Carole Jahme shines the cold light of evolutionary psychology on readers' problems. This week: promiscuity and nostalgia

Casanova complex

From a male, aged 42
Dear Carole, I wonder what, evolutionarily speaking, is going on with men such as myself who have a long history of promiscuity but are reluctant to reproduce. I am 42 and I still don't want children. The idea of marriage or a long-term partner with children repulses me still, though sex is still very much on my agenda. I usually seek women who have already had children so that I don't feel pressure to reproduce. I accept the central premise of all your posts, but what's going on with me?

Carole replies:
If a male willingly reproduces he usually does so intending to do his best to support his child and the mother of his child. From your description it appears you do not want to invest your resources in others, including another who carries your genes. Modern contraception allows you to exercise your ancient sex drive while saving you from responsibility for progeny.

In general, males find short-term mating strategies more acceptable than do females. You are not alone: there are plenty of men on the lookout for short-term mating opportunities. But I doubt the thought of long-term commitment and parenthood fills them all with repulsion.

Your repulsion at the thought of parenthood and all that goes with it may help you to remain as an overgrown adolescent. Without the pressures of responsibility you have not had demands put upon you that would have activated certain behavioural strategies. Thus, you have not adapted and cognitively matured in accordance with the demands of responsible breeding.

Narcissism in males can accompany an attractive boyishness, which on first impressions can appeal to females. But selfish, egocentric and immature behaviour in males will eventually contribute to the breakdown of a relationship.

Perhaps I should give you the benefit of the doubt and say that it is possible, after all that promiscuous sex, that you still haven't found a female good enough for you and that when you finally do the narcissism and feelings of repulsion will evaporate.

If you are happy and not making those single mums miserable with your cold repulsion of them as potential long-term mates, there's no reason for you to change your ways. But promises are made in bed and the fact that you have written to me suggests you are reflecting on your behaviour.

A word of warning: you may end up as the oldest swinger in town, which could be a lonely role, and by then your choice of mates will be vastly reduced.

Apostolou, M (2009) Parent–offspring conflict over mating: The case of short-term mating strategies. Personality and Individual Differences; 47(8): 895-899.
Holtzman, NS and Strube, MJ (2009) Narcissism and attractiveness. Journal of Research in Personality; 44(1): 133-136.

Nostalgia trip

From a female, no age given
Dear Carole, While listening to Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits recently I was struck by the relevance of the lyrics of The Chain to my current relationship. I have just become re-engaged with an ex-flame and am totally smitten by the thought of it all. Yet we ended our relationship a few months back after agreeing that neither of us was over our exes. We then both dabbled with our old flames before the two of us were drawn back together under unusual circumstances. I hate to be the one to over-analyse a good thing but my friends think I'm crazy.

Carole replies:
I believe the lyrics go something like this:

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain

Mistrust is embedded in these lyrics. The singer is realising that if love and commitment are not forthcoming now they never will be, and that second chances shouldn't be given because promises have been broken.

You say that you are smitten by the "thought of it all" but your friends (who surely know you and care for you) consider you to be crazy. You and your partner both seem to be chained to the past and you are lovingly lost in your musings.

Nostalgia and remembrance for the good times motivates us all, but your relationship ended for a reason, and you are now wasting time by looking back through rose-tinted glasses. Nostalgia can raise our sense of wellbeing and general optimism. We can generate feelings of being securely attached via sentimental memories. Secure attachment is essential in primates. Without it our mental health suffers and our status and immunity decline dramatically. Nostalgia can serve to keep us well and happy, but eventually reality comes a-calling.

Is it possible that if you put aside your nostalgia for a moment you will come to see the truth of why these lyrics are talking to you?

Routledge, C, et al (2008) A blast from the past: The terror management function of nostalgia. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; 44(1): 132-140.
Belsky, J, (1997) Attachment, mating and parenting: an evolutionary interpretation. Human Nature; 8(4): 361-381.
Goursaud, A. S. and Bachevalier, J. (2007) Animal models for autism. Behavioural Brain Research; 176(1): 75-93.

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The Natural History Museum has one of the world's greatest collections, capturing the earth's huge biodiversity. Ahead of a major new BBC TV series – Museum of Life – six members of their world-class team of 300 scientists each pick a treasure

The statistics defy comprehension. The mammal collection on its own contains 860,000 items, ranging from the skeleton of a blue whale to a dormouse. Yet this array of old bones and fur represents a mere slice of the contents of the Natural History Museum.

Over the three acres of storage space that forms a labyrinth around the museum in South Kensington, London, there are rooms that contain the remains of 58 million animals, drawers of five million pressed plants, and cupboards filled with nine million fossils. For good measure, this magnificent terracotta edifice – designed by Alfred Waterhouse and opened in 1881 – also provides a home for 300,000 rocks and minerals as well as 2,000 meteorites. This, quite simply, is one of the planet's most important natural history collections, a repository of the biological and geological wonders that have appeared on earth over its 4.6 billion-year history.

Yet only a tiny minority of these marvels is ever seen by the public. The rest are kept behind the scenes at the museum, although these artefacts are still of tremendous importance to researchers, as a new BBC2 TV series, Museum of Life, intends to show. Six documentaries examine some of the star specimens among the museum's scientific treasures and will demonstrate how they are being used as tools to understand, and improve, the planet's threatened ecology. Thus we will learn of the importance of giant tortoise excrement to the regeneration of the ebony forests of Mauritius and come to understand the usefulness of making moulds of dinosaur skeletons.

As Richard Fortey, one of the museum's most important palaeontologists, explains: "The golden rule of museum life is simple. Don't throw anything away. You never know – a technique or technology could come into existence and reveal a new scientific use for it."

As to the identity of the greatest treasures to be found within the walls of this scientific Hogwarts, there is, inevitably, disagreement. So the Observer asked some of the museum's personnel to name their favourites and explain why they have selected them.

Of course, opinions change over time and future generations will no doubt take a very different view – a point demonstrated by the museum's own walls. Waterhouse stipulated there should be carved images of living species on the west wing's walls while the east would only have those of extinct creatures. These included the coelacanth, then thought to be extinct, but which was discovered, very much alive, in 1934. As a result the coelacanth now finds itself commemorated on the wrong wall.

Museum of Life starts on Thursday

The diplodocus

Mike Dixon, director of the Natural History Museum

"It is hard to believe that the great skeleton of Dippy, our fossil diplodocus, has not always dominated the museum's entrance hall. The two look as if they had been made for each other: a vast cathedral-like space filled by that wonderful 26m-long skeleton of a long-extinct dinosaur. It is a sight that never fails to hypnotise youngsters when they first set foot in the museum.

