â–  Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, now America's largest online retailer. He set up his space company, Blue Origin, in 2000, though its existence only became public in 2003 when Bezos started buying land in Texas so that he could build a test site for his spacecraft. Blue Origin's main project is New Shepard, a vertical take-off and landing rocket, that is designed to take tourists to the edge of Earth's atmosphere: the edge of space .

â–  John Carmack, the man behind video games such as Doom and Quake, has set up a company called Armadillo Aerospace which is developing a series of spacecraft including a lunar landing vehicle and a spacecraft which is also aimed at taking tourists to the edge of Earth's atmosphere. Fares will cost around $100,000, says Carmack. The Virginia-based travel firm Space Adventures has signed an exclusive deal with Armadillo to sell tourist seats on its spaceships.

â–  Richard Branson, is planning to start suborbital space-tourist flights on his Virgin Galactic spaceplanes within the next two years. In 2004 he signed a deal with the US inventor Burt Rutan to use the spaceplane technology that he had just developed. When flights begin, a small craft carrying half a dozen passengers - who will pay up to $200,000 - will be flown to the edge of the atmosphere. After a few minutes, the spacecraft will then spiral back to the ground. Branson says he expects first flights to begin within two years.

■ Jeff Greason's XCOR Aerospace also aims to start suborbital tourist flights. XCOR is based in California where it designs, builds and operates rocket engines and rocket-powered vehicles to government and private markets. The Lynx spacecraft – fuelled by liquid oxygen and kerosene - is a two-seat rocket plane that can take off and land on a runway. The spacecraft has been designed to make up to four flights a day, carrying a single passenger into space where he or she can briefly experience weightlessness before returning to Earth.

â–  Steve Bennett is Britain's principal space engineer. His company, Starchaser, is developing rockets that are intended to blast paying passengers on 20-minute long suborbital flights that will include several minutes in which they will experience the delights of zero gravity.

â–  However, SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious player in the field. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future payload launches.

Camilla Turner

If we can stop the physical deterioration that comes with age, molecular biologist Aubrey de Grey sees no reason why human beings shouldn't live to be 1,000

With his beard and robust opinions, there's something of the Old Testament prophet about Aubrey de Grey. But the 47-year-old gerontologist (who studies the process of ageing) says his belief that he might live to the very ripe old age of 1,000 is founded not on faith but science. De Grey studied computer science at Cambridge University, but became interested in the problem of ageing more than a decade ago and is the co-founder of the Sens (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in the US.

What's so wrong with getting old?

It is simply that people get sick when they get older. I don't often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage. This is harmless at low levels but eventually it causes the diseases and disabilities of old age – which most people don't think are any fun.

Is this the biggest health crisis facing the world?

Absolutely. If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing. They are deaths from causes that affect older people and don't affect young adults. And if we look at the whole world, then the number of deaths that occur each day is roughly 150,000 and about two-thirds of them are because of ageing.

Why does the world not recognise this?

People have been trying to claim that we can defeat ageing since the dawn of time, and they haven't been terribly successful; there is a tendency to think there is some sort of inevitability about ageing – it somehow transcends our technological abilities in principle, which is complete nonsense.

And when people have made their peace with this ghastly thing that is going to happen to them at some time in the distant future, they tend to be rather reluctant to re-engage the question when someone comes along with a new idea.

Is it that our bodies just stop being so proactive about living?

Basically, the body does have a vast amount of inbuilt anti-ageing machinery; it's just not 100% comprehensive, so it allows a small number of different types of molecular and cellular damage to happen and accumulate. The body does try as hard as it can to fight these things but it is a losing battle. So we are not going to be able to do anything significant about ageing without hi-tech intervention – which is what I'm working on.

Ageing involves the process of metabolism, and then deterioration, and then pathology – is that right?

Basically, that's right. Metabolism involves a vastly complicated network of biochemical and cellular processes that are linked and that succeed in keeping us alive for as long as they do, but they have these side effects.

The side-effects start even before we are born, they go on throughout life and they are manifested as, for example, the accumulation of various types of molecular garbage inside cells and outside cells, or simply as cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. Gradually those changes at the molecular and cellular level accumulate and accumulate and eventually they start to get in the way of metabolism, and that's where pathology comes.

You've identified seven particular areas of cellular decay that might be combated. Can you give examples?

I just mentioned cells dying and not being automatically replaced, that's one. Another is cells not dying when they ought to – certain types of cells are supposed to turn over and sometimes they lose the ability to respond to signals that tell them to die.

A third is cells dividing too much – they may be dying when they are supposed to but dividing too much, and that is what cancer is.

We've known what causes cancer for some time but we are a long way from being able to cure it, aren't we?

I certainly don't claim that any of this is easy. Some of it is easier – but I've always viewed cancer as the single hardest aspect of ageing to fix.

You've talked about enriching people's lives, but isn't it the very fact of death that gives our lives meaning?

That's nonsense. The fact is, people don't want to get sick. I'm just a practical guy. I don't want to get sick and I don't want you to get sick and that's what this is all about. I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy. The only difference between my work and the work of the whole medical profession is that I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so healthy that at 90 they'll carry on waking up in the same physical state as they were at the age of 30, and their probability of not waking up one morning will be no higher than it was at the age of 30.

You've said you think the first person to live to 1,000 may already be alive. Could that person be you?

It's conceivable that people in my age bracket, their 40s, are young enough to benefit from these therapies. I'd give it a 30% or 40% chance. But that is not why I do this – I do this because I'm interested in saving 100,000 lives a day.

Can the planet cope with people living so long?

