Ancient DNA has been extracted from the fossilised eggshells of birds for the first time, and will eventually yield clues about their physiology, diet and how they went extinct

Scientists have collected DNA from the fossilised eggshells of birds that died hundreds and in some cases thousands of years ago.

The oldest eggshell to yield DNA came from an Australian emu that died around 19,000 years ago. It is the first time that scientists have succeeded in extracting ancient DNA from the fossilised eggshells of a bird.

Genetic material from the Madagascan elephant bird, the heaviest bird that ever lived, was also recovered, along with DNA from Australian owls, New Zealand ducks and flightless moas.

Elephant birds were native to Madagascar but had gone extinct by the 17th century. The ostrich-like creatures grew to around 3 metres tall and weighed up to half a tonne. Their eggs were bigger than footballs.

Eggshells from two other extinct species, the little bush moa and the heavy footed moa, both from New Zealand's north island, were estimated to be more than 3,000 years old. Attempts to collect DNA from a 50,000-year-old flightless Australian bird from the genus Genyornis failed because the DNA had degraded too much.

The ancient DNA has yet to be sequenced, but researchers will soon be looking to draw up genetic profiles of long-lost birds by extracting genetic material from eggshells held in museums and excavated at archaeological and fossil sites.

Previously, they had little hope of reading DNA from species that lived in warm climates because the genetic material breaks down so quickly.

By sequencing the genomes of ancient birds, scientists hope to build up a better picture of their physiology and how they dispersed and split into different species. It may even be possible to surmise their diets from genes encoding the enzymes for digesting particular types of food.

Charlotte Oskam, who led the study at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, is now analysing a large collection of eggshells from ancient sites in New Zealand and hopes that DNA profiles of the birds will help explain how the arrival of humans brought about the extinction of the giant moa around 500 years ago.

The researchers used a technique called confocal microscopy to see exactly where the DNA is located inside the egg shells of two of the extinct birds, the New Zealand giant moa and the Madagascan elephant bird.

From this they were able to say that the DNA almost certainly comes from the mother hen rather than the embryo growing inside the egg. When the egg moves away from the ovary, cells from the mother get mixed up in the calcium carbonate shell as it thickens.

The research, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, does not mean scientists will soon be able to resurrect long-extinct birds. Although the DNA can be sequenced, scientists would need to know how to repackage it into chromosomes, the giant molecules that carry genes.

The same problem makes it unlikely that scientists will bring woolly mammoths back to life, even though their DNA has been sequenced from well-preserved specimens recovered from the Siberian permafrost.

"As with all ancient DNA, the DNA we isolated from eggshell is very fragmented," said Oskam. It will be possible to sequence extinct genomes from fossil eggshell, he said, "but it is a huge leap to imagine we can clone an extinct species."

I agree with George Monbiot (Comment, 9 March) about the problems of communicating science, but it is a pity he did not mention the large amount of outreach work being done by scientists these days to address the very issues he raises, much of it in collaboration with Café Scientifique, a network of voluntary local initiatives in towns up and down the UK, and, indeed, the world. There is a Hippocratic oath for scientists, although it is not yet compulsory. It is called the Pugwash Pledge, and can be found at (www.spusa.org/pledge).

"I promise to work for a better world, where science and technology are used in socially responsible ways. I will not use my education for any purpose intended to harm human beings or the environment. Throughout my career, I will consider the ethical implications of my work before I take action. While the demands placed upon me may be great, I sign this declaration because I recognise that individual responsibility is the first step on the path to peace."

He might also be pleased to hear that very few of us wear beards these days.

Jim Grozier

Organiser, Brighton Café Scientifique

• What Peter Preston (Wanted: an eco prophet, 8 March) appears to omit is the emergence of eco-crankism – the proliferation of eco-friendly initiatives by a new class of do-gooder apparatchiks advising backyard gardeners to grow £1 carrots, use fashion-styled cotton carrier bags, cycle in fume-choked streets and boycott budget airlines. With this obscurantism there is no way the message of a more equitable distribution of the earth's dwindling resources can get through.

Julian Siann

Edinburgh

The usual rules of sexual attraction go out of the window when men are stressed, say psychologists

Men are drawn to a wider range of women when they are feeling stressed out, according to research into the psychology of sexual attraction.

People are usually attracted to partners with similar facial features to their own, but after a brief but stressful experience, men's preferences changed to include a wider variety of women, the study found.

Relaxed men who took part in the study rated women on average 14% less appealing if they looked very different from themselves compared with women who looked similar. But a group of stressed men found dissimilar women 9% more attractive.

Johanna Lass-Hennemann, who led the study at the University of Trier in Germany, said the findings echo research suggesting that animals lose their normal mating preferences when they are under stress.

"Men have a tendency to approach dissimilar mates and to rate these to be more pleasant when they are acutely stressed," Lass-Hennemann said. "[But] we are not sure how this might reflect in true mating decisions."

Scientists suspect the appeal of similar-looking partners may be linked to our tendency to have more trust in a familiar face, a factor that is important for long-term relationships. Under stress, however, the importance of pairing up with someone similar-looking seems to vanish.

Lass-Hennemann speculates that stress might increase men's tendency to "outbreed", or reproduce with more genetically dissimilar women, with the potential benefit that any children born from the relationship might be better equipped to cope with a stressful environment.

"We think that chronically stressful environments should increase outbreeding, because inbreeding may lead to offspring that are not genetically diverse enough to deal with the varying circumstances that a risky and stressful environment imposes on them," she said.

In the study, 50 healthy heterosexual male students were divided into two groups. Those in the first group were asked to plunge one arm into a bucket of icy water for three minutes before taking part in the test. Those in the second group were asked to do the same, but with water heated to body temperature.

Measurements of the volunteers' heart rates and levels of the stress hormone cortisol indicated that the men in the first group were significantly more stressed before the test began than those in the second.

In the test itself, the men were shown a series of images on a computer screen. Some were of household objects, but others were of naked women. Some of the women's faces had been digitally altered to resemble either the person being tested or another man in the group.

Throughout the test, the scientists played occasional bursts of noise to startle the men and recorded their reactions. Previous research suggests people startle less when they are looking at something they find attractive. The men were also asked to rate the images by how appealing and arousing they were.

While men in the control group performed as expected and were more attracted to women who looked like them, the stressed men consistently rated the unfamiliar women as more appealing. Their startle reactions confirmed their preferences.

The research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Lass-Hennemann said it is highly unlikely that the acute stresses of everyday life can switch someone's tastes when it comes to choosing a partner, but long-term stress might shift male preferences towards women who are more dissimilar.

Chosen insect feeds on invasive species but not other closely related plants and crops

Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect to eat the virulent weed.

The decision by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the first allowing one non-native species, a flying insect resembling a miniature moth, to control the seemingly unstoppable spread of an alien plant.

However, it is likely to cause concern among wildlife lovers because of a long history of human interventions in the natural world ending in failure, and sometimes causing worse problems than the original, as with the cane toad in Australia.

In a public consultation by Defra last year about 20 responses opposed the scheme, though 42 were in favour.

The wildlife minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, said the fast-growing Japanese knotweed was estimated to cost £150m a year to control, and was able to grow through buildings and roads.

Fallopia japonica has also been blamed for flooding, by causing erosion to river banks and clogging up streams with dead plants.

"This project is not only ground-breaking, it offers real hope that we can redress the balance," said Irranca-Davies.

Experts estimated in 2003 that it would cost £1.5bn to fund a physical clearance campaign for Japanese knotweed.

Laboratory tests were started on pests from Japan which control the knotweed by feeding on sap from its stems, causing the plant to die back.

The tests showed the chosen Aphalara itadori did not eat any other species, including closely related British plants and important crops.

The psyllids – or plant-jumping lice, which grows to only 2-2.5mm – will be released at two sites initially, under close supervision.

If these outdoor trials are a success the trials will be extended to another six sites, none of which Defra will disclose.

The concept is similar to biological pest control practised by some farmers, using predator insects to control crop pests. The non-native predatory beetle Rhizophagus grandis was also released in Britain under licence in the mid-1980s to tackle the invasive alien spruce bark beetle (Dendroctonus micans).

On conservation and wildlife internet forums, opponents of the idea said they feared the impact on other native wildlife, for example species that might start feeding on the psyllids. One blogger compared the risk to the traditional nursery rhyme "I know an old lady who swallowed a fly" in reference to the long pursuit of one animal to destroy another – ending in the lady swallowing a horse: "She's dead of course." The Global Invasive Species Programme said that despite a few well-known failures, a third of biological control programmes to tackle pests and weeds were judged successes, and the system was often considered more "permanent, efficient, environmentally sustainable and relatively cheap" than using chemicals or mechanical removal.

"While there are some risks, which still may be considered by some to be unacceptable, biological control is increasingly viewed as being the preferred management strategy for invasive species, wherever possible, and in the case of biological weed control specifically, it has an enviable safety record," said Sarah Simons, Gisp's executive director.

Japanese knotweed, which is native to Japan, Taiwan and China, was introduced by botanists into Britain in the 19th century as an ornamental plant. It grows at up to a metre a month, and a fragment of just 0.8 grams can grow into a new plant. Invasive predators have become a global problem and are among the top causes of global species threats and extinctions according to conservation experts.

The Royal Horticultural Society suggests gardeners destroy knotweed using glyphosate-based weed-killers or by digging out the roots and cutting back regrowth, however it warns that the process can take several seasons. Experts stress that uprooted plants must be destroyed carefully to avoid spreading. "Eradication requires steely determination," says the RHS.