"Yet we were without Dippy for the first 24 years of our existence. Indeed, it might never have ended up here at all had not King Edward VII asked for a copy of the newly discovered dinosaur when he visited the Carnegie Museum in America. Over the next 18 months, casts of the fossilised bones were made from five different diplodocus skeletons and shipped to Britain in 36 crates. Dippy was assembled and formally introduced to the public on 12 May, 1905, in the reptile gallery before ending up in the great hall in 1979.

"He has also changed over the years. For a long time we reckoned the diplodocus must have lumbered about in swamps because its body would have been too heavy to move about on dry land and would have needed water or mud for support. However, our ideas about sauropod dinosaurs have changed and we now believe they were much more dynamic and active than we had thought. So we have raised Dippy's head and also his tail, which would have acted as a counterbalance. Essentially, though, he is the same old Dippy that has entranced visitors to the museum for more than 100 years."

The Nakhla meteorite

Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites

"There are about 38,000 meteorites in museum and private collections in the world but this one is special because it's one of only a handful that are known to have come from another planet: Mars. About 12m years ago an asteroid or comet crashed on to Mars. The resulting blast blew pieces of rock into space and into orbit round the Sun. Then, in 1911, the Earth passed through that orbit and swept up some of those pieces of rock and these fell over the Nakhla area of Egypt. There was a fireball, a detonation and then a shower of stones. Locals claimed a dog was killed – which would have made the animal the only known victim of an interplanetary attack. However, the story is pretty suspect.

"The piece, which is a star specimen in our vault gallery, has a beautiful shiny black exterior. This is known as a fusion crust and was created by the intense heat of the meteorite's fiery passage through the atmosphere. Its interior is mostly a mixture of iron and magnesium silicates called pyroxene and olivine. Some scientists say they can see signs of fossil bacteria-like entities in the meteorite but I am not convinced. On the other hand, it is now clear some of that the minerals that make up the meteorite could only have been created in the presence of water. This shows that Mars – at least in the distant past – must have been a wet, fairly hospitable place."

Archaeopteryx

Angela Milner, research associate in the palaeontology department

"Archaeopteryx has unique, iconic importance for a very simple reason: it is a perfect example of evolution in action. It looks half-way between a bird and a small meat-eating dinosaur which, of course, is exactly what it is.

"It was found inside a piece of limestone in southern Germany and brought in 1862 to the museum, where Thomas Huxley recognised it is a transitional fossil that links modern birds with dinosaurs. Thus it became a key piece of evidence in the debate about natural selection. Our specimen is 147m years old and is the earliest known fossil of an animal that we can definitely call a bird. In other words, its lineage had only relatively recently evolved from dinosaur predecessors. It is wonderfully preserved despite the age, however. You can see its feathers in perfect detail.

"Archaeopteryx would have been about the size of a magpie and would have had a long tail like a magpie's. However, in its case this tail was made out of bone. Since then, birds have evolved tails that are made out of feathers. Intriguingly, we actually have two versions of this particular archaeopteryx. It was preserved in a slab of lithographic limestone which was split apart to reveal the bird inside.

"Both sides reveal detailed impressions of the bird. A copy of one is displayed in the earth gallery and another in the bird gallery."

The Broken Hill Skull

Chris Stringer, research leader of human origins at the museum

"This is a beautifully preserved skull of an early human being who we think lived about 300,000 years ago. It is also a fossil of special historical importance. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin had predicted science would show that the origins of humanity lay in Africa. But for the next 50 years the only fossils dug up were in Europe and Asia. The Broken Hill Skull – which was found in a mine in Zambia (then Rhodesia) in 1921 - changed that perspective and helped show our birthplace is, indeed, an African one. It has personal importance as well. When I saw a replica of the skull in the museum when I was a youngster, I was captivated, and decided, there and then, to study evolution.

"The skull of Broken Hill Man – we believe it is male from its size – was coated in ore when it was dug up. However, the huge brow-ridges over its eyes marked it out as special and it was sent to the museum.Today we now believe it belongs to a species called Homo heidelbergensis: big-brained, powerfully built hunter-gatherers who may also have been our direct ancestors.

"The skull – a replica is displayed in our human evolution gallery - also reveals clear evidence of illness among ancient people. It has a hole at the back which was probably caused by a small tumour or brain abscess which burst through the skull wall. However, to judge from the subsequent bone growth around the hole, this appears to have partly healed.

"In fact, it is more likely his teeth killed Broken Hill Man. These, and his upper jawbone, were riddled with abscesses that would have caused him immense pain and may even have led to the spread of a fatal infection."

The arapaima fish

Oliver Crimmen, lead curator in the fish group in the zoology department

"When I was young I was fascinated by the aquarium at London zoo and, in particular, by the tank that contained marine creatures from the Amazon. There was one fish, called the arapaima, which I thought was especially exciting. It was huge, around two metres, and looked truly spectacular.

"Then one day I found the tank had been closed and was being cleaned out. I never found out what happened to the arapaima – until I went to work for the Natural History Museum. There I came across a specimen preserved in alcohol. It was only when I checked the label that I discovered it had come from the zoo. It was, in fact, the very fish that had drawn me to the aquarium a decade earlier and begun my fascination with marine biology. The arapaima seems to have haunted my life.

"In fact, it is a really intriguing fish – not just because of its unusual size. For example, the adult arapaima looks after its young by keeping a shoal of them in its mouth to protect them. The fish is also rare in that it breathes oxygen from the water - and from the air.

"Unfortunately, the arapaima is easily harpooned because of its size and because it swims near the surface. As a result, it is suffering a serious loss of numbers in the wild. On the other hand, it is also being bred today in fish farms. I doubt if I could eat one though."

Darwin's pigeon

Jo Cooper, curator of anatomical collections in the museum's bird group

"Charles Darwin collected many bird specimens on his voyage on the Beagle. However, his research had only just begun when he returned to Britain in 1836. Still seeking evidence years later, he began studying domestic animals – and the pigeon turns out to be a surprising favourite. Darwin brought together many different breeds of the bird – which helped to demonstrate the general point that a wide variety of animals can be created from a single originating type. Between 1855 and 1858, Darwin devoted a large part of his time to pigeon breeding – just as fellow scientists, such as Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, were pressing him to publish his ideas about evolution. Just write something - 'pigeons, if you please' - but make sure you get your theory into print, Lyell urged.