That's to do with the balance of birth and death rates. It didn't take us too long to lower the birth rate after we more or less eliminated infant mortality 100 or 150 years ago. I don't see that it's sensible to regard the risk of a population spike as a reason not to give people the best healthcare that we can.

Schools need large, robust randomised trials to help them decide which teaching methods to use

It's the near misses that make you want to shoot your own face off. This week the Centre for Policy Studies has published a pamphlet on education that has been covered by the Mirror, the Mail, the BBC, the Telegraph, the Express, the Guardian, and more. Boris Johnson endorses it.

So Why Can't They Read? examines why one-third of children have reading difficulties at the age of 11, and concludes it is because of a lack of discipline, and the absence of a teaching system called "synthetic phonics". The report contains lots of anecdotes but barely mentions the evidence.

In 2006 the government published a systematic review and meta-analysis of all the trials ever to look at phonics, which you can read in full online.

There were 14 trials in total looking at reading accuracy as their outcome, and collectively they found some evidence that phonics are a little better.

Then there were four trials looking at comprehension, which found only weak evidence of benefit, and three trials on spelling, which collectively found no benefit for phonics.

All these trials were tiny, and when I say tiny, I mean they had between 12 and 121 children, mostly at the lower end of that range. Only one trial was from the UK.

Many teachers feel the evidence is not compelling, and don't like phonics. To be fair, there is not enough evidence to say phonics works. The pamphlet recognises this. So how do we move forward? Should we run a large, well-conducted randomised trial?

No. The Centre for Policy Studies has it all worked out, and so does Boris. Their solution is taken seriously by every newspaper in the country.

"It is time to end this culture war," says Boris in the Telegraph; "to try to settle once and for all … whether synthetic phonics is the complete answer or not …

"It is surely time for the government to organise a competition, a shoot-out between the two methods, to see which is the most effective for children of all abilities."

Both expand on this idea. Read for yourself. They don't mean a trial. They really do want a competition.

By now you do not need me to tell you how dumb this suggestion is, but in case anyone in power is reading: there is no room for debate here, a "competition" between schools who have chosen one or other method is definitely and unambiguously flawed by design.

We run randomised trials, where the schools are randomly assigned to one method of teaching or another, for one very simple reason: to make sure that the two groups of schools – the ones doing the phonics, and the ones using the other methods – are as similar as possible for all other factors.

If we don't randomise, "using phonics" might not be the only difference between the two groups of schools. Maybe the schools using the strict phonics systems tend also to be run – and attended – by hardworking disciplined nerds like me. If this is the case, those schools might do better on literacy tests because of the nerdiness, rather than because of the phonics.

Why have large, robust, randomised trials not already been done? Because people like Boris don't demand them; because teachers often believe – as doctors once did – that their expertise and intuition make such tests irrelevant and undesirable; and because many academics in the field of education inexplicably resist them.

This is a relatively new tragedy. In education, as in medicine, there is potential to do enormous good, but also incalculable enduring harm through failure: and, recognising that, some of the earliest examples of randomised trials are from education.

In 1928 HH Remmers took the worst 200 students of one freshman year and randomised them to receive either remedial teaching or teaching as usual, and measured the difference in outcomes at the end of the course. In 1931 JE Walters did a randomised trial to see if counselling improves student performance. In 1933 Remmers was at it again, running a randomised trial to see if having exams at the end of the first term improved a pupil's outcome in final exams.

Education researchers helped to pioneer randomised trials, a lifetime ago, but then abandoned them.

We expend a vast amount of money and effort on assessing children, without much evidence that this does them any good at all; but we make no attempt to cheaply and systematically assess the teaching profession's various education methods, despite knowing that this would bring incalculable benefits for every generation to follow.

Instead, we have Boris and some thinktank wittering on about a "competition", and everyone takes them seriously.

Agony aunt and 'humanzee' Carole Jahme prepares to take audiences on an evolutionary journey in her new show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

I have devised a comic science show to mark the International Year of Biodiversity 2010, Carole Jahme Is Bio-diverse!, which premieres at this year's Edinburgh Festival.

I'm taking on the role of a monkey-human hybrid in a bid to help audiences get in touch with their inner apes and understand what makes us who we are.

We proudly declared ourselves Homo sapiens, meaning "wise man", and defined mankind with the phrase, "Man the tool-maker". Then it was discovered that chimps also make and use tools to hunt for food.

Unabashed, we instead crowed about what we presumed was our lineage's uniquely masterful ability to harness and control fire. But research on the newly discovered primate species Homo floresiensis – commonly known as "the Hobbit" – has shown that this ape-man creature, who is anatomically closer to chimps than to us, adeptly used fire to cook food.

When science forces us to compare ourselves to other primates, we prefer to separate ourselves from our cousins with an emphasis on mankind's evolved articulation. "Man the talker", we shout now.

But recent genetic research on the FOXP2 gene – a dominant gene for language found on chromosome seven – has revealed that Neanderthals shared this gene with us.

Traditionally we have portrayed the Neanderthal as an inferior prototype of ourselves; the Caliban of pre-history. Yet here is genetic evidence showing that Neanderthals were as linguistically sophisticated as we are.

Genetics has also revealed that we bred with them and those of us of European descent carry at least 4% Neanderthal genes. Not only were Neanderthals gossiping to us over the cave wall 24,000 years ago, but they were silver-tongued enough to guarantee that a little of them lived on in us.

Analysis of chimp and human DNA has revealed how we separated from ancestral apes approximately 10m years ago. But the parallel evolving species of early ape-men and archaic apes continued to breed with each other for at least another 4m years.