Not all dinosaurs were wiped out by the Chicxulub meteorite. We too may be in the midst of mass extinction

Everyone loves an apocalypse, and none more so than the one that sped the dinosaurs to their now legendary status. Having been a popular theory for 30 years, last week scientists finally reached a consensus that it was indeed the after-effects of a juggernaut meteorite crashing 65 million years ago into what we now call Chicxulub in Mexico that triggered the end of the dinosaurs' reign on Earth.

The reasons for loving this particular catastrophe are easy to understand. Dinosaurs are awesome. Giant meteorites are awesome. And of course, the combination of the two opened the door for the rise of the mammals. Our own story begins with that cataclysm.

"Consensus" has unfortunately become a dirty word outside the scientific world, thanks to those who disagree with the overwhelming majority of scientists about man-made global warming, but fail to offer any science in return. Unlike climate change, though, many issues remain with this extinction event. Sixty-five million years later, the pattern of extinction looks decidedly uneven. Dinosaurs were wiped out, but many similar-sized crocodiles survived. Amphibians managed to come out of this apocalypse relatively unscathed. Sharks survived, but plesiosaurs perished. Much work remains to be done.

Nevertheless, this consensus on the fate of the dinosaurs is welcomed by people such as me who worry about such things. But let's not get too attached to it. On the grand scale of extinctions, the Chicxulub meteorite is a drop in the ocean. There have been five major extinctions in the history of life. 251 million years ago was the big mama, erasing 95% of sea species and 70% of land life.

It is important to recognise that although 10-mile-wide rocks crashing from space are not the norm, extinction itself is. About 97% of all species that have ever existed currently do not. We may be in the midst of a mass extinction, though probably not on the scale of those 65 or 251 million years ago. Up to a third of all species are "committed to extinction", according to current models.

But it is the speed at which we are losing species that is truly significant. The explosion caused by the Chicxulub meteorite would have been enormous, melting rocks into glass, and vomiting forth mile-high tsunamis. But don't assume that the dinosaurs abruptly keeled over. In the aptly named Hell Creek in Montana, dinosaur fossils have been found dating from up to 40,000 years after the impact.

Climate change is also the planetary norm, but the rate at which the climate is changing since industrialisation is unprecedented. This is reason enough to accept the scientific consensus that we are the root cause, and the same goes for current extinctions.

We have evolved the capability to partially excuse ourselves from natural cataclysms, at least at a species level. Our ability to adapt and survive far outstrips the speed of the same process in natural selection. Should a colossal rock fall from the sky and block out the sun for a thousand years, the effect on humankind would be devastating, but not terminal. Should we continue to ravage the Earth's resources to the extent that human life is unsustainable, it is not in the realm of total fantasy for us to ditch this planet, and set up somewhere else in the universe.

But these are not reasons to be complacent. We exist as a part of this planet, not merely on it. The loss of biodiversity from a mass extinction will be devastating to everyone's lives. Unlike with the previous extinctions, we have the power to slow this current one. We will all have to change our lifestyles to adapt to the world that we have created, but by moderating our impact on extinction, that change won't have to be apocalyptic.

Despite the decision by the European Union last week to approve the cultivation of a GM potato, plant scientist Eoin Lettice argues that consumers will only accept the technology when it provides tangible benefits for them

Last week's decision by the European Commission to allow genetically modified potato varieties to be grown in some European Union countries concludes a 13-year campaign by the German chemical company BASF.

Ordinary potatoes produce two kinds of starch, but the GM potato Amflora only produces the economically useful form, amylopectin, which is used in the paper, textiles and adhesives industries. Production of the uneconomic form, amylase, has been turned off by genetic modification, so the useful starch doesn't need to be separated from the useless form during processing.

BASF says that while starch from its GM potato will not be used in human food, it may use the product in animal feed.

What particularly worries opponents of GM technology, however, is that Amflora carries an extra gene that makes the potato resistant to the antibiotics neomycin and kanamycin.

Why is it there? GM plants are produced by inserting novel genes into individual plant cells and then growing the cells into whole plants in the laboratory. Gene insertion can be achieved by using a bacterium to "ferry" it into the cell or by blasting it in using a gene gun. Alternatively, the tough plant cell wall can be stripped off and the gene can be inserted into this "naked" cell.

Regardless of the technique used, not all of the plant cells will take up the novel gene and incorporate it into their own DNA – perhaps just five cells out of every thousand. Tagging the novel gene with an antibiotic resistance gene allows modified cells to be singled out, because they will be resistant to a specific range of antibiotics.

This has been a source of concern for campaigners, but in June 2009, the European Food Safety Authority ruled that marker genes like this are unlikely to cause adverse effects on human health and the environment. As a result of limitations in sampling and detection it was unable to be conclusive, but the authority emphasised that it considered Amflora to be safe.

BASF first submitted its Amflora potato for approval in 1996. However, an EU-wide moratorium on GM between 1998 and 2004 delayed the process substantially.

When the potato was resubmitted for approval after the moratorium ended, progress was so slow that in 2008 BASF filed an action against the EC in the European Court of First Instance for "failure to act" and decide on the issue despite the European Food Safety Authority saying in two separate reports that the product was as safe as any conventional potato.

The company claimed that the previous commissioner, Stavros Dimas, "unjustifiably delayed" the decision on several occasions.

Now, within weeks of stepping into the role, the new European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy, John Dalli, has given the green light for planting to begin. BASF says the potatoes will be grown in Germany and the Czech Republic this year, and in Sweden and the Netherlands in 2011.

Opponents of GM technology have been quick to denounce the decision, with Greenpeace saying that Dalli has "steamrolled" a decision through. Given that the potato variety in question has undergone 13 years of testing since its first submission, this analogy might be better applied to the lumbering decision-making process in Europe rather than this final decisive move by the new commissioner.

At the root of this issue is consumers' wariness about GM foodstuffs and GM organisms in general. Consumers genuinely do not see the worth of GM products, which is why there is a need to move beyond crops that confer benefits to industry and growers alone towards second-generation GM that produces added health and nutritional benefits for consumers.

Hans Kast, president and CEO of BASF Plant Science, is on record as saying that the Amflora potato could potentially earn European farmers an extra €100 million annually. The company has also pointed out that it is losing between €20m and €30m in licence income for every lost cultivation season.

Perhaps I'm being presumptuous, but I can't imagine many Irish or European consumers lying awake at night worrying about lost revenues for BASF. What Irish consumers are interested in, however, are real and tangible benefits from their foods.

In a survey in 2005 by Ireland's Agriculture and Food Development Authority, 42% of consumers questioned indicated that they would consider purchasing a hypothetical GM-produced yoghurt if it had anti-cancer properties. In the same study, 44% of consumers said that they would use a GM-produced dairy spread if it had anti-cancer properties.

"Second generation" GM crops also have a role to play in developing countries, with the development of fortified foodstuffs such as "golden rice" to counteract malnutrition. A new variety of Golden Rice has been engineered to produce even more pro-vitamin A to combat vitamin A deficiency.

Undoubtedly, some British and Irish consumers, in common with their European counterparts, are reluctant to consume GM crops and see them growing in their countries. The focus of industry on benefits to the grower and seed producer rather than on consumer-centred benefits will prolong this reluctance and hamper the innovation in our food and agriculture industries that is so badly needed.

Eoin Lettice is a lecturer in the department of zoology, ecology and plant science at University College Cork, Ireland. He specialises in the control of plant pests and diseases

How can normal people be made to act heroically?

In paying tribute to Michael Foot last week, David Cameron used an intriguingly double-edged phrase. He described the former Labour leader as "almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics" – a duly respectful compliment, but one that also hinted that Foot was from a bygone era where politics was done in brash primary colours rather than the thoughtful shades used today.

Of all the virtues, heroism is now the most remote. Heroes are either mythic or historical characters (Achilles or Gandhi) or they are superhuman (Spider-Man, or even 9/11 firefighters). What they are not is one of us. Our age has role models and it has celebrities, but it has no room for heroes.

Fighting to revive heroism is Philip Zimbardo, the septuagenarian who is probably the most famous living psychologist in the world. Zimbardo built his career on the study of evil; in 1971, he led the Stanford Prison Experiment, where long-haired students were put in a mock jail and divvied up as prisoners or guards at random. Within a few days, the "guards" were humiliating their "prisoners", refusing some permission to urinate and subjecting others to simulated sodomy.

That experiment and others convinced Zimbardo that ordinary people could be driven to evil acts if put in horrific situations. His latest work flips that principle and asks: how can normal folk be made to behave heroically? By heroism, the psychologist does not mean altruism but the risking of one's safety or status, sometimes for an ideal. Zimbardo talks of the "banality of heroism" – a neat inversion of Hannah Arendt's observation that the Nazi Adolf Eichman demonstrated "the banality of evil" – and points out that social scientists have done acres of research on evil but barely any on heroism. And to that end, he has been slaving away – heroically, one might say – lecturing policy-makers and raising research funds.

There is more to this project than academic papers, however. Matt Langdon works with Zimbardo and, as head of the Hero Construction Company, runs his own character-building classes for 10-14 year olds. "I always tell them that the opposite of a hero isn't a villain – it's a bystander," he says.

There is no simple way to battle public hostility to climate research. As the psychologists show, facts barely sway us anyway

There is one question that no one who denies manmade climate change wants to answer: what would it take to persuade you? In most cases the answer seems to be nothing. No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us. The new study by the Met Office, which paints an even grimmer picture than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will do nothing to change this view.