"Then, in 1858, Darwin got a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining his own version of natural selection, and he dropped everything to write On The Origin of Species. Crucially, this includes many observations about domestic animals – including the pigeon. Later Darwin left his pigeon specimens to the museum and these have turned out to be some of the best preserved items in all his collections. My favourite is a skeleton that has been carefully labelled, in Darwin's own handwriting, and dates back to 1856, just when his ideas about natural selection were crystallising. It is not on permanent display but it is usually included in most, behind-the-scenes tours of the museum."

The figures for bugs in train compartments sound a little bit on the high side. Where did they come from?

The figures were all very specific and very frightening. "Two thousand bugs taking a ride in every train compartment," said the Daily Mail. "Cockroaches cluster on trains," groaned the Telegraph. "Commuters share trains with 1,000 cockroaches, 200 bedbugs and 200 fleas," said the Evening Standard.

These figures all sound a little bit on the high side. Where did they come from? "Staff at Rentokil sprayed insecticide throughout the carriages of a train and a bus and then counted the bodies of insects," said the Standard. It quoted a Rentokil spokesman: "The bus we studied was within the M25."

But Transport for London says it has had no contact with Rentokil, and that no such study has been done on its vehicles. I asked Rentokil for more details.

After a bit of prodding, its PR company, Brands2Life, explained: no buses or trains were studied.

How did people get the wrong end of the stick? I have no way of knowing, as Brands2Life and Rentokil both declined to show me what they had sent to journalists but, in any case, contrary to what was said earlier, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts – they are based on a "theoretical model".

Models are handy. They're a simulation of reality, based on a series of assumptions. Rentokil's model for the number of bugs on trains and buses made some interesting assumptions, and you will have your own view on whether they make for a reasonable approximation of the real world.

It assumed, for example, that the railway carriage or bus was left in isolation. It assumed this carriage was helpfully furnished with a plentiful food supply. It assumed that the ratio of male to female bugs was perfectly optimal for breeding.

It assumed (surprisingly for anyone involved in modelling populations – surprisingly for anyone, really) that the population of bugs would be left entirely unchecked, with no external factors to control the mortality rate.

It assumed that the siding or garage was controlled at a constant temperature all day and night, with no extremes. It assumed there were no trampling commuters, no cruel vacuum cleaners, no anything. In fact, it assumed there was no cleaning, ever, and no passengers, ever. This was its model of insect populations on commuter vehicles.

You will have your own view on whether you could trust an organisation that makes assumptions like these in estimating the average population of bugs. But it's somehow unseemly that Rentokil, a company with £2.36bn in revenue and a 54% increase in profits in 2009 to £166m, and poised to pay £90m in bonuses to its top three executives, feels the need to make everyone afraid of public transport on a PR whim. There is also the ugly thought that Rentokil will do more business if it can make everyone scared of bugs on the bus.

And on 2 March, the day before the cockroach press release, Rentokil announced the single biggest ever contract in the history of its business: £200m over five years with London Underground.

Our favourite foods are making us fat, yet we can't resist, because eating them is changing our minds as well as bodies

For years I wondered why I was fat. I lost weight, gained it back, and lost it again – over and over and over. I owned suits in every size. As a former commissioner of the FDA (the US Food and Drug Administration), surely I should have the answer to my problems. Yet food held remarkable sway over my behaviour.

The latest science seemed to suggest being overweight was my destiny. I was fat because my body's "thermostat" was set high. If I lost weight, my body would try to get it back, slowing down my metabolism till I returned to my predetermined set point.

But this theory didn't explain why so many people, in the US and UK in particular, were getting significantly fatter. For thousands of years, human body weight had stayed remarkably stable. Millions of calories passed through our bodies, yet with rare exceptions our weight neither rose nor fell. A perfect biological system seemed to be at work. Then, in the 80s, something changed.

Three decades ago, fewer than one Briton in 10 was obese. One in four is today. It is projected that by 2050, Britain could be a "mainly obese society". Similar, and even more pronounced, changes were taking place in the US, where researchers found that not only were Americans entering their adult years at a significantly higher weight but, while on average everyone was getting heavier, the heaviest people were gaining disproportionately more weight than others. The spread between those at the upper end of the weight curve and those at the lower end was widening. Overweight people were becoming more overweight.

What had happened to add so many millions of pounds to so many millions of people? Certainly food had become more readily available, with larger portion sizes, more chain restaurants and a culture that promotes out-of-home eating. But having food available doesn't mean we have to eat it. What has been driving us to overeat?

It is certainly not a want born of fear of food shortages. Nor is it a want rooted in hunger or the love of exceptional food. We know, too, that overeating is not the sole province of those who are overweight. Even people who remain slim often feel embattled by their drive for food. It takes serious restraint to resist an almost overpowering urge to eat. Yet many, including doctors and healthcare professionals, still think that weight gainers merely lack willpower, or perhaps self-esteem. Few have recognised the distinctive pattern of overeating that has become widespread in the population. No one has seen loss of control as its most defining characteristic.

"Higher sugar, fat and salt make you want to eat more." I had read this in scientific literature, and heard it in conversations with neuroscientists and psychologists. But here was a leading food designer, a Henry Ford of mass-produced food, revealing how his industry operates. To protect his business, he did not want to be identified, but he was remarkably candid, explaining how the food industry creates dishes to hit what he called the "three points of the compass".

Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling. They stimulate neurons, cells that trigger the brain's reward system and release dopamine, a chemical that motivates our behaviour and makes us want to eat more. Many of us have what's called a "bliss point", at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. Combined in the right way, they make a product indulgent, high in "hedonic value".

During the past two decades, there has been an explosion in our ability to access and afford what scientists call highly "palatable" foods. By palatability, they don't just mean it tastes good: they are referring primarily to its capacity to stimulate the appetite. Restaurants sit at the epicentre of this explosion, along with an ever-expanding range of dishes that hit these three compass points. Sugar, fat and salt are either loaded into a core ingredient (such as meat, vegetables, potato or bread), layered on top of it, or both. Deep-fried tortilla chips are an example of loading – the fat is contained in the chip itself. When it is smothered in cheese, sour cream and sauce, that's layering.

It is not just that fast food chains serve food with more fat, sugar and salt, or that intensive processing virtually eliminates our need to chew before swallowing, or that snacks are now available at any time. It is the combination of all that, and more.

Take Kentucky Fried Chicken. My source called it "a premier example" of putting more fat on our plate. KFC's approach to battering its food results in "an optimised fat pick-up system". With its flour, salt, MSG, maltodextrin, sugar, corn syrup and spice, the fried coating imparts flavour that touches on all three points of the compass while giving the consumer the perception of a bargain – a big plate of food at a good price.