Not only are we modern Westerners the product of hybridised Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, we are also the progeny of ancestral humans and ancestral chimps. One could even go so far as to suggest that we are in fact a type of evolved "humanzee".

A recent survey has highlighted that, of the 634 species of primate, 300 are endangered and 114 are imminently threatened with extinction. Since 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, I'm using the medium of theatre to highlight the point.

I present Carole Jahme Is Bio-diverse! as a humanzee, describing the problems of growing up as a hybrid with a chimp for a dad and a Homo sapiens for a mum. I'll be taking audiences on a comedic yet authentic simian journey to help them get in touch with the ape inside themselves, while reflecting upon what it might be like to belong to the only primate species left.

Bio-genetic engineering is bravely taking us into a new world where approximated reconstructions of creatures that have gone before will be brought back to life. A chicken with teeth in place of a beak has already been bred this way to illustrate how ancestral birds had teeth before evolving beaks.

Now that both the chimp and human genome have been mapped, advanced embryological technology will soon see the laboratory giving birth to a creature similar to the Hobbit. After 12,000 years this ape-man species might very well walk again. But when humanzee-like primates are breathing once more, what will we do with them? Put them in zoos?

Richard Dawkins has speculated that the creation of a humanzee or the discovery of a primate cryptid "would change everything." According to Dawkins, if a yeti or one of the other anecdotal bipedal ape-men is ever scientifically validated, our self-image would implode.

Homo sapiens are good at manipulating their environment and typically we do not leave space for others. Today's global deforestation and loss of biodiversity is stark evidence of this. It is imperative to save what we have rather than relying on future bio-engineering to create laboratory freaks of nature – however fascinating they may be.

Discovery of our evolved natures can only be achieved by placing our lineage within the greater, comparative context of the order of primates. But with the loss of our closest surviving species, some of them barely hanging on with their opposable thumbs, knowledge of our rightful place will be lost for good and King Kong will become mightier in our minds as we attempt to fill our concrete emptiness.

Support the International Year of Biodiversity, fight to preserve what's left and, most importantly, come to the Edinburgh Fringe to see my show.

Two colonies of age-old and endangered tadpole shrimps discovered alive and well near Solway coast

A field near Gretna in Dumfriesshire might not be an obvious place to find the world's oldest living creatures, but a team of scientists has done just that.

Two colonies of a prehistoric shrimp that evolved when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth have been found alive and well in the Caerlaverock nature reserve on the Solway coast.

The discovery has led experts to think there could be more of the little crustaceans, which are listed as endangered species, elsewhere in the area.

The ancient creatures, known as Triops cancriformis or tadpole shrimps, are thought to have the oldest pedigree of any living animal. Fossil evidence suggests they have hardly changed in the more than 200m years that they have been around.

Wild tadpole shrimps can grow to more than 10cm long and are remarkable in surviving three major extinctions in the Earth's history. The shrimps have an extraordinary lifecycle. They live in temporary pools of water in which they lay eggs. When the pools dry out, the adults die off, but their eggs remain dormant until the pools fill up again.

Researchers at Glasgow University discovered the rare shrimps after collecting samples of mud, which were dried out and then made wet again before being placed in glass tanks. A fortnight later Elaine Benzies, a research student, noticed a tadpole shrimp swimming around in one of the aquariums. "I hadn't expected to find it and was just going in to check on the heat and lights. It was great to see everyone in the lab gathering round and peering into the tank to look at this ancient survivor from the past," she said.

Until recently, researchers believed the ancient shrimps lived only in a single pond in the New Forest in Hampshire. Six years ago, Larry Griffin, a scientist at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, discovered what appeared to be an isolated colony of the creatures in a pool at Caerlaverock.

"At the time it seemed that the Caerlaverock colony was a vulnerable historic outlier," he said. "But now that we know how this curious creature survives, we have realised that there's a good chance there are more populations out there.

"Triops matures rapidly and produces hundreds of eggs in just a couple of weeks. The pond they live in may dry out, but the eggs can survive in the mud for many years. Although in the UK they are all females, they have both male and female reproductive parts, so just one egg needs to survive to regenerate a whole population."

Synthetic silks have a great future – if only scientists can unlock the chemistry of natural silk

It's tougher than Kevlar and stronger than steel, and no one really knows how to make it. Except spiders of course. And silkworms.

Scientists have been trying to mimic the remarkable properties of natural silk for years, with varying success. New approaches are needed to break the deadlock, argue Fiorenzo Omenetto and David Kaplan of Tufts University in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

Omenetto and Kaplan say reconstituted silks could have a wide range of applications, from implantable drug delivery systems to optical and electronic devices.

We've all watched a spider build a web or lower itself down a delicate thread. You might even have seen a silkworm make a cocoon. It looks simple, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Researchers still do not fully understand the complex chemical changes that turn silk from a concentrated protein solution inside the glands of a spider or silkworm to a high-strength extensible fibre on the outside.

Though synthetic silks have been made in the lab, Omenetto says they fall short of natural silk.

"We don't use synthetic silks [for hi-tech applications] because they're basically not good enough," he said. Instead scientists use reconstituted silk extracted from silkworm cocoons.

"The natural fibre is put in solution and purified, the protein is extracted and essentially you go back to what is in a silkworm gland. That's the 'magic sauce' from which you can make new materials," Omenetto explains.

However, he and Kaplan predict that high-quality synthetic silks, modified for a diverse range of applications, could soon be made on an industrial scale.

"In the next few years, silk sutures, drug delivery systems and fibre-based tissue products that exploit the mechanical properties of silks can be envisioned for ligament, bone and other tissue repairs," the pair write in Science.