The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as "white-coated prima donnas and narcissists … pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks … The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more."

Views like this can be explained partly as the revenge of the humanities students. There is scarcely an editor or executive in any major media company – and precious few journalists – with a science degree, yet everyone knows that the anoraks are taking over the world. But the problem is compounded by complexity. Arthur C Clarke remarked that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". He might have added that any sufficiently advanced expertise is indistinguishable from gobbledegook. Scientific specialisation is now so extreme that even people studying neighbouring subjects within the same discipline can no longer understand each other. The detail of modern science is incomprehensible to almost everyone, which means that we have to take what scientists say on trust. Yet science tells us to trust nothing, to believe only what can be demonstrated. This contradiction is fatal to public confidence.

Distrust has been multiplied by the publishers of scientific journals, whose monopolistic practices make the supermarkets look like angels, and which are long overdue for a referral to the Competition Commission. They pay nothing for most of the material they publish, yet, unless you are attached to an academic institute, they'll charge you £20 or more for access to a single article. In some cases they charge libraries tens of thousands for an annual subscription. If scientists want people at least to try to understand their work, they should raise a full-scale revolt against the journals that publish them. It is no longer acceptable for the guardians of knowledge to behave like 19th-century gamekeepers, chasing the proles out of the grand estates.

But there's a deeper suspicion here as well. Popular mythology – from Faust through Frankenstein to Dr No – casts scientists as sinister schemers, harnessing the dark arts to further their diabolical powers. Sometimes this isn't far from the truth. Some use their genius to weaponise anthrax for the US and Russian governments. Some isolate terminator genes for biotech companies, to prevent farmers from saving their own seed. Some lend their names to articles ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies, which mislead doctors about the drugs they sell. Until there is a global code of practice or a Hippocratic oath binding scientists to do no harm, the reputation of science will be dragged through the dirt by researchers who devise new means of hurting us.

Yesterday in the Guardian Peter Preston called for a prophet to lead us out of the wilderness. "We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince … We need to be taught to believe by a true believer." Would it work? No. Look at the hatred and derision the passionate and persuasive Al Gore attracts. The problem is not only that most climate scientists can speak no recognisable human language, but also the expectation that people are amenable to persuasion.

In 2008 the Washington Post summarised recent psychological research on misinformation. This shows that in some cases debunking a false story can increase the number of people who believe it. In one study, 34% of conservatives who were told about the Bush government's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were inclined to believe them. But among those who were shown that the government's claims were later comprehensively refuted by the Duelfer report, 64% ended up believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

There's a possible explanation in an article published by Nature in January. It shows that people tend to "take their cue about what they should feel, and hence believe, from the cheers and boos of the home crowd". Those who see themselves as individualists and those who respect authority, for instance, "tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire". Those with more egalitarian values are "more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted".

These divisions, researchers have found, are better at explaining different responses to information than any other factor. Our ideological filters encourage us to interpret new evidence in ways that reinforce our beliefs. "As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarised, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information." The conservatives in the Iraq experiment might have reacted against something they associated with the Duelfer report, rather than the information it contained.

While this analysis rings true, the description of where the dividing line lies isn't quite right. It doesn't describe the odd position in which I find myself. Despite my iconoclastic, anti-corporate instincts, I spend much of my time defending the scientific establishment from attacks by the kind of rabble-rousers with whom I usually associate. My heart rebels against this project: I would rather be pelting scientists with eggs than trying to understand their datasets. But my beliefs oblige me to try to make sense of the science and to explain its implications. This turns out to be the most divisive project I've ever engaged in. The more I stick to the facts, the more virulent the abuse becomes.

This doesn't bother me – I have a hide like a glyptodon – but it reinforces the disturbing possibility that nothing works. The research discussed in the Nature paper shows that when scientists dress soberly, shave off their beards and give their papers conservative titles, they can reach to the other side. But in doing so they will surely alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to trust them. As the MMR saga shows, people who mistrust authority are just as likely to kick against science as those who respect it.

Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don't want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life's work.

Science writer Simon Singh and Tracey Brown from Sense About Science tell us about Libel Reform Week and the campaign to change Britain's libel laws and protect scientific freedom of expression.

Simon is currently locked in a legal battle over a comment piece published in the Guardian.

Matthew Applegate, aka Pixelh8, is performing an audiovisual study as part of Cambridge Science Festival. We went along to the Institute of Astronomy to hear the telescopes he used as his musical instruments.

Ian Sample speaks to Kees van Deemter about the importance of being vague. Kees is trying to program computers to be a little more ... erm ... fuzzy? His new book Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness is out now.

The Guardian's Nell Boase joins Alok in the studio.

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Three species thought extinct, including a caddisfly and yellow-spotted bell frog, have been sighted in the UK and Australia

• Humans driving extinction faster than species can evolve, say experts

Three species thought to be extinct have been found again, to the delight of conservationists.

In the UK, the rare ghost orchid, declared extinct in this country just last year, has been found in England, and a caddisfly – a small flying insect – last seen more than a century ago has been discovered again in Scotland. On the global stage the yellow-spotted bell frog, presumed "possibly extinct" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, has been seen on a creek-bed in Australia.

The good news stories follow a warning by a leading IUCN expert that humans are now driving plants and animals to extinction faster than new species can evolve.

Simon Stuart, the IUCN expert who chairs the Species Survival Commission which declares species endangered or extinct, said that although roughly one "possibly extinct" species each year was re-discovered, many more plants and animals were added to the list.

There will also be continuing concern for species that are re-discovered in very small numbers. For example only a single 5cm high ghost orchid was found by the botanists who revealed it is still alive in the UK. The sighting of the caddisfly by a PhD student beside a river in north-west Scotland – 350 miles north of the previous record, according to the conservation charity Buglife – could further suggest the influence of climate change in driving species out of their traditional habitats, something some plants and animals will be able to adapt to better than others.

"The whole point of the 'possibly extinct' list is they can come in and out," said Stuart. "But we're adding species on to the 'possibly extinct' list much faster than we're taking them off it."

The IUCN has much stricter rules about declaring a species fully extinct, including that it must have been actively searched for by teams of experts in the field. However in 2008 the Switzerland-based organisation did have to move the Miles' robber frog (Craugastor milesi) from the extinct to critically endangered list after a single specimen was found in Honduras.

Among the reasons conservationists dislike a species being declared extinct are that it is no longer possible to get money to research and preserve its habitat. The locations of the orchid and the Australian frog are both being kept secret to protect them, however one of the bell frogs and a tadpole have been taken to Taronga zoo in Sydney for a captive breeding programme.

Officials concerned space flight might affect fertility of first Chinese women to go into orbit

They are, of course, in peak physical condition, with the flying skills required of any air force ace. But China's first female astronauts have faced an extra challenge: they had to be mothers to qualify for the country's prestigious space programme.

Two women and five men have been selected as the next generation to go into space, a Hong Kong newspaper reported today, citing an unnamed military source.

Xu Xianrong, an expert at the air force general hospital, said women had advantages as astronauts over men because they were more mentally stable, better able to bear loneliness and had better communication skills.

The insistence that they should also be wives and mothers does not relate to their multi-tasking abilities. Officials are concerned that space flight might affect their fertility.

"It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," Xu told the state news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious. After all, it's unprecedented in China."

The authorities have yet to disclose the names of the would-be astronauts, but all are between 27 and 34. Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po newspaper identified five of the 15 women shortlisted, who it said were all from Shandong province.

Sun Jing is described as a "flying maniac", while Xing Lei was the only straight-A student in pilot school. Cao Yanyan comes from a high-flying family; both her husband and mother-in-law are said to be outstanding pilots.

Liu Lu is multi-talented and a lover of literature, while Wang Yaping helped with recovery efforts after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and seeded clouds to ensure clear skies for the Beijing Olympics.

Qi Faren, a delegate to the Chinese political advisory body currently meeting in Beijing, told state media that one or two women were currently receiving training for the space programme, but had no timetable for launch. They face up to five years of intensive training.

Last year Sui Guosheng, an officer in charge of recruitment with the air force, said he expected to see a woman in space by 2012 – nine years after Yang Liwei became the first Chinese citizen to lift off.

Would-be astronauts are vetted so carefully that even bad breath can scupper their chances, a medical adviser revealed last year. Many of those who make the grade and undertake the gruelling training programme never actually make it into space.

Valentina Tereshkova, from the then USSR, became the first woman in space in 1963. Nasa barred women for years – despite the fact female aspirants scored better on several medical tests than male counterparts – and it was only in 1983 that Sally Ride became the first American woman to go into space.

Research shows vitamin D, produced by skin when exposed to ultraviolet light, associated with reduced rate of renal cancer

Men who work outdoors, enabling their bodies to create vitamins through exposure to sunlight, have a reduced risk of kidney cancer, researchers said today.

In the largest study of its kind, scientists found that vitamin D – produced by the skin when exposed to ultraviolet light – was associated with a reduced rate of renal cancer of up to 73% among men.

However, the study, published by the American Cancer Society, found that the reduced risk only applied to men – there was no drop in renal cancer among the women studied who worked outdoors.

The researchers, from the National Cancer Institute in the US, said the study of 2,500 workers in central Europe supported emerging evidence that the prevalence of a number of cancers, including breast, ovarian and colorectal cancer, was lower when people were exposed to ultraviolet light.

They said vitamin D, a known anti-carcinogenic, was carried by the body to the liver and on to the kidneys, and recommended further research.

"Scientific evidence suggests that vitamin D, which is generally made in the body after exposure to the sunlight, may help prevent a number of diseases, including cancer," the research author, Sara Karami, said.