Initially, KFC meals were built around a whole chicken, with a pick-up surface that contained "an enormous amount of breading, crispiness and brownness on the surface. That makes the chicken look like more and gives it this wonderful oily flavour." Over time, the company began to realise there was less meat in a chicken nugget compared with a whole chicken, and a greater percentage of fried batter. But the real breakthrough was popcorn chicken. "The smaller the piece of meat, the greater the percentage of fat pick-up," said the food designer. "Now, we have lots of pieces of a cheaper part of the chicken." The product has been "optimised on every dimension", with the fat, sugar and salt combining with the perception of good value virtually to guarantee consumer appeal.

He walked me through some offerings at other popular food chains. Burger King's Whopper touched on the three points of the compass – then was altered for further effect. In its first, stripped-down form, the burger was explosively rich in fat, sugar and salt. Then the chain began adding more beef, extra cheese or a layer of bacon. McDonald's broke new ground in another way – by making food available on a whim. "The great growth has been the snacking occasion. You get hungry, you want something, your mind pushes off the reality of what you ought to eat, and you end up picking up a hamburger and a giant soda or french fries."

Next they introduced a high-fat, high-salt morning meal. "They took what they learned from the core lunch and dinner menu, and applied it to breakfast. The sausage McMuffin and the egg McMuffin are stand-ins for the hamburger. In effect, you are eating a morning hamburger."

This kind of food disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite that it readily overrides the body's signals that should tell us, "I'm full." The food designer offered coleslaw as an example. When its ingredients are chopped roughly, it requires time and energy to chew. But when cabbage and carrots are softened in a high-fat dressing, coleslaw ceases to be "something with a lot of innate ability to satisfy".

This isn't to say that the food industry wants us to stop chewing altogether. It knows we want to eat a doughnut, not drink it. "The key is to create foods with just enough chew – but not too much. When you're eating these things, you've had 500, 600, 800, 900 calories before you know it." Foods that slip down don't leave us with a sense of being well fed. In making food disappear so swiftly, fat and sugar only leave us wanting more.

According to food consultant Gail Vance Civille, of management consultants Sensory Spectrum, fat is crucial to this process of lubrication, ensuring that a product melts in the mouth. In the past, she says, Americans typically chewed food up to 25 times before it was swallowed; now the average American chews 10 times. "If I have fat in there, I just chew it up and whoosh! Away it goes," she says. "You have a 'quick getaway', a quick melt."

The Snickers bar, Civille says, is "extraordinarily well engineered". Unlike many products whose nuts become annoyingly lodged between your teeth, the genius of Snickers is that as we chew, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel picks up the peanut pieces, so the entire candy is carried out of the mouth at the same time. "You're not getting a build-up of stuff in your mouth."

Kettle chips are another success story. Made of sugar-rich russet potatoes, they have a slightly bitter background note and brown irregularly, which gives them a complex flavour. High levels of fat generate easy mouth-melt, and surface variations add a level of interest beyond that found in mass-produced chips. Heightened complexity is the key to modern food design.

Not so many decades ago, a single flavour of ice-cream was a special treat. Our options ran to vanilla, chocolate and strawberry – and when we could buy all three in a single carton, we saw that as a great innovation. Now ice-cream has countless flavours and varieties; it comes mixed with M&M's or topped with caramel sauce.

When layers of complexity are built into food, the effect becomes more powerful. Sweetness alone does not account for the full impact of a fizzy drink – its temperature and tingle, resulting from the stimulation of the trigeminal nerve by carbonation and acid, are essential contributors as well.

"The complexity of the stimulus increases its association to a reward," says Gaetano Di Chiara, an expert in neuroscience and pharmacology at the University of Cagliari in Italy. Elements of that complexity include tastes that are familiar and well liked, especially if not always readily available, and the learning associated with having had a pleasurable experience with the same food in the past.

Take a bowl of M&M's. If I've eaten them in the past, I'm stimulated by the sight of them, because I know they'll be rewarding. I eat one, and experience that reward. The visual cue gains power and stimulates the urge we call "wanting". The more potent and complex foods become, the greater the rewards they may offer. The excitement in the brain increases our desire for further stimulation.

In theory there's a limit to how much stimulation rewarding foods can generate. We are supposed to habituate – to neuroadapt. When Di Chiara gave animals a cheesy snack called Fonzies, the levels of dopamine in their brains increased. Over time, habituation set in, dopamine levels fell and the food lost its capacity to activate their behaviour.

But if the stimulus is powerful enough, novel enough or administered intermittently enough, the brain may not curb its dopamine response. Desire remains high. We see this with cocaine use, which does not result in habituation. Hyperpalatable foods alter the landscape of the brain in much the same way.

I asked Di Chiara to study what happens after an animal is repeatedly exposed to a high-sugar, high-fat chocolate drink. When he'd completed his experiment, he sent me an email with "Important results!!!!" in the subject line. He had shown that dopamine response did not diminish over time with the chocolate drink. There was no habituation.

Novelty also impedes habituation, and intermittency is another driver. Give an animal enough sugar-laden food, withdraw it for the right amount of time, then provide it again in sufficient quantities, and dopamine levels may not diminish.

There's still a lot we don't know about the relationship between the dopamine-driven motivational system and our behaviour in the presence of rewarding foods. But we do know that foods high in sugar, fat and salt are altering the biological circuitry of our brains. We have scientific techniques that demonstrate how these foods – and the cues associated with them – change the connections between the neural circuits and their response patterns.

Rewarding foods are rewiring our brains. As they do, we become more sensitive to the cues that lead us to anticipate the reward. In that circularity lies a trap: we can no longer control our responses to highly palatable foods because our brains have been changed by the foods we eat.

I wanted to know how much the industry understood about how the food we eat affects us; about what I have termed "conditioned hypereating" – "conditioned" because it becomes an automatic response to widely available food, "hyper" because the eating is excessive and hard to control. I turned to Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics.

"Does the industry know that what it feeds us gets us to eat more?" I asked.

"The industry has jacked up what works for it," Stiglitz said. "The learning is evolutionary." Practical experience has been its guide – it does not need lab rats when it can try out its ideas on humans. Its decision-makers do not have to analyse human brain circuitry to discover what sells.

A venture capitalist who knows the business intimately cited Starbucks as a company that has recognised and responded brilliantly to a cultural need. The caffeine and sugar in the coffee, with their energising effects, are certainly part of the equation, but the chain also offers something much more primal. "It's about warm milk and a bottle," he says. "One of my colleagues said, 'If I could put a nipple on it, I'd be a multimillionaire'."