Follow-on applications could include degradable electronic displays and implantable optical systems for diagnosis and treatment.

Omenetto believes that silk will be harvested from transgenic plants in the same way as cotton. Researchers have already created transgenic bacteria and fungi in an attempt to increase silk yields.

In 1995, a team of American researchers inserted a synthetic gene for spider dragline silk into the bacterium Escherichia coli, which made the protein. In 2002, a North American team produced spider silk in mammalian cells.

"The remaining challenges are quality control and scale-up," says Omenetto.

Currently silk is harvested by boiling and separating the cocoons of the domesticated silkmoth larva, Bombyx mori, which are reared on farms. The 5,000-year-old process, known as sericulture, provides over 300,000 tonnes of silk per year to the commodity textile and medical suture industries. But the process is labour and time-intensive.

"In a synthetic form we could bypass the purification process and have control over quality and yield," argues Omenetto.

There may be other advantages. Natural silk contains the glycoprotein sericin, which causes an immune response when used in medical sutures. The sutures have to be wax-coated to eliminate this problem, but it makes them non-biodegradable. "With purified silk you could eliminate the immune response and still maintain the mechanical properties of the silk," says Omenetto.

However, others urge caution about the prospects for artificial silk. "There are many applications for such materials, but first we have to be able to make them to order and at reasonable cost, and here we have quite a way to go," says Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford's silk research group.

One of the many challenges scientists face is in their understanding of the molecular structure of silk.

Silks are large proteins made from repeating sequences of amino acids flanked by specific side chains that determine the protein's chemical behaviour. Making the correct side chains in synthetic silks is essential to capture the properties of the natural fibre.

Another mystery is how silk protein stays fluid at high concentrations inside the glands of spinning animals. At similar concentrations on the outside, many of the proteins aggregate, coming out of solution to form a gooey mess.

Though the future looks bright for silk-based technologies, it may be some time before silkworms can weave their cocoons in peace.

We want to find exactly out what kind of beliefs students bring to science lessons, and how teachers can deal with them

Alom Shaha recently raised the issue of how science teachers should respond to being asked questions about God that arise in science lessons. Shaha draws attention to an increasingly sensitive issue for teachers already challenged by the ever-shifting demands of curriculum, assessment and other expectations. This became clear two years ago when the education director of the Royal Society, Professor Michael Reiss, a highly respected biologist and science educator, resigned after pointing out that science teachers need to take into account student worldviews in teaching about evolution. Yet one of the central principles of teaching science is that pupils' existing beliefs and understandings will influence their learning, and there is much research to show that teaching which ignores this is seldom effective.

Sadly, Shaha is right. Some young people will come into the school science laboratory assuming that science and religion are necessarily in conflict. This may derive from views at home: but in recent years there have been a number of high-profile television programmes claiming that science has ousted religious superstition with its rational approach. Students from religious communities who have accepted this view are indeed likely to find science an uncomfortable school subject, and so to later avoid further study and employment in science.

As there are many religious scientists, and diverse views about whether science should be seen as in conflict, harmony or dialogue with, or even as totally irrelevant to, religion, it is clearly unfortunate if some children are disengaging with school science because of a popular conception that science and religion are opposed. The arguments for how a supernatural God might relate to a natural world ordered through regular laws are often nuanced, and are seldom encountered by school-age students. This links to understanding about the nature of science itself (its limits, the status of its laws etc), which has recently become a more central theme of the school science curriculum – although this has traditionally been an area of relative weakness in science teaching and learning.

It was concerns such as these which led to the setting up of the Learning about Science and Religion (Lasar) research project, which is a collaboration between researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Reading. The project sets out to explore how secondary age pupils actually do perceive the relationship between science and religion, and how this impacts on their thinking about the science they are taught. The researchers are based in university education departments that are heavily involved in teacher education, and it is hoped that investigating student thinking in this area will enable us to find ways to better support teachers in Shaha's position, whatever their own personal views about the matter.

The researcher leading the project from Reading, Dr Berry Billingsley of the Institute of Education, has previously undertaken research in Australia, where she found that university students generally reported showing limited sophistication in dealing with the issue during their own earlier schooling. Indeed a common response had been to avoid considering a potential conflict by switching into science mode in science lessons, but then to switch away from that way of thinking in other classes. This may be a good coping strategy, but it is not good education. Science teachers desperately want their teaching to influence students beyond the laboratory or examination room. As Shaha points out: scientific ways of thinking are important life skills.

The Lasar research, funded through the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St Edmund's College Cambridge, is now underway, using both survey methods and detailed interviewing of a sample of secondary age pupils in various parts of England. Our early impressions are that considerable numbers of students do consider science and religion to be in conflict, and that few have developed sophisticated ways of thinking about possible alternatives. A surprising number of Christian students – not just those from more fundamentalist churches – consider that their religion is committed to a six-day creation of the world, including special acts of creation to produce Adam and Eve as progenitors of the human race. That is something I would not have realised when I was a school science teacher, knowing that mainstream churches have no problems with scientific theories of origins. Science teachers currently have little preparation to deal with student questions on the issue. That is something our project intends to address by better informing science teachers about where students' thinking is at, and by making them aware of the full range of positions that different scientists adopt on the issue. Science teachers should neither tell students what to think about God, nor what to think about how science relates to religion. However, they should introduce students to the range of views available. Shaha wants science teachers to equip young people to arrive at their own decisions, and our research is aimed at supporting teachers in this important task.