"In our study, we used job titles to estimate sunlight exposure at work. We observed that men with high estimated levels of sunlight exposure had a lower risk of kidney cancer than men who had lower estimated sunlight exposure at work."

Scientists have monitored an increase in renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the main form of kidney cancer, in the US and globally over the past 20 years.

A reduction in vitamin D – probably caused by many more people having sedentary lifestyles and indoor jobs – is believed to be a likely contributory factor.

The researchers studied more than 2,500 workers of Caucasian descent in Russia, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic, splitting them into three groups according to exposure to daylight in their jobs.

A significant fall of up to 38% in the risk of RCC was found with increasing occupational UV exposure among men.

In northern-most regions, that increased to a 73% drop. But after finding no similar decrease in the risk for women, Karami said: "We do not have an explanation for the apparent differences in risk between men and women".

"Biological or behavioural differences between men and women may play a role. For example, hormonal differences may influence the body's response to sunlight exposure, and men may be prone to working outdoors while shirtless."

Although some foods contain vitamin D, the majority of people receive up to 90% of the chemical through exposure to ultraviolet light.

Farm workers and those who receive strong UV light reflected from the sea were in the highest category. Those in high-sunlight jobs were assumed to receive double the intensity of sunlight to those in low-exposure jobs.

Despite the findings, the researchers warned against ignoring the "well-documented risks" of skin cancer resulting from excess exposure to the sun.

"There are no public health recommendations from this study. Men and women should continue to consult their healthcare providers regarding the appropriate amount of sun exposure, weighing the well-documented risks between sun exposure and skin cancer risk," Karami said.

Healthy Caucasians can generate a full dose of vitamin D with 10-20 minutes' exposure to strong sunlight on unprotected skin. After that, photo-degradation ensures no higher levels are created.

The anti-carcinogenic properties of vitamin D include the prevention of tumour cell replication.

Soil deposits of CO2 'not fuelling global warming yet – but will in future'

A major study for the UK government has cast doubt over claims that rising temperatures are causing soil to pump greater amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further fuelling global warming.

In 2005 it was reported in the science journal Nature that over the past 25 years 100m tonnes of carbon dioxide had been released by the soil of England and Wales. The figure cancelled out all emissions cuts in the UK since 1990.

However, a national survey of the soils of Great Britain, funded by the department for environment food and rural affairs, claims to have found no net loss of carbon over approximately the same period.

Scientists have now proposed that a special study group, with an independent statistical expert, should examine why the reports differ and which result is more likely to be correct.

The latest questions follow weeks of claims that predictions about the impacts of climate change have been overstated or miscalculated, including the melting of Himalayan glaciers, and separate allegations of bias based on leaked emails from scientists at the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia.

The author of the latest report, Professor Bridget Emmett of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), warned that finding there had been no loss of carbon so far should not be taken to mean the absence of a threat. In the long term, scientists predict a "tipping point" when the faster activity of microbes in warmer soils starts to generate more CO2 than can be absorbed by plants.

"That's when you start losing carbon as a whole," said Emmett. "Most of the models say that will be later this century."

The 2005 report in Nature was based on the National Soil Inventory, carried out initially between 1978 and 1983, and again from 1994 to 2003, by the National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University. That study said that from 1978 to 2003 there had been an estimated loss of 4m tonnes of carbon a year from the soils of England and Wales, and the researchers estimated that, because of the higher carbon content of Scotland's peaty soils, the annual loss from the UK as a whole was 13m tonnes a year. The fact that the losses occurred across all types of land use suggested a link to climate change, said the team.

At that time, one of the research team, Professor Guy Kirk of Cranfield University, told a conference: "It had been reckoned that the CO2 fertilisation effect was offsetting about 25% of the direct human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. It was reckoned that the soil temperature emission effect would catch up in maybe 10 to 50 years' time. We are showing that it seems to be happening rather faster than that."

The latest report by the CEH, just released as part of the ongoing analysis of the 2007 Countryside Survey of Great Britain, compared studies between 1978 and 2007. It found carbon concentration in the top 15cm of soil increased over the first two decades, and decreased between 1998 and 2007. The only exception was arable land, where there was a net loss of carbon, probably because of disruption by ploughing.

"Overall there was no change in carbon concentration ... and [we] cannot confirm the loss reported by the National Soil Inventory," states the report.

Kirk told the Guardian that the Cranfield team were still "confident in our results [that] there was a net loss of carbon". But he said subsequent studies had suggested that "at best" 10% of the loss of carbon was due to climate change, and the rest was due to changes in land use and management, such as conversion of grassland to crops.

Reasons being examined for the difference in results include where and how samples were chosen and analysed and how the data was compiled.

"The amount of carbon in topsoils across England and Wales is about 2bn tonnes, so detecting a change of even 4m tonnes per year is very challenging," said Emmett. "Small differences in methods between the two surveys can therefore have a large effect."

French scientists claim some babies could have fault in regulation of heartbeat that makes it slow down and stop

French scientists are claiming to have identified an anomaly in the hearts of victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) that could pinpoint newborn babies at risk with a simple blood test.

The research team at the University of Strasbourg believes so-called cot death babies have a fault in the regulation of the heartbeat causing it to slow down to the point where it stops altogether.

This fault is caused by the heart absorbing too much of a chemical produced by the cardiac nerve, which controls the heart rate, it says. It believes the anomaly can be identified by an enzyme in white blood cells.

Professor Pascal Bousquet, of the Faculty of Medicine at Strasbourg University Hospital, said researchers had been working on another possible cause of SIDS when they made the "very new and exciting" breakthrough.

The Strasbourg team worked on heart or blood samples from 18 cot death victims and 19 children who had died violent or sudden deaths that were not related to any heart condition or cardiac abnormalities. The infants were between one and nine months old.

Heart tissue samples were taken from nine of the SIDS victims and eight from the control group. The hearts of all but one of the nine SIDS victims showed high levels of acetylcholine, a substance produced by the cardiac nerve that controls the heart rate, and an increased number of acetylcholine receptors in the heart.

This has led the researchers to believe that in the case of SIDS victims the cardiac nerve may go into overdrive and slow the heart down too much. Evidence to back this up was found in an enzyme in the white blood cells in six out of 10 of the blood samples taken from the remaining SIDS victims and control group.

Bousquet said: "We were working on another hypothesis when we came across this. The difference between the samples taken from SIDS infants and the control group were remarkable. It is unusual in scientific research to come across such a big difference."

The team has carried out tests to find signs of the anomaly in blood samples from animals, and is hoping to identify it in human beings. This could mean new born babies with the anomaly could be identified through a routine blood test.

"We have found the marker in white blood cells and if it exists in humans we will be able to identify children at risk of SIDS," he said.

"The idea is to then try out drugs that already exist to control the heart rate and see which of them work to block the receptors in the heart. Unfortunately, we have no sponsorship for that stage of our research."

The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, which funds research and gives advice in the UK, called the work an excellent piece of research. "SIDS is generally understood to result from a vulnerable infant at a particular developmental stage being exposed to specific environmental stressors. This research may help to explain why some infants are particularly vulnerable," it said.

"As the authors point out, further research is needed to see if their results can be replicated elsewhere, to further understand the normal development of neurotransmitter receptors in the heart, and how an over expression of these receptors might act to increase vulnerability."

Jon Ronson meets Paul Davies, the scientist with an awesome responsibility

If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I'm having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he's chair of the Seti (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Group. They're a group of the world's most eminent scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet's alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn't take lightly.

"Imagine a civilisation that's way in advance of us wants to communicate with us, and assist us in our development," Paul says. He pushes his mackerel across his plate. "The information we provide to them must reflect our highest aspirations and ideals, and not just be some crazy person's bizarre politics or religion."

This is why, Paul says, he very much hopes that our opening communication with the aliens will be drafted by him. "All the attempts to send messages up so far have been very crass," he says. "If you're going to leave it up to the mob to decide what's important, it'll be this really cool video game. Or some sporting event. Or some rock group."

"Do you have any idea of what you might say to the aliens?" I ask.

There is a short silence. "I do," he says.

"Will you reveal it to me?" I ask.

Paul thinks for a second. And then he clears his throat.

Who is Paul Davies? How have events transpired to put him on the front line of extraterrestrial relations? And what will his message to the aliens be?

The story begins 50 years ago, in April 1960, when a young astronomer named Frank Drake decided to cut a swathe through the forest of unscientific UFO believers, the abductees, the searchers for mutilated cattle, and so on, and treat the subject with some rigour. He formulated an equation, the Drake Equation, which attempted to determine mathematically how many intelligent civilisations exist in our galaxy. His conclusion: 10,000. Amazed at his findings, and at the thought that some of these extraterrestrials must surely be bombarding our hitherto deaf ears with incredible radio messages, he borrowed the 26m dish at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, pointed it at a distant star called Tau Ceti, turned it on and – nothing. Just a disappointing static hiss.

"No signals have been detected," he noted.

Despite this setback, Seti was born. Drake managed to score some US government funding and created an institute in California. Like-minded scientists joined him. For much of the 60s, as Paul Davies writes in his new book, The Eerie Silence, a "major preoccupation among Seti researchers was to decide which particular frequency ET might choose, given that there are billions of possibilities. The hope was that the aliens would customise their signals for Earth-like planets."

But the aliens didn't customise their signals for us. After a decade or so, a schism formed within Seti. Some contended that surely the aliens – being far advanced – would use lasers to communicate, not radio. And so Optical Seti was born.