But it was thinking creatively about how to attract more consumers that led Starbucks to the Frappuccino, the venture capitalist told me. Although its stores were crowded early in the day, by afternoon "they were so empty you could roll a bowling ball through them". The creation of a rich, sweet and comforting milkshake-like concoction utterly transformed the business. A Starbucks Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino comes with whipped cream and 18 teaspoons of sugar: all in all, this "drink" contains more calories than a personal-size pepperoni pizza, and more sweetness than six scoops of ice-cream. By encouraging us to consider any occasion for food an opportunity for pleasure and reward, the industry invites us to indulge a lot more often.

Starbucks learned a basic lesson: make enticing food easily and constantly available, keep it novel, and people will keep coming back for more. With food available in almost any setting, "the number of cues, the number of opportunities" to eat have increased, while the barriers to consumption have fallen, says David Mela, senior scientist of weight management at the Unilever Health Institute. "The environmental stimulus has changed."

Of course, when food is offered to us, we're not obliged to eat it. When it's on the menu, we don't have to order it. But this takes more than willpower. As an individual, you can practise eating the food you want in a controlled way. As a society, we can identify the forces that drive overeating and find ways to diminish their power. That's what happened with the tobacco industry: attitudes to smoking shifted. Similar changes could be brought about in our attitudes to food – by making it mandatory for restaurants to list calorie counts on their menus; by clear labelling on food products; by monitoring food marketing. But until then few of us are immune to the ubiquitous presence of food, the incessant marketing and the cultural assumption that it's acceptable to eat anywhere, at any time.

Call it the "taco chip challenge" – the challenge of controlled eating in the face of constant food availability. "Forty years ago, you might face the social equivalent of that taco chip challenge once a month. Now you face it every single day," Mela said. "Every single day and every single place you go, those foods are there, those foods are cheap, those foods are readily available for you to engage in. There is constant, constant opportunity."

How to take back control

Plan when and what you will eat There should be no room for deviation; the idea is to inhibit mindless eating and eliminate your mental tug-of-war. Once you've set new patterns, you can become more flexible.

Practise portion control Eat half your usual meal; see how you feel one and two hours later. A just-right meal will keep away hunger for four hours.

List the foods and situations you can't control Cut out those foods; limit exposure to those situations. If offered something you overeat, push it away.

Talk down your urges Learn responses to involuntary thoughts: eating that will only satisfy me temporarily; eating this will make me feel trapped; I'll be happier and weigh less if I don't eat this.

Rehearse making the right choices Before entering a restaurant, imagine chosing a dinner that's part of your eating plan. Think of this as a game against a powerful opponent. You won't win every encounter, but with practice you can get a lot better.

• This is an edited extract from The End Of Overeating: Taking Control Of Our Insatiable Appetite, by David A Kessler, published by Penguin on 1 April at £9.99. To order a copy with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.

An early day motion claims shortcomings in the committee's recent homeopathy "evidence check"

Last month, the Commons science and technology committee published a detailed report into the evidence for the efficacy, or otherwise, of homeopathic remedies. You can read it here.

After taking oral testimonies from scientists, doctors and homeopathy advocates, the committee recommended the government halt NHS funding for this kind of alternative medicine and said the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency should ban false statements of medical efficacy on the labels of homeopathy products.

In forming their conclusions, the committee heard evidence from, among others, David Harper, the chief scientist at the Department of Health; Kent Woods, the chief executive of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency; Robert Wilson, chairman of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers; Peter Fisher, director of research at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital; and Robert Mathie, research development adviser at the British Homeopathic Association.

The evidence sessions were by turns interesting, depressing and downright hilarious. The standards director at the high street chemist, Boots, admitted he had no evidence to suggest that homeopathy worked beyond the placebo effect. In other words, the products they sell, which contain no active ingredients, are no more effective than sugar pills.

And then there was Peter Fisher talking about how shaking homeopathic products (which are diluted to within an inch of their lives) is crucial for the substance to have a memory and so work. The comment prompted Evan Harris, the Lib Dem science spokesman to say: "I'd have thought shaking it would make it more likely to forget." To which Fisher replied: "You have to vigorously shake it. You can't stir it."

But I digress. Two weeks ago, Tory MP David Tredinnick, set down an early day motion expressing concern about the science committee's report. He's not happy that evidence was taken from a limited number of people and wanted to hear more views from people who are fans of homeopathy.

The early day motion itself is by the by. There is a long and colourful history of nonsense EDMs that come and go with no one noticing. But what is staggering about this one – as pointed out on David Colquhoun's blog – is that 58 MPs have signed it. As Colquhoun, a professor of pharmacology at University College London, says, that's 9% of all MPs.

We don't have the most scientifically literate bunch of MPs in the House today and what a desperately depressing thing that is. For a full list of EDM signatories, see Prof Colquhoun's article.

Here is some sensible background on homeopathy.

Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar talks to Aleks Krotoski

Being sued for libel is not only ruinously expensive, writes Simon Singh, it takes over your whole life. Which is why this will be his last column

Almost a year after writing my first column for this site, I would like to welcome you to my final article.

At first I was able to deliver my monthly column on time, but my submissions have become increasingly delayed, and this is my first since November. The problem is that I have spent the past two years being sued for libel, which has taken up huge amounts of time. And now all my remaining spare time is being devoted to campaigning for libel reform.

The crippling and prohibitive financial cost of defending a libel case is often highlighted, but the equally terrible cost in terms of time and stress is rarely mentioned.

I recently discussed this with Dr Peter Wilmshurst, the eminent cardiologist who is being sued for libel for commenting on the efficacy of a new heart device. Peter was put under immense stress when he received legal papers on Friday 21 December 2007 at 5.09pm, which was nine minutes after most solicitors closed for their Christmas holiday. It was not until the new year that Peter was able to get any legal advice, so it was an anxious Christmas.

Perhaps it was just as well that Peter was not aware of the full implications of what lay ahead of him, namely at least two years of anxiety, misery and the threat of bankruptcy. Almost all his spare time has been spent on the libel case. When finalising his defence, he took two weeks of annual leave to work on the documents. Moreover, dealing with ongoing legal issues has prevented him from carrying out his usual medical research, and a number of publications have been put on hold.

After chatting to Peter, I decided to count up how much time I had spent defending the article published in the Guardian in April 2008 that led to the British Chiropractic Association suing me for libel. I reckon I have spent 44 solid weeks on the libel action spread across two years.

I am in the very fortunate position of having no employees, being a freelancer, having financial resources and having a very supportive wife. In any other circumstance, I cannot imagine fighting a libel action because of the enormous sacrifices involved.

