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Badgers 10hr 53min ago

Badger cull: illegal shooting and gassing reported to police in trial counties

23 Oct 2013: Gloucestershire and Somerset police receive 27 reports of illegal activity involving badgers as doubt is cast of effectiveness of official culls
Global development 13hr ago

Thousands with tuberculosis not given treatment to stay alive, warns WHO

23 Oct 2013: Global failure to tackle multidrug-resistant tuberculosis costing lives, say experts, as three in four cases go undiagnosed
Amazon rainforest 18hr 44min ago

Purring monkey and vegetarian piranha among 400 new Amazon species

23 Oct 2013:
Four years of scientific expeditions have found previously unknown animals and plants in world's largest tropical rainforest
Oceans 1 day ago

XPRIZE dives into Earth's final frontier – our oceans and their future health

22 Oct 2013:
Scientific funding foundation launches new prizes for research into acidification, climate change, garbage and other issues
Alfonso Cuarón 2 days ago

Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón says he knew of film's scientific flaws

21 Oct 2013:
Film-maker says explanations for discrepancies were removed at an early stage to help the film's watchability
Badgers 2 days ago

Stop badger cull immediately, says Natural England science expert

21 Oct 2013: Prof David Macdonald warns extending duration 'would make the outcome even less predictable and even more unpromising'
Ageing 2 days ago

Scientists discover DNA body clock

21 Oct 2013: Newly discovered mechanism could help researchers understand ageing process and lead to ways of slowing it down

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Latest comment

Comment is free 1 day ago

A cure for baldness is the last thing I want

22 Oct 2013: Peter Ormerod: Scientists may be making great strides in baldness reversal, but I've had enough of the whole 'hair equals confidence' con
Comment is free 2 days ago

Fructose: the poison index

21 Oct 2013: Robert Lustig: A ruling on fructose boosts the powerful sugar industry, either by incompetence or collusion, but is based on pseudoscience
Space 4 days ago

What will we call the next generation of astronauts? Holidaymakers…

20 Oct 2013:
Maggie Aderin-Pocock: the commercialisation of space travel will lead to the next giant step for mankind
Andrew Brown's blog 4 days ago

If war builds civilisations, the left has a problem

19 Oct 2013:
Andrew Brown: Computer modelling suggests that competition between societies, in the form of warfare, drives the evolution of complex societies
Comment is free 5 days ago

Are Republicans anti-science? In this case, yes

18 Oct 2013:
Richard Schiffman: The government shutdown forced by the GOP cost not only $24bn but incalculable damage to scientific research
In praise of ... 6 days ago

In praise of ... the Dmanisi skull

17 Oct 2013: Editorial: The discovery of a near-perfect fossilised skull dating from 1.8m years ago means nothing will be quite the same again

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Editor's choice

Most distant galaxy ever discovered was a prolific star factory

Exceptionally high rate of star formation in the galaxy, formed a mere 700m years after the big bang, has baffled astronomers

Science blogs

The delight of fright

Halloween allows us to revel in the dark, disquieting and mysterious. But why do so many of us take delight in terror and when does this strange proclivity develop?
Even sex-crazed students can't catch this many STIs in a year

Michael Marshall: Freshers may have a lot of sex, but the claim that a quarter will catch a sexually transmitted infection is preposterous
Peer review needs to expand so that more scientists are reviewing papers

Guardian Professional A new tool that selects peer reviewers by algorithm could make the peer review process more reliable, says Richard Price
Small-scale agriculture holds big promise for Africa

Guardian Professional
Supporting smallholder irrigation through finance and technical assistance could significantly improve productivity and incomes
How can non-scientists influence the course of scientific research?

Cath Ennis: Members of the public should be able to communicate their priorities to scientists and those who fund them
Spanish science: still suffering

Despite Friday's €70m rescue of the Spanish National Research Council, Spain's scientists are still in mourning. Amaya Moro Martín sets the scene as a range of commentators identify the challenges still facing Spanish science
Selling Science: Science Britannica, tribal tales or historical research?

John V Pickstone: British TV has some great science presenters, but often has problems with the history of science; shouldn't scientists apply the same rigour to history as they do to science?
We need to talk about sexism in science

Connie St Louis: Women in science face a long struggle to root out sexism
Malaria: where's the evidence of drug resistance?

Guardian Professional
New studies call into question the effectiveness of malaria drugs used in Africa, but do they prove resistance is on the rise? Colin Sutherland reviews the evidence
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Features

The 'bootlaces' of Beowulf's weird fire – an unnatural history of honey fungus

Country diary: Wenlock Edge: The ghostly glow of this fungus – bioluminescence – appears in the Old English epic poem
An A-Z of modern office jargon

It's time to drill down into Steven Poole's A-Z of office jargon. You could be talking like a boardroom legend by end of play. Massive yield!
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Regulars

Multimedia

Fossil skull challenges understanding of human evolution - video

The discovery of a cache of fossils suggests that the earliest members of the Homo genus – currently split into half a dozen species – were actually a single species