Optical Seti didn't detect any signals either.

The day before my lunch with Paul, Frank Drake was in London to update the Royal Society on the latest. The good news is that with the help of wealthy private benefactors such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Seti is now better equipped than ever. Allen has provided them with an array of new dishes called, in fact, the Allen Telescope Array. They're situated in a field 290 miles north of San Francisco. The bad news is that no signals have been detected.

"Fifty years of nothing," I say to Paul now. "Do Seti people just go into work every morning, spend all day hearing nothing and then go home again?"

"Your question is very similar to, 'How does a computer scientist spend their days?' " Paul replies. "Sending emails and raising finance and teaching students and thinking about strategy."

"Doesn't it get depressing?"

"The Seti people are very calm, very determined. There is a hypothesis to test and Seti are testing it." He pauses. "If the eerie silence goes on for 500 years and not 50 years, it might become hard to recruit the young scientists."

Seti scientists also fill the void by putting protocols in place for what to do on the day a bleep is definitively heard. It is extremely likely they will be the ones to hear it: they're the ones with the dishes. Should the protocols be followed, they'll know not to call the media or some government figure. They'll call the chair of the Post-Detection Task Group. Which is Paul.

Paul is a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University. He lives his life at an incredibly high level of amazingness. He lectures at the Vatican, the Smithsonian, Davos and the UN. He has an asteroid named after him – the Pauldavies Asteroid. He's a passionate scientific communicator and a grumpy man of enormous intellect. A telephone near us keeps letting off a loud and unexpected ring, and whenever it does, Paul looks extremely cross and says, "This is terribly annoying." I can't help thinking that if the aliens do make contact, his automatic response will be to screw up his face in irritation and yell: "WHAT?"

I've been following Paul for a few days now. I watched him speak twice yesterday at the Royal Society (it has been hosting a Seti conference). The queue to get into his evening talk snaked around the block. He encouraged the audience, which filled the main hall and an overflow room, not to be depressed. It's quite possible the aliens do know we're here, but because they're 1,000 light years away and are consequently seeing us as we were 1,000 years ago – all pathetically rudimentary and agricultural – they're going to hold off beaming a signal to us until they know we've developed radio technology.

During the question and answer session, a man with dark glasses stood up and animatedly announced: "To see the future, one must look at the fringe, at the freaks, the visionaries, the artists. Why does Seti ignore what's right in front of us? The 6,000 abductions! The 10,000 cattle mutilations…!"

One or two people nodded in agreement. Paul tried to look kindly, but his annoyance was obvious. "To expect alien technology to be just a few decades ahead of ours," he replied, "is too incredible to be taken seriously."

His inference was, you can tell the abductees are lying or delusional because their descriptions of the aliens and their craft are always so unimaginative. As he writes in The Eerie Silence, the giveaway is the banality of the aliens' putative agenda, which seems to consist of grubbing around in fields or meadows, chasing cows or cars like bored teenagers, and abducting humans for Nazi-style experiments.

"At least flaky UFO nuts believe they've met aliens," I say to Paul now. "They believe they've been abducted and probed. You lot have rationalised yourselves into a 50-year void of nothingness." I pause and add: "I realise what I just said is quite stupid, but will you respond to it anyway?"

"For me, science is already fantastical enough," he says. "Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance."

Paul says he doesn't trust people. But he does have great faith in aliens. His face lights up when he imagines them. My guess is that, since he's spent so much of his life meeting people who aren't as clever as him, the aliens are – intellect-wise – his last-chance saloon.

The Post-Detection Task Group has been in existence since 1996. It is comprised of 30 Seti-friendly scientists, writers and engineers. Paul was invited to become chair in 2008 but has so far convened only one meeting. He hopes to hold a second later this year in Prague, so they can update their declaration of principles.

"So what's the first thing that'll happen when a bleep is detected?" I ask.

"We'll have it independently verified. That's really important."

"And once it's verified?"

"My strenuous advice," Paul says, "will be that the coordinates of the transmitting entity should be kept confidential until the world community has had a chance to evaluate what it's dealing with. We don't want anybody just turning a radio telescope on the sky and sending their own messages to the source."

"So you'll tell the world that extraterrestrials are beaming signals to us, but you'll refuse to say from where?"

"Exactly," Paul says.

"They'll kill you. They'll grab you and torture the information out of you."

"But what's the alternative? Imagine we go to the United Nations: 'There's an alien community over there and everyone has to think about what our response might be, so we're turning it over to you, the United Nations, who are so adept at finding harmonious solutions to the world's problems.' Well, of course it would be a complete shambles. And which are the agencies that can truly represent humanity? You wouldn't go to the Catholic church, would you? Or the US Army."

This is why, he says, the most prudent course of action will be to create some sort of science parliament – a bit like the one set up to oversee the scientific exploration of Antarctica – and present to them the draft of a message that will be written by him later this year in Prague.

I am, I'm proud to say, the person who gave him the idea to draft the message this far in advance.

"If you don't trust anyone else to come up with a decent message, you should do it yourself!" I say. "You don't want to be caught on the hop. Do it in Prague and just put it in a drawer somewhere until the time comes."

"That's a very good idea!" he replies. "I'm thinking on my feet here, but it's an excellent idea."

"I'm full of ideas like that. I'd be happy to join the Post-Detection Task Group."

Paul looks panicked. "There's no money."

"Oh, right," I say. "Right. Yes." It is an awkward moment.

"So what will the message say?" I ask, changing the subject.

"We're talking about two civilisations communicating their finest achievements and their deepest beliefs and attitudes. I feel we should send something about our level of scientific attainment and understanding of how the world works. Some fundamental physics. Maybe some biology. But primarily physics and astronomy."

"And some classical music?" I suggest.

"Well, we could, but it's not going to mean anything to them," Paul says.

"Yes, yes, of course." I pause. "Why won't it mean anything to them?"

"There's nothing certain in this game," Paul says, "but our appreciation of art and music is very much tied to our cognitive architecture. There's no particular reason why some other intelligent species will share these aesthetic values. The general theory of relativity is impressive and will surely be understood by them. But if we send a Picasso or a Mona Lisa? They wouldn't care." He pauses. "I mean the phonograph disc that went off on Voyager had speeches by Kurt Waldheim and Jimmy Carter. That's a world away from what we should be doing."

"Yeah, and Beagle 2 had Blur songs!"

"Quite," Paul says.

I actually like Blur and found the idea of their music being beamed to Mars quite exciting, but I'm belittling it because I feel a strong desire to make Paul think I'm wise.

"Of course, the world will eventually discover the coordinates and start sending up their own stuff," I say.

"Yes. So one of the first things we might want to say is that there's no unitary government on this planet, no unitary political philosophy or ideology. We're a great place for freedom, if not anarchy, and so we're putting together the best possible coherent package for your consideration, but expect it to be followed up with all sorts of bizarre and incoherent babble that you must treat with some discretion." He pauses. "Although how we'll express all this when we only have mathematics in common will be something of a challenge."

We get the bill. Paul wants to end on an optimistic note and so he mentions the one time in Seti history when something broke the silence.

"We call it the Wow signal," he says. "It was a radio telescope in Ohio, back in the days when they didn't have the electronic gadgetry to go 'ping' if there was something weird. So they looked at a computer print-out some weeks afterwards, and it showed a signal that went on for 72 seconds. Nobody was listening at the time. The researcher wrote 'Wow' in the margin. And many times radio telescopes have been turned on that star, but nothing odd has ever happened again."

"Should we feel excited by the Wow signal?"

"I've often wondered," Paul says. He puts on his coat. "What we're doing is a fantastic and challenging task. It compels us to think about all the things we should be thinking about. What is life? What is intelligence?" He pauses. "And if nothing else, it is a great deal of fun."

• The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone In The Universe? by Paul Davies is published by Allen Lane, £20. To order a copy for £18, including UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 68467. For information on Paul Davies' UK lecture tour, 12-22 March, go to penguin.co.uk/eeriesilence.

Recovery 'roadmap' would see large herds roaming free over thousands of hectares but hinges on an overhaul of government regulations and a rethink of public attitudes to the animal

Bison, the iconic animal of the American west, could once more roam wild across the great plains under a recovery roadmap prepared by international scientists.

A report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (pdf), prepared by dozens of scientists and bison experts from Mexico, America, and Canada, says there is a chance of a second recovery, nearly a century after the animals were rescued from the brink of extinction.

But success depends on allowing large herds to roam free over thousands or perhaps millions of hectares, an overhaul of government regulations, and a rethink of public attitudes to the animal.

Currently, there is only one population of plains bison, in Yellowstone national park.

"The next 10-20 years present opportunities for conserving American bison as a wild species and restoring it as an important ecological presence in many North American ecosystems," the study says. It says the animals are critical to the restoration of the prairie grasslands.

But Americans, especially ranchers in the west who view the animals as competition for grazing lands or a potential source of disease in their cattle, need to accept its presence on the plains.

"The greatest challenge is to overcome the common perception that the bison, which has had a profound influence on the human history of North America, socially, culturally and ecologically, no longer belongs on the landscape," the study says.

Tens of millions of bison once grazed the rolling hills and prairies of North America, from Alaska to northern Mexico. But by the beginning of the 20th century, the great herds had almost completely wiped out by hunters trying to satisfy the European fur trade.

Early efforts managed to save the bison from the brink of extinction, and about 31,000 now roam free. But conservationists say more needs to be done to protect the genetic diversity of such herds to assure their long-term survival.