Ben Darvill and Bob Dawson explain why conserving Britain's declining bumblebee population is so important

Scientists from two leading climate research centres publish 'best evidence yet' of rising long-term global temperatures

• Jeffrey Sachs: Obama must take a lead on climate change

Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago, according to two of the world's leading climate research centres.

Scientists have also released what they described as the "best evidence yet" of rising long-term temperatures. The report is the first to collate 11 different indicators – from air and sea temperatures to melting ice – each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s.

The newly released data follows months of scrutiny of climate science after sceptics claimed leaked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggested temperature records had been manipulated - a charge rejected by three inquiries.

Publishing the newly collated data in London, Peter Stott, the head of climate modelling at the UK Met Office, said despite variations between individual years, the evidence was unequivocal: "When you follow those decade-to-decade trends then you see clearly and unmistakably signs of a warming world".

"That's a very remarkable result, that all those data sets agree," he added. "It's the clearest evidence in one place from a range of different indices."

Currently 1998 is the hottest year on record. Two combined land and sea surface temperature records from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the US National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) both calculate that the first six months of 2010 were the hottest on record. According to GISS, four of the six months also individually showed record highs.

A third leading monitoring programme, by the Met Office, shows this period was the second hottest on record, after 1998, with two months this year – January and March – being hotter than their equivalents 12 years ago.

The Met Office said the variations between the figures published by the different organisations are because the Met Office uses only temperature observations, Nasa makes estimates for gaps in recorded data such as the polar regions, and the NCDC uses a mixture of the two approaches. The latest figures will give weight to predictions that this year could become the hottest on record.

Despite annual fluctuations, the figures also highlight the clear trend for the 2000s to be hotter than the 1990s, which in turn were clearly warmer than the previous decade, said Stott.

"These numbers are not theory, but fact, indicating that the Earth's climate is moving into uncharted territory," said Rafe Pomerance, a senior fellow at Clean Air Cool Planet, a US group dedicated to helping find solutions to global warming.

The Met Office published its full list of global warming indicators, compiled by Hadley Centre researcher John Kennedy. It formed part of the State of the Climate 2009 report published as a special bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the NCDC temperature series.

Seven of the indicators rose over the last few decades, indicating "clear warming trends", although these all included annual fluctuations up and down. One of these was air temperature over land – including data from the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA, whose figures were under scrutiny after hacked emails were posted online in November 2009, but the graphic also included figures from six other research groups all showing the same overall trends despite annual differences.

The other six rising indicators were sea surface temperatures, collected by six groups; ocean heat to 700m depth from seven groups; air temperatures over oceans (five data sets); the tropospheric temperature in the atmosphere up to 1km up (seven); humidity caused by warmer air absorbing more moisture (three); and sea level rise as hotter oceans expand and ice melts (six).

Another four indicators showed declining figures over time, again consistent with global warming: northern hemisphere snow cover (two data sets), Arctic sea ice extent (three); glacier mass loss (four); and the temperature of the stratosphere. This last cooling effect is caused by a decline in ozone in the stratosphere which prevents it absorbing as much ultraviolet radiation from the sun above.

One key data set omitted was sea ice in the Antarctic, because it was increasing in some areas and decreasing in others, due to reduced ozone causing changes in wind patterns and sea-surface circulation. This data set showed no clear trend, said Stott. These figures were also in the last report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

"It's not that the IPCC didn't look at this data, of course they did, but they didn't put it all together in one place," he added.

The cause of the warming was "dominated" by greenhouse gases emitted by human activity, said Stott. "It's possible there's some [other] process which can amplify other effects, such as radiation from the sun, [but] the evidence is so clear the chance there's something we haven't thought of seems to be getting smaller and smaller," he said.

Stone tools, flakes and the remains of a final feast at the site in Wiltshire hint that the huge sarsens that now stand at Stonehenge were brought to Marden Henge first

View an interactive guide to the site

The last revellers seem to have cleared up scrupulously after the final party at Marden Henge some 4,500 years ago.

They scoured the rectangular building and the smart white chalk platform on top of the earth bank, with its spectacular view towards the river Avon in one direction, and the hills from which the giant sarsen stones were brought to Stonehenge in the other.

All traces of the feast – the pig bones, the ashes and the burnt stones from the barbecue that cooked them, the broken pots and bowls – were swept neatly into a dump to one side. A few precious offerings, including an exquisitely worked flint arrowhead, were carefully laid on the clean chalk. Then they covered the whole surface with a thin layer of clay, stamped it flat, and left. Forever.

In the past fortnight, English Heritage archaeologists have peeled back the thin layer of turf covering the site, which has somehow escaped being ploughed for more than 4,000 years. They were astounded to find the undisturbed original surface just as the prehistoric Britons left it.

"We're gobsmacked really," said site director Jim Leary.

Giles Woodhouse, a volunteer digger who must return next week to his day job as a lieutenant colonel in the army bound for Germany and then Afghanistan, has been crouched over the rubbish dump day after day, his black labrador Padma sighing at his side. He has been teasing the soil away from bone, stone and pottery so perfectly preserved it could have been buried last year.

"It gives one a bit of a shiver down the backbone to realise the last man to touch these died 4,500 years ago," he said. His finds, still emerging from the soil, will rewrite the history of the site.

Marden in Wiltshire has been puzzling archaeologists for centuries. It is set almost exactly half way between two of the most famous and tourist-choked sites in Britain, Stonehenge and Avebury, but it is far larger than either. The ragged oval of outer earth banks at Marden, completed by a bend of the Avon, enclose more than 14 hectares, compared with 11.5 hectares at Avebury, where the banks surround an entire modern village.