I should have started writing a new book a year ago, but as yet I cannot even develop proposals and talk to publishers because I have no idea how the next year or so will develop.

The case could easily continue for another two years. If I win then I will not recover all of my legal costs, but (worse still) I will never recover the time I have dedicated to poring over legal documents.

Before saying goodbye, I will urge you once more to sign up to the campaign for libel reform. If you remain unconvinced about the need for libel reform, try visiting the National Enquirer website. If you live in the UK then you will find a blank page except for the words "Page unavailable/under construction".

The reason is that the National Enquirer is so scared of English libel law that it no longer sells magazines in the UK or makes it web content available here.

You might feel that the unavailability of the National Enquirer is not enough to justify changing English law. However, more serious than the National Enquirer's position is the fear that other American publications will follow suit and that some key American magazines, newspapers and websites will be available everywhere in the world except in Britain.

You might feel that I am being alarmist, but major US newspapers, such as the Boston Globe and The New York Times, sent a memo last year to the House of Commons select committee on media, libel and privacy. They warned that they are considering stopping the sale of their publications in Britain due to the threat of libel. The benefits of selling newspapers here in terms of profit are outweighed by the potential losses in libel cases.

If publishers stopped selling hard copies in Britain, they would almost certainly also block their online content, because otherwise the threat of libel would remain.

Thereafter, it would be sensible for everything from academic journals to blogs to follow suit. Very quickly Britain could become an isolated society. In terms of free speech and access to information, our nation would become the European equivalent of China.

That's just one of the reasons you need to sign the petition for libel reform.

Brain scans revealed with reasonable accuracy which short film clip volunteers were thinking about

Scientists have used brain scans to delve into people's minds and predict what films they are thinking about from one moment to the next.

This is the first time brain imaging has been used to decipher such complex thoughts, which take place in the base of the brain in a region known as the medial temporal lobe.

The work follows an earlier study in which neuroscientists at University College London showed they could read a person's thoughts about where they were standing in a virtual reality simulation.

"In the previous experiment we were able to predict where someone was in a simple, stark virtual reality environment. What we wanted to know is can we look at 'episodic' memories that are much more naturalistic," said Eleanor Maguire, who led the study at the university's Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. "The kinds of memories we form day-to-day are far more complex – they involve people and buildings and all kinds of actions."

The scientists recruited six women and four men, with an average age of 21, to watch three film clips, each lasting seven seconds. All three films were similar, and showed an actress performing a particular activity in a street. In one film, for example, a woman drank a coffee before binning the cup, while in another, a different woman posted a letter.

After watching the clips, the participants practised recalling the three films as vividly as they could.

The scientists then used a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to look for memory traces in the participants' brains when they thought about each of the films in turn. At first, they were told which film to recall while the scanning was in progress.

Using a computer program, Maguire's team was able to identify consistent and characteristic memory traces for the three films in each participant.

In a second series of experiments, the volunteers were asked to remember the movie clips at random while having their brains scanned.

The computer program was not good enough to predict which film a person was thinking about every time. With three films to choose from, a blind guess would be right 33% of the time on average. The computer predicted the right film 40-45% of the time.

The memory traces associated with each film stayed the same throughout the experiment, suggesting the memories were fixed, at least for the duration of the study. More striking was the finding that the memory traces for each of the three films looked similar in all 10 volunteers.

"The patterns of neurons that are able to represent these different movies are certainly in a similar place across the group," Maguire said.

The researchers recorded memory traces from three different areas of the medial temporal lobe, including the parahippocampal gyrus, the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. Of these, the hippocampus was the most important for recording everyday memories and held the most reliable memory traces.

The study appears in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers are now trying to understand which aspects of people's memories they were reading. They may be only partial memories, such as the location each movie clip was set in. Previous studies have shown that the neocortex plays a major role in storing the content of memories, while the hippocampus orchestrates the recollection of the memory.

"Now that we are developing a clearer picture of how our memories are stored, we hope to examine how they are affected by time, the ageing process and by brain injury," said Maguire.

Women come out best in listening and recollection tests in study by University of London's Institute of Education

It's been an endless source of aggravation between the sexes; how can men so easily forget birthdays, anniversaries, and even friends' names?

Not, it seems, because they cannot be bothered to remember. Research suggests that, in middle age at least, absent-minded-ness is a particularly male problem.

At the age of 50, women's verbal memory outperforms their male counterparts by a significant margin, a report by the Institute of Education, University of London suggests.

A survey of more than 9,600 middle-aged British men and women showed that women outscored men in two listening and recollection tests.

"Men performed significantly more poorly in the verbal memory tests: particularly on the delayed memory test," the authors, Matthew Brown and Brian Dodgeon, said.

"This was quite a surprising result, since women turning 50 tend to do worse: another study has shown that during the menopause women do not do so well."

Participants in the first test listened to 10 common words being read out and were then given two minutes to recall as many as possible. The second test required them to list the same 10 words about five minutes later. Women scored almost 5% more than men, on average, in the first test, and nearly 8% more in the second.

Women were less accurate in a third test requiring them to cross out as many "Ps" and "Ws" as possible in a page filled with rows of random letters. They had, however, scanned letters faster than men.

In a fourth test, naming as many animals as they could in a minute, men and women had identical scores. Each could name 22 animals, on average. The study did not test whether men are better than women at recalling numbers; previous studies have shown that women tend to do better on word recognition tests.

Those tested were members of the National Child Development Study who have been tracked since their birth in 1958. They were tested at age 16, and the latest tests will help estimate the impact that exercise, diet, smoking, alcohol and depression have had on mental abilities. Initial analysis shows those who exercised at least once a month did better on all tests, on average, than those who did not. Non-smokers, including ex-smokers, also outscored smokers in the first of the "word recall" tests, even after social background was taken into consideration.

"Although measuring gender differences was not the central purpose of tests, the differences between men and women were interesting," the authors said.

Sequencing the genomes of every family member gives researchers a powerful new tool for tracking down the defective genes that cause inherited diseases

An American family has become the first to have the entire genome of each member mapped to identify the causes of rare diseases that affect the children.

The family of four is unusual because the parents are healthy but both son and daughter have two rare inherited medical conditions that cause facial and limb malformations and lung problems.

Mutations in "recessive" genes are responsible for these conditions, meaning that in each case the children must have inherited a defective copy from both their mother and their father to get the disease.

One of the conditions, Miller's syndrome, causes facial and limb abnormalities and affects only around one in a million people. Only a few families in the world have been formally diagnosed with the condition.