Aside from harsh winters, bison in the wild face a range of diseases from anthrax to BSE, or mad cow disease.

The study says the new conservation strategy should aim to recreate the traditional range of the bison.

"While substantial progress in saving bison from extinction was made in the 20th century, much work remains to restore conservation herds throughout their vast geographical range," said Cormack Gates, a University of Calgary conservationist who co-edited the study.

Several states continue to view bison as livestock rather than wild animals and about 400,000 bison are being raised in commercial herds. Some 55,000 of those belong to Ted Turner, the media magnate and CNN founder, who has ranches in seven states.

"The key is recognition that the bison is a wildlife species and to be conserved as wildlife, it needs land and supportive government policies," Gates said.

But persuading the public the bison should be free and not food may not be easy. In 2002, Turner's ranches were so successful in raising bison that he opened up a chain of bison burger restaurants that now stretches from Montana to Florida.

Professor Edzard Ernst, the UK's only professor of complementary medicine, is in danger of losing his job

Homeopaths and their friends at Buckingham Palace must be rubbing their hands. The scourge of complementary medicine, Professor Edzard Ernst, may be facing the closure of his unit at the Peninsula medical school in Exeter. While there is plenty of money in alternative therapies, the funding to allow Ernst to test them scientifically is running out.

Ernst smells a royal rat, of course. An unusually outspoken scientist, he has never made a secret of his issues with Prince Charles's Foundation for Integrated Health, which last week he labelled a "lobby group for unproven treatments". He believes he has become "persona non grata" with Exeter since Sir Michael Peat, the Prince's private secretary, wrote to complain that he had publicly criticised a report he had been shown in confidence. The university cleared him, but Ernst suspects they would still like to see him go. The university argues that it is just hard to raise money for such studies.

Can we afford to lose him? Anybody with a belief in evidence-based medicine would have to say no. He is the only professor of complementary medicine in the UK and his unit not only carries out studies, but assesses those done by other researchers. St John's wort for depression got his seal of approval, and he found some benefits from acupuncture, even though he damned homeopathy and said chiropractic treatment had the potential to cause harm.

Ernst is a man who is unafraid to tell it like it is. His verdict on Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture: "Prince Charles contributes to the ill-health of the nation by pretending we can all overindulge, then take his tincture and be fine again . . . he thus promotes a 'quick fix' and outright quackery."

Lake Maracaibo left in darkness as drought caused by El Niño disrupts weather patterns that cause constant lightning storms
In pictures: Venezuela's vanishing lightning

Darkness rarely lasted long in the skies over Lake Maracaibo. An hour after dusk the show would begin: a lightning bolt, then another, and another, until the whole horizon flashed white.

Electrical storms, product of a unique meteorological phenomenon, have lit up nights in this corner of Venezuela for thousands of years. Francis Drake abandoned a sneak attack on the city of Maracaibo in 1595 when lightning betrayed his ships to the Spanish garrison.

But now the lightning has vanished. A phenomenon that once unleashed up to 20,000 bolts a night stopped in late January. Not a single bolt has been seen since.

"This is unprecedented. In recorded history we have not had such a long stretch without lightning," said Erik Quiroga, an environmentalist and leading authority on the Relampago de Catatumbo, or Catatumbo Lightning.

The spectacle, one of the longest single displays of continuous lightning in the world, lasts up to nine hours a night. On average it is visible over 160 nights a year and from 400km away. Lightning bolts discharged from cloud to cloud strike 16 to 40 times a minute. They can reach an intensity of 400,000 amps but are so high thunder is inaudible. There are similar phenomena in Colombia, Indonesia and Uganda but they do not last the whole night.

Fishermen in the village of Congo Mirador, a collection of wooden huts on stilts at the phenomenon's epicentre, are puzzled and anxious by its absence. "It has always been with us," said Edin Hernandez, 62. "It guides us at night, like a lighthouse. We miss it."

The celestial spectacular appears to be a casualty of the El Niño weather phenomenon, which has disrupted global weather patterns and caused a severe drought in Venezuela. Rain has all but disappeared, drying up rivers and disrupting the conditions that produce the lightning, whose causes remain unclear. One theory links it to decomposing organic materials which release methane. Another links it to Andean winds blowing across marshes, generating low pressure and building up an electrical charge in the atmosphere.

The last time the phenomenon vanished was in 1906 after a catastrophic 8.8-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Ecuador and Colombia unleashed a tsunami. The lightning returned three weeks later.

Now it is five weeks and there is still no sign of the nocturnal flashes.

"I look for it every night but there is nothing," said Francisca Hernandez, 28, a schoolteacher in Congo Mirador who monitors Lake Maracaibo's sky for researchers based in Caracas.

Some scientists believe the electrical storms help replenish the ozone layer. Others doubt that, saying the ozone they produce reaches only the tropospheric atmosphere.

The drought has also extinguished many man-made lights across Venezuela as the country relies largely on hydropower. Last month, the president, Hugo Chávez, declared an electricity emergency and said severe rationing, which has blacked out towns and cities, could last months. One state electricity company told workers to pray for rain.

Losing the lightning is a symbolic blow. In addition to warding off Drake's naval assault – an event celebrated in Lope de Vega's 1598 epic poem – it is credited with helping independence fighters defeat a Spanish fleet in 1823. The state of Zulia, which encompasses Lake Maracaibo, has a lightning bolt across its centre and refers to the phenomenon in its anthem.

Quiroga worries that when rains return the lightning may not recover its former glory. It was dwindling in frequency and force even before the drought, probably because deforestation and agriculture had clogged the Catatumbo river and several lagoons with silt.

"This is a unique gift and we are at risk of losing it," said Quiroga, who has led scientific teams to its epicentre. He has lobbied Venezuelan authorities to protect the area and the United Nations to recognise it as a world heritage site. A Unesco spokeswoman said there were no plans to do so because electrical storms did not have a "site".

Quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral thinks he has found what the universe is made of: information. Interview by Aleks Krotoski

Professor Vlatko Vedral is a quantum physicist at the universities of Oxford and Singapore who grapples with the behaviour of energy and matter at subatomic scales, and this has led him to ask some bigger questions including why are we here? And what does it all mean? The 39-year-old, originally from Belgrade, passionately believes units of information – not particles – are the building blocks of humanity and everything that surrounds us. Information, he maintains, is what came before everything else. It is akin to God.

Vedral has set out his argument in a new book, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information (OUP), in which he explains faith, love and teleportation.

What information is important at the quantum level, and how does it help us understand the origins of the universe?

At first sight, all types of information look very different from one another. For example, contrast thermodynamics – how chaotic a system is – with the information in your genome. You'd say: what on earth is the relationship between these two types of information? One looks much more orderly, the living system, while the other is disorder. But it's actually one and the same information… you actually need very little to define the concept of information in the first place. When you strip out all the unnecessary baggage, at the core is the concept of probability. You need randomness, some uncertainty that something will happen, to let you describe what you want to describe. Once you have a probability that something might happen, then you can define information. And it's the same information in physics, in thermodynamics, in economics.

Quantum physicists think of the universe as being made up of particles and strings. Are you suggesting that information is superior to these physical properties?

It depends on what you ultimately aim to explain. In science, we start with a certain basic set of laws, like the ones described by particle physics. These laws rely on quantum mechanics and relativity and so on. We start from them and try to describe everything else – subatomic, atomic, larger objects and, ultimately, the universe. But the simple question raised at the end is: where do these laws come from?

In science, we're criticised for being unable to go beyond these laws to explain their origins. It's what philosophers call an infinite regression: you give me an explanation, but I can ask where that comes from. We never seem to be able to end the list of questions. I think information is the only concept capable of almost explaining itself, of closing this circle.

How are you not conflating information with a God or another deity?

The common answer is that there was some kind of original creator of this information. The trouble is that this answer doesn't really solve anything because as a physicist I'd also like to understand this being itself. I'd like to explain the origin of God. And then you encounter the same infinite regression. For a scientist, "Why is there a universe? Well, because something even more complicated created it the way it is" isn't an explanation. We want a better answer than that. You can argue that science will never get there, that it's an open-ended enterprise. Maybe this is faith.

But we also have a set of beliefs in science. We believe in one method of understanding the ultimate, secure truth: the scientific method. We make a conjecture. We try to refute it as far as we can. Those conjectures that survive longest are those that currently define the laws of nature. We're not dogmatic about it at all; if you have compelling evidence that something is wrong, we are very happy to upgrade ourselves to the new theory. Of course you can always challenge me and ask why I believe this is the only way to understand the world. The only answer is that it makes sense to me. I find it better than anything else.

How can you explain the emergence of free will, of faith, of any subjective construct if information defined in your theory is binary, a yes or a no?

The things you describe are far too complicated to easily derive within physics, but I do believe one day that we will be able to explain complicated phenomena such as love, for example. I just don't think anyone yet knows how to approach it. But quantum mechanics does bring all kinds of shades of grey between the binary digits.

The perspective of classical physics governed by Newtonian laws describes the world as deterministic, and that there is no randomness. But the key concept behind information is probability: if you could compute and predict everything, as we could if the world really was classical, there would be no concept of surprise and there'd be no information. Everything would be clear, from the beginning to the end of the universe. Somehow we need a genuine randomness that can't be explained by anything more fundamental. That's the key concept for explaining everything out of nothing.

To reduce humanity to this idea of mathematical quantification implies that we can be recreated by having the right recipe and ingredients.

We can take a particle of light, a photon, and we can recreate this photon in a different lab that's hundreds of kilometres away. We can do the same thing with an atom, and smaller objects.