Famously – to its comparatively few devotees and visitors, that is – it is the biggest henge in Britain that isn't there, surrounding one of the biggest artificial hills in Britain, which isn't there either.

This is the first excavation since Geoffrey Wainwright, former chief archaeologist at English Heritage, explored one small corner of the site in 1969. What stunned the archaeologists when they started work three weeks ago was just how much is left.

Once your eye is in you can see it: the sweep of the ditches, the belt of trees hiding some of the earth bank, which still rises to three metres in some places, the stain in the grass marking the lost barrow and its massive surrounding moat, and the wholly unexpected discovery – the second, smaller henge, so close to the modern houses that the roots of two trees at the foot of a back garden are actually growing into its bank.

The neolithic buildings were not where others have looked for them, on the level in the centre of the henges, but on top of the bank.

"We've all been looking in the wrong place," Leary said, "there will have to be a major rethink about other henges. And it's actually almost terrifying how close to the surface the finds were – there's also going to have to be a major review of our management plans for other sites."

The only known image of Hatfield Barrow – an early 18th century map in the archives of the landowner, Corpus Christi College in Oxford – shows the artificial hill as a jaunty little sandcastle sporting a cockade of trees. It once rose to a height of almost 15 metres, half the height of Silbury near Avebury.

The two antiquarians who burrowed like rabbits through scores of Wiltshire earthworks in the early 19th century, Sir Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington, punched a massive shaft through Hatfield Barrow in 1807. Their scrappy records torment the modern archaeologists, including references to animal bones, burned wood, and "two small parcels of burned human bones".

They left the shaft open, possibly intending to return in another season, and the mound collapsed. This is a phenomenon Leary knows well, having led the rescue excavation before the engineering works to stabilise Silbury, which was also left riddled with slowly collapsing holes by Georgian and later diggers.

The farmer at Marden filled in the moat, which an 18th century naturalist recorded as fed by a natural spring and never dry even in the hottest summer, and sold the collapsed hillock as top soil. Leary's massive trench has uncovered barely a trace of hill or moat.

If the hill disappointed, the excavations at one of the original entrances and at the small henge certainly do not. They are revealing what appears to be a broad gravelled ceremonial road leading towards the river. Discovering undisturbed neolithic surfaces and building platforms on this scale counts as a discovery of international importance.

There is no evidence of permanent occupation of the dwellings or the site as a whole. As in the work led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson at Durrington Walls, 20 miles away (he couldn't resist coming over to help dig, and some of his former students had the pleasure of giving him orders) the implication is of people gathering for seasonal rituals and feasting, and maybe a work camp.

"A completely artificial division has been made in the past between domestic and religious, recreation and ritual," Leary said. "We're going to have to rethink all that. It's not one thing or the other, it's everything mixed in together."

If it wasn't a village, or a temple, or a farm, or a cemetery, what was Marden for? Leary suspects the answer may be emerging in stone working tools, and flakes of sarsen, turning up all over the site. If you were going to drag sarsens the size of double decker buses from their original site to Stonehenge, he said, the obvious route is straight through a natural gap in the hilly landscape, which would take them through Marden.

The evidence that Marden was a sort of builder's yard for the most famous prehistoric monument in the world may have been in the mud under the boots of Leary's puzzled predecessors.

So why did the site's temporary occupants leave? Maybe with Stonehenge complete, the sarsens shaped into the giant trilithons that still fill the hordes of modern visitors with awe, their job was done. They tidied up nicely, turned out the lights, and left.

Particle physicists mull over the latest data from Fermilab and Cern at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris

The UK government's rejection of a damning Commons report on homeopathy leaves Martin Robbins baffled and depressed

The government has released its eagerly anticipated response to the Science and Technology Committee's Evidence Check on Homeopathy and, incredibly, it's even worse than I thought it would be. The verdict is "business as usual", with the main recommendations of the committee ignored in a fog of confusion and double-think.

You get a sense of this confusion very early on, with lines like: "given the geographical, socioeconomic and cultural diversity in England, [policy on homeopathy] involves a whole range of considerations including, but not limited to, efficacy." I actually have no idea what this means – do medicines work differently in Norfolk from the way they work in Hampshire? The report doesn't elaborate.

As expected, the word "choice" features heavily in the government's response:

There naturally will be an assumption that if the NHS is offering homeopathic treatments then they will be efficacious, whereas the overriding reason for NHS provision is that homeopathy is available to provide patient choice ... if regulation was applied to homeopathic medicines as understood in the context of conventional pharmaceutical medicines, these products would have to be withdrawn from the market as medicines. This would constrain consumer choice and, more importantly, risk the introduction of unregulated, poor quality and potentially unsafe products on the market to satisfy consumer demand."

So we can't regulate these products as medicines because they'd end up being banned, but we'll let them be called medicines anyway? It gives me a headache just trying to think down to the level of the person who wrote this stuff.

The report accepts that there's no evidence that homeopathy works, but apparently this shouldn't be a barrier to it being distributed via the NHS because not handing out medicines that don't work might infringe the freedom of patients to choose things that don't work. What makes this even more absurd is that they concede that:

In order for the public to make informed choices, it is therefore vitally important that the scientific evidence base for homeopathy is clearly explained and available. He [the government's chief scientific adviser] will therefore engage further with the Department of Health to ensure communication to the public is addressed."

So the government is planning to launch a public information campaign against homeopathic treatments at the same time as it continues to fund those treatments through the NHS. In this glorious mess of a policy the government has come up with something so brain-meltingly stupid that even the satirical brain of Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop) would struggle to match it.