The second disease, called primary ciliary dyskinesia, makes the hair-like structures that sweep mucus from the lungs and airways stop working, and affects around one in 10,000 people globally. The chances of one person having both conditions are less than one in a billion.

Scientists at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle sequenced the entire genomes of all four family members and used the information to pinpoint four genes that might be responsible for the diseases. Mutations in two of the genes were later confirmed to be the cause of the diseases.

The breakthrough, reported in the journal Science, gives researchers a powerful new tool to track down quickly the defective genes behind almost any disease that is caused to a significant extent by genetic glitches.

"It remains to be seen how far we can push it, but I really don't see any limitation to this. If we look at more and larger families we should be able to home in on the key genes linked to far more complex conditions, such as neurodegenerative diseases and autoimmune diseases," said David Galas, professor of genetics and a senior author on the study.

With many diseases, identifying the defective gene can help doctors make a diagnosis and arrange for appropriate counselling for the patient and other family members.

"The big impact is going to be helping us understand diseases at the molecular level, but that is a longer play," Galas added.

The researchers also report the first measurement of how many new, spontaneous mutations parents pass on to their children. They identified 30 from each parent, meaning that each child inherited 60 new mutations in total. Estimates based on comparisons between human and chimp genomes have previous led scientists to think the figure was higher, at around 75.

Writing in the journal, the scientists explain that in future, everyone is likely to have a full genome sequence in their medical records, making such familial genetic comparisons easier.

Many patients who are referred to a clinical geneticist by their doctor are not diagnosed because scientists only know the genes involved in a fraction of the medical conditions they see.

"What this group has shown is that with one family, you can get almost directly to the important mutation itself. It's a big deal, because if we can collect families affected by a condition, we might be able to get much more rapidly towards understanding their genetic causes," said Matthew Hurles, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK.

In a separate study, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, helped discover genetic mutations that cause his own rare medical condition. James Lupski inherited Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome, a rare disorder that leads to a loss of sensitivity and muscle in the hands and feet. Neither of his parents have the disease, but three of his siblings do.

Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, Lupski and his colleagues describe how they compared his genome with those of his other family members and identified two mutant genes that cause the syndrome.

"This is the first time we have tried to identify a disease gene in this way," said Lupski. "We can [now] start to use this technology to interpret the clinical information in the context of the sequence, of the hand of cards you have been dealt."

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.

The data is unequivocal: investing in scientific research during times of recession results in economic growth

On Tuesday night, the science representatives of the three main parties jovially debated in front of a heaving Westminster audience, all pushing the agenda that science is now a central election issue.

Quite right too. All evidence suggests that increased expenditure in basic research results in economic growth. Conservative shadow science minister Adam Afriyie immediately set up their stall the wrong way round, by declaring that mending the economy came before investing in science. Science minister Lord Drayson countered, as he always does, by engaging well with critics, saying the right thing, but appearing hamstrung by his own party.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Royal Society, under Lord Martin Rees's excellent leadership, has the very clearest view on what needs to be done. Published on Monday, their report entitled The Scientific Century: Securing Our Future Prosperity is a masterful document, packed with robust data, and well written to boot. In it, they recommend a long-term strategy of ring-fenced investment, and increased funding towards people rather than projects. It plays down the sometimes false dichotomy of "basic" as opposed to "applied" research, but reasonably promotes revenue generating academic-industry collaboration.

This debate doesn't just centre on research. It also comes in a school education, and the Royal Society's report hammers home the primary importance of specialist science teachers. Afriyie cited shadow children's secretary Michael Gove's predictable declaration last week that the curriculum should return to the old school and comprise "traditional" lessons. Bizarrely, they are claiming to battle endemic dumbing down not by employing the knowledge of education experts, but by asking celebrities. To shape the science curriculum, Gove volunteered public scientists and figures including Lords Rees and Winston, the publicity-courting Lady Greenfield and Carol Vorderman. While no doubt these have all achieved excellence in particular fields, none is a school-level educational professional.

The New Labour project was in the thrall of expert advice, sometimes taking it, and in the case of the sacking of drugs adviser David Nutt, conspicuously ignoring it. The Conservatives appear to be following suit. Alongside their celebrity-endorsed curriculum, yesterday they issued a report by vacuum cleaner manufacturer James Dyson. It's not a bad document, glossy and vaguely in line with that of the Royal Society. But alongside Afriyie's statements in the debate, it's hard to see past this as being anything other than vacuous lip service, if you'll forgive the inevitable pun. Dyson, for the record, manufactures his vacuums, not in the UK, but in Malaysia.

The Lib Dems' Evan Harris is the only MP who genuinely appears to understand both the scientific process and the import of investing in that process to ensure our future. His position that the science budget can only be cut after we are out of recession is spot on. A coalition brought on by a hung parliament could result in the installation of this man as a science minister who will drive a genuinely progressive policy for the benefit of everyone. In a hung parliament, though, his position will be weakened in enacting those policies.

Science must be a major election issue. The data is unequivocal: investing in basic research during times of recession results in economic growth. That investment comes primarily at university level, and in hard times, by ring-fencing research council budgets. The current government has made some key progress on sorting out the science curriculum (such as on the teaching of evolution), but before 2009, the UK failed to meet its targets on attracting more secondary teachers into science and maths every year for a decade.

With little to call between the main parties on many issues, promises on how to bust the economic depression will be critical. Whichever party most heartily adopts the Royal Society's recommendations will secure the UK's future economically and, more importantly, create the science-literate society and research-driven economy we should all aim for. As this august organisation so pithily says: "Unless we get smarter, we'll get poorer."

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 Sherborne 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

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

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.

Scientists in Geneva expect to generate beams of particles with three times more energy than previously achieved

The giant machine designed to recreate conditions that existed moments after the big bang will attempt to run with enough energy to break a world record next week.

The Large Hadron Collider, at the European nuclear research organisation (Cern) on the outskirts of Geneva, is expected to generate beams of particles with three times more energy than has ever been achieved before.

The machine, which occupies a 17 mile (27km) circular tunnel 100m beneath the French-Swiss border, is expected to bring the speeding particles together within the next few weeks and continue operating until the end of 2011.

In January Cern managers told staff the machine will close for a year in 2012 for essential maintenance and to install failsafe systems designed to protect the machine when it runs at full power from 2013.

The £6bn collider was built to slam sub-atomic particles together at a maximum energy of 14 trillion electron volts (TeV), but the machine exploded soon after being switched on in September 2008.

That incident shut the collider down for more than a year, while engineers attended to repairs that cost an estimated £24m.