Human beings are ultimately nothing but a collection of atoms. If we apply this same teleport scheme, resulting in another copy of yourself somewhere else, what does that mean? Would you really be yourself? Or would the teleported self be another person with the same physical features who might not feel the same? As far as we know, this would have to be your self there. But we can only wait until an experiment is done to test this.

Are we at an important point in our human history in terms of how we generate, synthesise and understand information?

A good analogy is if you put yourself in the perspective of the people who, in the early 1920s, had just discovered the laws of quantum physics. They said it's extremely difficult to apply this to even the simplest of atoms. Then along comes someone else who says: "I have a piece of solid – 10 to the power of 24 atoms – and you're telling me you're finding it hard to understand a single atom? How on earth will we understand a whole solid?" In fact, this happened very shortly afterwards. It's called solid-state physics and it's the basis of all modern technology.

Being negative by saying that it looks too complicated has always been refuted by scientists. That's why I believe there is hope for us to understand more and more.

Pop star-turned-physicist Brian Cox speaks about his new TV series on the solar system

It's big space, isn't it?

It's 93 million miles to the Sun: that's a long way. It takes light eight minutes to do that. There are 100bn galaxies in the observable universe. If you take a 5p coin and hold it 75 feet away, the space in the sky it would obscure would hold 10,000 galaxies. It's mindblowing. I don't think anyone has a grasp of that other than to say: it's big.

You recently answered claims that experiments with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva might swallow the planet by saying: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat." Ever worry that you might have phrased that more delicately?

It's not a comment, it's a statement of fact, isn't it? It's factually accurate! It's been everywhere, that. If you're lucky you get one quote on your gravestone and that'll be mine. It's like with Bruce Forsyth: "Nice to see you, to see you nice." I gave a talk in Florida the other week, and I walked on stage and said that and everyone was like: "Wahey!"

Should scientists be similarly robust when it comes to the arguments raging around climate change?

You mean swear more? I don't know whether it's because I'm from Oldham but I believe in a straight-talking version of science. There's nothing mystical about it. We are too delicate with people who talk crap sometimes. But issues like climate change are difficult for scientists because they're not politicians and there's obviously a toxic confluence of agendas there.

Where does your field of expertise lie?

I work in an area called diffraction. It's interesting for lots of technical reasons.

What first inspired you?

I was born in March 1968 and my father says I watched the moon landings. I always knew I wanted to be an astronomer or someone who explored space or a physicist.

What about your career as a pop star?

I went to see Duran Duran with my sister in Leeds when I was about 15. The Seven and the Ragged Tiger tour. I thought: that looks brilliant, so I learned to play keyboards. I actually met Nick Rhodes recently… he just laughed. But it panned out perfectly.Joined my first band when I was 18, made a couple of albums, toured with Europe, supported Jimmy Page. Left that band and joined D:Ream. '97 was the last thing I did – the election.

You played "Things Can Only Get Better" at the Royal Festival Hall the night Labour won. What was that like?

The song had gone back into the charts so we did Top of the Pops that morning. Then we went to a hotel which Labour had got us, overlooking the Houses of Parliament. Sat there, watched all those classic moments. Portillo getting voted out! Then they rang and said: "We've won", so we went and played. Robin Cook and everyone dancing…

You met Tony Blair at the time. Did he strike you as being all right?

Yeah. He still does. I bumped into him last year in Oxford and we had a brief chat. Blair's government was good for science. Funding is having a blip now. It's odd because it's such a small amount of money [we're talking about].

You're called "the rock star physicist". Do colleagues give you funny looks?

Careers don't tend to be long in rock, and I left to do physics at the right time. My colleagues know I've been in bands, and I don't just make TV programmes – I do try and use that platform to have arguments about science funding and so on, so I don't think there's much resentment. There can be, and it's reasonable, because if you're an academic and have a lot of admin to do… well, I've got out of that a bit. But if I'm off in Hawaii filming for the BBC, it doesn't look great.

In the first episode of your new TV series, we see you flicking through a book you had as a child called The Race Into Space. Does today's world live up to the vision of the future you enjoyed then?

That's a disappointing book when you look at it now! It says we were going to be on Mars by 1983. I met the head of exobiology at one of the big Nasa research institutes who knew the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun from back in the early 60s. He told me they had a plan to go to Mars with the Saturn V rockets. If the programme hadn't been cancelled in the late 70s, they could have done it.

Historically, we've often thought we're getting close to cracking the secrets of the universe. Are we?

I honestly think the wheels are coming off our picture of the way the universe works at the moment. We don't know what 96% of the universe is made of – that tells us that we don't understand something fundamental. It reminds me of the start of the 20th century when quantum mechanics and relativity were about to appear.

We wouldn't expect a dog to understand the mysteries of the universe, so why should we imagine that we can?

It's an open question, whether it's too complicated. All you can do is point back to history to note that we've been successful on this reductionist journey up to now. But there's no reason…

Have you ever believed in God?

No! I was sent to Sunday school for a few weeks but I didn't like getting up on Sunday mornings. But some of my friends are religious. I don't have a strong view on religion, other than illogical religion. Young earth creationism, for example: bollocks.

You went to Alaska for your new series. What would you have said to Sarah Palin if you'd met her in a bar?

I would have started by asking: "Why do you think the Earth is only 6,000 years old?" I would have tried to convert her…

Interview by Caspar Llewellyn Smith

After studying 20 years of data, panel of 41 scientists rule out volcanic explosions as cause of dinosaurs' demise

A mere 65 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs, a panel of the world's most eminent scientists have finally got to the bottom of the extinction. The creatures were wiped out by a large asteroid slamming into the Earth, they insist.

After studying 20 years' worth of research and data, a panel of 41 scientists came to a conclusion which will sound more than just a bit familiar to most schoolchildren who paid attention in science class.

The new finding flies in the face of claims by other scientists that the extinction was caused by volcanic explosions. According to the new international study, the asteroid that did for the dinosaur struck the Earth at an angle of 90 degrees and a speed of about 12.4 miles per second – about 20 times faster than a speeding bullet.

The asteroid generated a force one billion times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the close of the second world war, the scientists say.

It crashed into the Earth in what is now Mexico, at Chicxulub, off the Yucatán peninsula.

Dr Gareth Collins, one of the scientists from Imperial College London, said: "The asteroid was about the size of the Isle of Wight and hit Earth 20 times faster than a speeding bullet. The explosion of hot rock and gas would have looked like a huge ball of fire on the horizon, grilling any living creature in the immediate vicinity that couldn't find shelter.

"While this hellish day signalled the end of the 160 million-year reign of the dinosaurs, it turned out to be a great day for mammals, who had lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs prior to this event."

The effect of the strike was to create a global winter, and geological records reveal that it rapidly destroyed marine and land ecosystems.

Scientists say there was an abundance of iridium in geological samples dating back to the time of extinction, which is commonly found in asteroids, but little of which is found in the Earth's crust.

Joanna Morgan, of Imperial College, a co-author of the review, described the effects of the asteroid strike: "This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale and continental landslides, which created tsunamis.

"However, the final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs happened when blasted material was ejected at high velocity into the atmosphere. This shrouded the planet in darkness and caused a global winter, killing off many species that couldn't adapt to this hellish environment."

Where would we be without the unpaid hobbyists who make progress in the arts and science just for the love of it?

We're all the children of amateurs: amateur parents. There's no government department that will certify you as a parent (thankfully), nor a university department where you get your PhD in being a daddy, nor a professional body ready to strike you off for not following mothering standards. But any parent who's held a newborn child in their arms has unconsciously taken the amateur's oath: "I may not be a professional, but I'm going to do whatever it takes to act like one."

It's a pity that too often we associate amateur with amateurish, and dismiss amateurs as second-rate pretenders to a professional throne. What we should remember is that the word amateur has its roots in the French word for love: amour. And amateurs do for love what professionals do for money.

Of course, many professionals love what they do (and are lucky enough to get paid for it), and many amateurs deserve to have the term amateurish applied to their efforts. Having worked in amateur theatre, I know too well how misplaced enthusiasm can override sense resulting in a four-hour panto. But amateurs helped build the world we live in. At the beginnings of the scientific age, scientists themselves were amateurs. They toiled away examining nature to understand why things are the way they are. They invented physics, chemistry and biology.

Although modern science may appear to be the preserve of a well-financed laboratory run by a Nobel-quality mind, the amateur scientist is not on the endangered species list. For example, amateurs play a crucial role in fields where large numbers of observations are needed. There are too many stars, comets and asteroids for only professional astronomers to keep an eye on, so we shouldn't be surprised that Pluto was spotted by an amateur, Clyde Tombaugh, in 1930. And the whole field of radio astronomy got a kick start when, in 1937, amateur Grote Reber built a 9 metre dish in his back garden and plotted the first radio map of the sky.

Keeping track of bird movements and numbers is greatly aided by flocks of amateur ornithologists who report their observations to bodies such as the British Trust for Ornithology, and amateur palaeontologists get in on the act when they uncover new fossils. In 1990, a sociologist uncovered unseen fossilised reptile tracks in New Mexico, much to the surprise of professional scientists.

Even weather forecasting relies partly on amateurs who take thousands of measurements of temperatures and rainfall and report them to the US National Weather Service. Also in the US, the Society for Amateur Scientists helps promote the relationship between professionals and amateurs, showing the hobbyist how to communicate with professionals and how to get their work published and recognised. Its founder, Shawn Carlson, won a MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 1999 honouring his creation.