What I find so frustrating is this dedication to a form of "consumer choice" that is absolutely anything but. If I walk into a pharmacist looking for a packet of condoms, and I'm given the choice between a packet of Durex and a sock, it isn't a choice, it's just a pointless piece of confusion that's going to lead to lots of people having really uncomfortable sex, and a localised population explosion.

Another feature worth picking up on is the way in which responsibility for these decisions has been passed down the line, allowing alternative medicine to fall conveniently into various regulatory gaps. The government doesn't believe that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has time to waste on a review of homeopathy, while the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has made its guidelines flexible enough to allow many homeopathic products a free pass, for reasons that are still unfathomable to me.

In this regulatory vacuum the government's response repeatedly delegates responsibility for making decisions on the use of homeopathy to primary care trusts, yet these are set to be abolished in the next few years, which will dump responsibility onto individual GPs.

The General Medical Council's guidance to GPs on the issue of alternative medicine is woolly at best (and the the council has ignored my requests to clarify it). The GMC states that "we are not in a position to advise doctors about the suitability or otherwise of particular treatments as our remit does not extend to collecting, analysing or disseminating clinical information" and basically leaves it to GPs' own judgement about whether or not a treatment is in the best interests of a patient.

Given that some GPs are practising homeopaths, this is a not a thrilling prospect.

Before the election I put questions on science policy to all the main parties on behalf of the Guardian. The Conservatives told me that it would be "wholly irresponsible to spend public money on treatments that have no evidence to support their claims". The Liberal Democrats stated that they would actively seek a full review of complementary and alternative therapies and that, "[if] Nice's advice was that the treatment did not perform better than placebo, then of course it should not be supported by the NHS."

Both parties made a commitment to evidence-based medicine on the NHS. Both parties have performed screeching U-turns on the subject at the first hurdle, ignoring pledges made in writing only three months ago.

What should they do now? As a near namesake of mine once said, I'd make a suggestion, but they wouldn't listen. No one ever does. It's all very depressing.

Study finds being sociable is good for your health, while loneliness is as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day

A life of booze, fags and slothfulness may be enough to earn your doctor's disapproval, but there is one last hope: a repeat prescription of mates and good conversation.

A circle of close friends and strong family ties can boost a person's health more than exercise, losing weight or quitting cigarettes and alcohol, psychologists say.

Sociable people seem to reap extra rewards from their relationships by feeling less stressed, taking better care of themselves and having less risky lifestyles than those who are more isolated, they claim.

A review of studies into the impact of relationships on health found that people had a 50% better survival rate if they belonged to a wider social group, be it friends, neighbours, relatives or a mix of these.

The striking impact of social connections on wellbeing has led researchers to call on GPs and health officials to take loneliness as seriously as other health risks, such as alcoholism and smoking.

"We take relationships for granted as humans," said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University in Utah. "That constant interaction is not only beneficial psychologically but directly to our physical health."

Holt-Lunstad's team reviewed 148 studies that tracked the social interactions and health of 308,849 people over an average of 7.5 years. From these they worked out how death rates varied depending on how sociable a person was.

Being lonely and isolated was as bad for a person's health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic. It was as harmful as not exercising and twice as bad for the health as being obese. The study is reported in the journal Plos Medicine.

Holt-Lunstad said friends and family can improve health in numerous ways, from help in tough times to finding meaning in life. "When someone is connected to a group and feels responsibility to other people, that sense of purpose and meaning translates to taking better care of themselves and taking fewer risks."

Holt-Lunstad said there was no clear figure on how many relationships are enough to boost a person's health, but people fared better when they rarely felt lonely and were close to a group of friends, had good family contact and had someone they could rely on and confide in.

Writing in the journal, the authors point out that doctors, health educators and the media take the dangers of smoking, diet and exercise seriously, and urge them to add social relationships to the list.

A report by the Mental Health Foundation in May blamed technology and the pressures of modern life for widespread feelings of loneliness in all age groups across Britain. The survey of more than 2,200 adults found one in 10 people often felt lonely and one in three would like to move closer to their family.

Andrew McCulloch, of the Mental Health Foundation, said the latest study builds on work that links isolation to poor mental and physical health. "Trends such as increasing numbers of people living alone and the advent of new technologies, are changing the way in which we interact and are leading both the young and old to experience loneliness. It is important that individuals and policy-makers take notice of emerging evidence and of the potential health problems associated with loneliness."

The king of string theory visited London earlier this month to accept the Newton medal at the Institute of Physics. His full lecture is now online

"We know a lot of things, but what we don't know is a lot more." So said Edward Witten, one of the world's most prominent theoretical physicists, when I interviewed him recently during his visit to London to receive the Isaac Newton medal at the Institute of Physics.

The medal is awarded each year to international scientists for outstanding contributions to physics. Last year, it was picked up by MIT's Alan Guth, who gave a brilliant lecture on the inflationary universe. The full video of Witten's lecture has just been posted.

Witten is a great speaker and manages to make clear that no matter how much he understands, we have so much more to learn about the nature of matter and the universe, the subjects that dominate his work.

He describes the history of string theory and the bizarre world it paints. That world might well be ours, but it might too be any of the countless others that could be going about their business, beyond our perception in the multiverse. If there's a multiverse, why are we living in this particular region? Witten has the answer.

Witten is something of a phenomenon. He started out, academically, studying history at Brandeis University, then dabbled with economics and politics before returning to university, this time in Princeton, where he studied applied mathematics under David Gross, a Nobel laureate. He is now at the Institute for Advanced Study, also in Princeton, and the former workplace of Albert Einstein.