In January Cern officials decided to operate the machine at half-power from later this month until the end of 2011. The standard procedure of closing down briefly over the winter has been scratched for 2010-11.

The explosion that closed the machine was caused by a short circuit that caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the collider's tunnel.

During the year-long shutdown scheduled for 2012, engineers will inspect 10,000 wires that connect giant superconducting magnets inside the machine. "It's likely that most of those wires will be modified in some way," said James Gillies, Cern's spokesman.

Extra safety valves designed to vent liquid helium in an emergency will also be fitted.

Inside the machine two counter-rotating beams of sub-atomic particles called protons will be accelerated around a circular racetrack to almost the speed of light. At four points around the ring the beams will cross over, slamming the protons into each other in head-on collisions. These orchestrated acts of violence release fleeting bursts of energy that recreate in microcosm the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the big bang.

Last November Cern's collider became the most powerful in the world after crashing particles together at an energy of 2.36 trillion electronvolts. The previous record holder, the US Tevatron collider near Chicago, reached 1.96TeV.

Scientists hope the machine will discover the elusive Higgs boson, which imbues other particles with mass; that it will find evidence for "supersymmetry", which postulates an invisible twin for every kind of particle in the universe; and that it will even expose the nature of dark matter, an invisible material that stretches across the cosmos and collects around galaxies.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

Astrophysicist Paul Davies discusses new approaches to finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The Seti scientist's new book is called Eerie Silence and is on a lecture tour of the UK.

You can hear an extended version of this interview in our latest Science Weekly Extra podcast.

Anthropologist Rick Potts is opening a new exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. It's called What does it mean to be human?

In the newsjam we discuss the new body set up to investigate an IPCC climate change report, sequencing the genomes of an entire family, and the new energy record about to be smashed at the LHC.

When it comes to theatre, sound is just as important as vision. It's the subject of a lecture this week in London organised by the Wellcome Trust. Neuroscientist Prof Sophie Scott of University College London and theatre director Jonathan Holmes go on stage at London's Bloomsbury Theatre to demonstrate. You'll hear some drama from actor Seth Sinclair.

The Observer's science editor Robin McKie and Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample join the pod.

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Britain must celebrate its scientists, because if the voters do, then so will the politicians

National Science and Engineering Week – running now with 2,000-plus exhibitions, lectures, open days and debates for an expected audience of 1.5 million – began as a whistle in the dark. Back in 1994, the science minister, William Waldegrave, secured a derisory £100,000 for the first one, and it seemed like a gimmick.

The charge of cynicism was unfair: Waldegrave was that rare thing, a minister with a prior and genuine interest in science. But the gesture came near the end of a long period of devastation of an intellectual tradition that had delivered Newton, Faraday, Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Rutherford and one of the unsung giants of the 20th century, Paul Dirac. In 15 years of Conservative government, ambitious projects had been abandoned, long-established research teams broken up, laboratories closed, universities starved and institutions privatised. The asset-stripping continued for another three years and, by 1997, British science had a stagnant and impoverished culture, creaking equipment and demoralised personnel.

Paradoxically, it also had a lively national festival of science, engineering and technology, and a separate, slightly later funfair in Edinburgh, both of which attracted crowds of buzzing schoolchildren and delighted adults. The science community took Waldegrave's crust not as a sop but a challenge, and began to campaign for the re-election of reason and curiosity to the national debate. Thatcherite logic had argued that, if the economy really needed research, the market would provide it. No such thing happened. France, Germany, Japan and the US went on increasing investment in R&D while Britain became the place for merchant bankers and estate agents. But a freshly politicised community had by then understood that, in a democracy, science had to speak up, and so – at their successive jamborees – scientists did just that. They spelled out how information technology was forging a society in which knowledge was the real capital, and economic growth the interest that it accrued.

Here we go again. Last week the Royal Society reminded us that, while British science again faces cuts, France, Germany and the US are spending more than ever. Meanwhile, the inventor James Dyson urged the Tories not to cut the tax credits that support R&D. Peter Mandelson showed some sign of listening in an interview at the weekend, but that anyone should even need to make the argument shows how quickly forgotten have been the lessons of the past 30 years. Instead of paying university bosses the super-salaries we report on today, Britain must celebrate its scientists, because if the voters do, then so, eventually, will the politicians. We need our science festivals more than ever.

Average volume of sales increased by 22%, with South America and south-east Asia seeing the biggest rises

The worldwide arms race has accelerated, most dramatically in South America and south-east Asia, despite the economic and financial slump, according to a report published today.

The average volume of arms sales increased by 22% over the past five years, compared to the previous five-year period, says the report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The last two of these years were marked by worldwide economic turbulence which has far from stabilised, yet the arms trade is booming, it finds.

The report does not give the cost of the arms trade because most governments no longer release the figures. Britain stopped publishing the cost of its arms sales last year.

The US remains the world's top arms exporter, accounting for 30% of the total, followed by Russia (23%), Germany (11%), and France (8%).

Britain, with 4%, saw a fall in the volume of its exports, as the delivery of 72 of its Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft to Saudi Arabia was only just getting under way in the period covered by the report.

Germany's arms exports have risen by more than 100%, mainly because of sales of armoured vehicles, says the report.

Arms sales to South America rose by 150%, raising the spectre of an arms race in the region. Last year Venezuela received $2.2bn (£1.4bn) in credit from Russia for the purchase of air defence systems, artillery, armoured cars, and tanks.

Mark Bromley, SIPRI researcher and Latin America expert, said: "We see evidence of competitive behaviour in arms acquisitions in South America. This clearly shows we need improved transparency and confidence-building measures to reduce tension in the region."

In south-east Asia, arms sales to Indonesia and Malaysia increased significantly, while Singapore became the first country in the region to be among the world's top 10 arms importers, since the end of the Vietnam war.

SIPRI Asia expert Siemon Wezeman said: "In 2009, Vietnam became the latest south-east Asian state to order long-range combat aircraft and submarines." He added: "The current wave of acquisitions could destabilise the region, jeopardising decades of peace."

China was the world's biggest arms importer over the past five years, with 9% of the total, followed by India, South Korea, the UAE and Greece, traditionally a big weapons importer and now immersed in a serious economic crisis.

Combat aircraft accounted for 39% of major US weapons sales over the past five years, and for 40% of Russian arms sales, according to today's report.

The report also warns that deliveries of combat aircraft could fuel an arms race in the Middle East, north Africa, South America and south Asia. Meanwhile, Pakistan is importing the first batch of 300 combat aircraft from China and an early warning aircraft from Sweden.

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