Amateurs are also doing well outside the sciences. In popular music, many bands get their start in a garage playing instruments with no formal training. Only very few musicians have spent years in a music academy, yet love for their music has brought us the Beatles, the Stones and every single rapper. Likewise – they help build the world we live in, most authors are amateurs, partly because the money to be made from writing is so poor, and partly because it's hard to get a job as an author. You have to be one to become one. I once asked the writer Alain de Botton about the role of amateurs. He responded nervously that he wouldn't want to be operated on by an amateur brain surgeon, or flown by an amateur pilot. So I steered him back to the safer ground of amateur philosophy.

In any pub in Britain you'll find plenty of Friday-night philosophers waxing lyrical. But even in the world of serious philosophy, amateurs outrank the professionals. Many of the great philosophers were amateurs, from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Sartre. De Botton puts this down to university philosophy departments being so poor. But perhaps there's another reason: if there's one subject we all study and can be passionate about, it's the human experience.

So watch out when you're down the pub: you might be sitting beside the next Nietzsche. Or at least a bloke who counts butterflies for the sheer love of it.

• This article was commissioned after Cif was contacted by a commenter in a You Tell Us thread

Natural History Museum starts courses at Dorset heritage site

Hilary Penrose, an artist from Oxfordshire, was feeling soggy but inspired. Soggy because she had misjudged a wave during a windy walk on Britain's Jurassic Coast. Inspired because she had been learning about the geology of the area from some of the world's leading experts.

Penrose is one of the first students to attend a course at a new outreach centre opened by the Natural History Museum in Lyme Regis, Dorset.

The museum may be best known for its stunning collections of all creatures great and small and its displays of dinosaur and whale skeletons, but the new Jurassic Coast Studies Centre is part of an attempt to spread its message farther and wider.

Effectively, the pilot scheme is turning the 95 miles of coastline in Devon and Dorset that makes up the Jurassic Coast into a giant classroom. The courses are designed to appeal both to people with general interests and to professionals who want to learn more about a particular subject.

Professor Andy Fleet, leader of the Geology of Jurassic Coast course, said: "It's about taking the Natural History Museum out of London and to wonderful places like this. The Jurassic Coast is an obvious place for us to come when we're talking about geology.

"We've had a range of people here. Some have become interested in geology having gone to evening classes. One person got interested after taking a walk along a beach on the Isle of Arran in Scotland and wanted to know more."

He added: "The Jurassic Coast is the only natural world heritage site in England. It makes sense for us to be here."

Hilary Penrose and her husband, sculptor John, decided to attend because they felt knowing more about geology could inform their work. "It's great to be learning about such a dynamic landscape," she said.

A course on meteorites is proving popular with people who have a general interest while other courses, on marine nematodes and petroleum, are of greater appeal to people who already work in those specialist fields.

If the programme, which is running for two months, proves a success, a much larger centre for earth and natural science education will be established.

The museum's partners are the Field Studies Council and the Lyme Regis Development Trust, a charity that works to stimulate the economic, social and environmental well-being of the area.

Marcus Dixon, chief executive of the trust, said the centre could provide a much-needed boost to the area's economy. Though the town is full of tourists in the summer, it can be much quieter at other times of the year.

"This will help attract more people all year round. It's also about getting more people engaged in science, which we feel is very important," he said.

Hilary Penrose said: "Apart from getting soaked by a wave, we've had a very stimulating time. We're bowled over by what we have learnt. It's incredible learning from people who are at the top of their field but also being in a place like Lyme Regis where you are right in the middle of what they are talking about."

She and her husband arrived at the centre on Thursday afternoon. There was a lecture that night, followed by full days on Friday and Saturday, spent indoors and on the beaches and headlands around Lyme Regis.

Marcus Dixon said that though the town was famous throughout the world it suffered some of the problems of isolated rural communities in lovely settings, such as high property prices and an overdependency on the tourism industry.

Almost half of the population is aged over 65 and young people often leave and do not return. "It's a remarkable place but there are challenges," Dixon added. He said it was hoped an expanded study centre could create extra jobs and bring more people in all year round.

A breakdown of passenger lists indicates that survival of the fittest reigned on the Lusitania because of how quickly it sank

The frightfully British stiff upper lip disaster, with women and children ushered towards the lifeboats and everyone else queueing politely, only happens if there is enough time: the hours after the Titanic hit the iceberg were a model of decorum, but the short sharp shock of the sinking of the Lusitania was a panic-stricken scramble of the youngest and fittest to escape.

Scientists have studied the casualty figures for the two famous passenger liner disasters, and found that although the ships, passenger numbers and fatalities were very similar, the breakdown of the casualty figures was not.

On both ships the captains gave orders for women and children to be saved first – but the response was very different.

The Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage on 14 April 1912, and took several hours to sink with the loss of 1,517 lives.

The highest percentage of survivors were women, children, or people accompanying a child. Statistically males, adults and passengers without children were less likely to survive.

A woman's chance of survival was more than 50% greater than a man's, a child had a 14.8% higher probability of surviving than an adult, and an adult accompanying a child was 19.6% more likely to survive than one without.

The Lusitania took just 18 minutes to sink on 7 May 1915, torpedoed by a German U-boat just off Kinsale in Ireland, on a voyage between New York and Liverpool: 1,198 died, and it was literally survival of the fittest among the 639 who escaped.

Fit young passengers, aged between 16 and 35, had the best chance of survival. Men in that age group had a 7.9% better chance of survival, and women 10.4%. Slightly more women survived, but there was no significant difference between the sexes.

Not only did the fittest get to the lifeboats first, but when the boats were launched inefficiently, with some tilting or rocking violently, they were more likely to be able to hang on or to get back in if they fell out.

Class also played a part: first class passengers on the Titanic were more likely to find a place in a lifeboat, but fared worse in the stampede on the Lusitania.

The scientists, who publish their findings this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, conclude: "This difference could be attributed to the fact that the Lusitania sank in 18 minutes, creating a situation in which the short-run flight impulse dominated behaviour. On the slowly sinking Titanic, there was time for socially determined behavioural patterns to re-emerge."

They noted that on the Titanic the women and children first order was enforced by the crew, and accepted by the passengers – "otherwise the passengers could have easily revolted against such a protocol".

The study could be useful for predicting behaviour in other disasters, they suggest.

"Knowing human behaviour under extreme conditions provides insight into how widely human behaviour can vary, depending on differing external conditions."

The 2012 Olympics offer the perfect chance to mark the anniversary of a great mathematician – and marathon runner

Last year I led a campaign to obtain an apology for the mistreatment of the British mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's prosecution for homosexuality led to the death of a true genius at the age of only 41 in 1954. On 10 September last year, Gordon Brown issued an apology that recognised Turing's stature as one of the greatest Britons. But Britain has a final opportunity to unapologetically recognise Alan Turing in two years' time, at the 2012 Olympics.

It's now well known that Turing laid down the foundations of computer science in the 1930s, helped shorten the second world war by breaking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and investigated artificial intelligence. He went on to design early computers during the late 1940s and just before he died he was untangling the process of morphogenesis to understand why and how living beings take the shape they do. Only today are scientists appreciating the work he did in his last years, and every computer user can be thankful for his theoretical Turing machine, which captured the essence of the machines we all use.

What is less known is that Turing was also an accomplished physical athlete. He was an excellent marathon runner, with a best time of 2 hours 46 minutes. He ran for a local club in Walton, Surrey while working at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. He is also said to have run between London and Bletchley Park for meetings during the second world war, and at age 14 he cycled 60 miles from Southampton to school at Sherbourne during the general strike of 1926.

The last time Britain hosted the Olympics, in 1948, Turing tried out for the British Olympic marathon team. He came fifth in the trials. He ended up attending the games as a spectator taking along two of his young nieces as guests. That year Britain took a silver in the marathon when Thomas Richards ran for 2 hours 35 minutes. Alan Turing was only 11 minutes slower.

2012 has great significance: it's the centenary of his birth on 23 June. To celebrate "Alan Turing Year", mathematicians and scientists across Britain and around the world are arranging events throughout the year. Celebrations of Turing's work will be held in Manchester (where he was living and working when he died) and at Bletchley Park. There's even a suggestion that Unesco should designate 2012 the year of computer science.

Turing's life also deserves celebration far from the places he's most associated with. As Britons, we live in a world Turing helped create: computers have permeated our lives and his work at Bletchley Park with thousands of others helped bring the war with Nazi Germany to an end. As London shows off what's great about Britain through the Olympic games, let's show off a great Briton of whom we should be proud. What better way to honour Turing than by naming the 2012 marathon the "Turing marathon" and inviting his surviving nieces to witness the event? One of them could even be invited to fire the starting pistol that will set the runners off. Those little girls are elderly now, but their memories of Uncle Alan are bright. Inviting them would be a fitting tribute.

Of course, detractors may be concerned about sullying the games by associating an individual with an event. But such concerns didn't stop Greece in 2004 from naming their entire Olympic stadium after Spiridon Louis (who won the marathon event in 1896). Honouring the life of a man would be a welcome antidote to the heavy commercialisation surrounding the games.

Others may worry about raking over the embers of the dark days of anti-homosexuality laws. But there's little need to be concerned: celebrating Turing doesn't mean focusing on just that one aspect of his life; it means recognising a mental and physical athlete, a mathematician and marathon runner, and a man to whom we owe so much. It's rare that events coincide to give us one moment in time when a man like Turing can be celebrated in all his complexity. Let's not miss the chance in 2012.

• This article was commissioned after the author contacted us via a You Tell Us thread

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