String theory comes in for its fair share of criticism, but Witten is clear as to why he devotes his time and considerable efforts to it. "I think it's the most interesting avenue we have for trying to go beyond the laws of nature as we currently understand them," he says.

My interview with Witten is here.

Home Office statistics suggest there were 37,000 fewer animal experiments in 2009 compared with 2008. For the first time, more genetically modified animals were used than non-modified

The number of scientific experiments carried out on animals in the UK dropped by 37,000 last year to just over 3.6m, according to data released today by the Home Office.

The drop came despite an increase in the use of genetically modified mice, a crucial tool in medical research and genetics.

While the number of experiments on new world primates, such as marmosets, increased by around 250, those carried out on old world primates, such as macaques, fell by 590.

"The main drop [in the overall figure] was the number of fish used and we think that was probably because the numbers reported for 2008 seemed abnormally high – that was probably a blip and normal research has now been resumed," said Jon Richmond, head of the animal procedures section at the Home Office.

He added that, for the first time, the number of genetically modified animals used in research exceeded the number of non-modified animals.

The number of procedures is not equivalent to the number of animals used by British scientists: a single animal might undergo several procedures, and the act of breeding a genetically modified mouse counts as a procedure in itself. The total number of procedures, excluding GM breeding, fell by 180,000 in 2009 to 2.1m.

Consistent with previous years, 97% of the scientific procedures last year involved rats, birds, mice and fish. The number of cats, dogs, horses and primates combined accounted for less than 1% of the total, said Richmond.

The number of animals used in toxicological testing has also been dropping. Richmond said there were a number of reasons for this, one being that there are now alternative tests that are accepted for regulation purposes. "Different international regulators are now prepared to accept the same test data, so there's less re-testing using different animal models for different regulators," he said. "Of that regulatory testing, 78% is for human healthcare products."

So far, the Home Office's numbers do not suggest a rise in animal use as a result of the European Union's Reach legislation, which requires the registration and testing of tens of thousands of commonly used chemicals to determine any dangers, ensure their safe use, and encourage companies to switch to safer alternatives.

However, the long-term trend in animal use for research is upwards.

Barney Reed, senior scientist at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), said: "The public is repeatedly told that animals are only used where 'absolutely necessary' and that the UK has the 'tightest regulations in the world'. It is difficult to reconcile these statements with today's news that more scientific procedures are being carried out on animals in the UK now than at almost any time since the current laws on animal experiments came into force more than 20 years ago."

Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone said the government was committed to the highest standards of animal protection.

"We are also committed to ending the testing of household products on animals and to working to reduce the use of animals in scientific research, and work is currently under way to see how this can be achieved whilst maintaining the UK's position as a leader in scientific advancement," she said.

"The UK already has one of the most rigorous systems in the world to ensure that animal research and testing is strictly regulated. We ensure procedures are only carried out where completely necessary, and that suffering is kept to an absolute minimum."

Judy Macarthur Clark, chief inspector of the Home Office's Animal Procedures Committee, pointed to the development of a technique for automatically monitoring pain in mice. "We can use computerised systems to monitor mouse behaviour and expression and it has been demonstrated that the system is as good as experienced human observers."

But Reed said the coalition government had reneged on its pledge to reduce the number of animals used in research, failing to announce any new strategy to achieve this. "Over the coming weeks and months people will be watching to see whether there is any genuine commitment to reducing numbers and suffering," he said.

The woman used the revolutionary device, which is controlled by sniffing, to write a letter to her children

A 51-year-old woman who was left paralysed and unable to communicate following a massive stroke has written for the first time in seven years, scientists say.

The Israeli patient, who was diagnosed with "locked-in syndrome", typed an emotional email to her six children using a revolutionary device that is controlled by sniffing.

The woman was so badly brain-damaged by the stroke that she cannot move any of her limbs or even blink in response to simple questions. She wrote the letter within a few days of being taught how to use the device.

The technology, developed by scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, is now being used by other severely disabled people to surf the internet and even control a wheelchair. One, a 63-year-old quadriplegic woman who can barely speak, wrote her first letter in 10 years with the device and has started using it to send emails.

"The most moving thing has been witnessing this technology give people a means of communication when they haven't had it," said Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist at the institute, who helped develop the technology.

The device works by detecting slight changes in pressure that are produced when a person opens or closes their soft palate, the tissue at the roof of the mouth that controls air flow through the nose. Many patients with serious disabilities are still able to move their palate voluntarily, and so can use the device, said Sobel.

When the sensor is connected to a computer, a person wearing the device can use sniffs alone to select letters on the screen and build up words, phrases and sentences.

One patient, a 42-year-old man who was diagnosed with locked-in syndrome after a car crash 18 years ago, used the sniff-controlled device to say he preferred it to a previous disability aid that performed a similar function by tracking his eye movement, writing that it was "more comfortable and more easy to use".

The speed at which patients can write with the new device varies between around 20 seconds and a minute for a single letter of the alphabet. The 1997 book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby at a rate of roughly one word every two minutes. Bauby, who became locked-in after suffering a stroke, selected letters by blinking his left eye.

In another test of the device, a 30-year-old man who was paralysed from the neck down in a car accident six years ago, used the device to steer a motorised wheelchair along a winding path 30 metres long. After one trial attempt, the patient completed the course as fast as healthy volunteers.

Sobel said he was anxious what locked-in patients might write after being unable to move or communicate for so long, but he said none wrote about wanting to end their own lives. "I was afraid that the minute we could communicate, all that might come out," he said. "What's important is giving the person the ability to express themselves."

The findings are published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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