This week’s biggest stories
Not since Jaws has summer features this much excitement about a shark. We knew that Greenland sharks are quite long-lived, but there’s never been a way to properly determine their age. Not only do scientists think they’ve finally cracked it, they also discovered that one of the sharks measured was around 400 years old, making it the oldest vertebrate animal. Double champagne all round. Don’t put your glass away just yet: a team of scientists hoping to give paraplegic patients more independence found that using a combination of VR, exoskeletons and software trial participants unexpectedly experienced partial recovery of movement and sensation. There were also exciting times in archaeology this week as forensic researchers named the prime suspect in the Piltdown hoax, magic spells were unearthed in Serbia (yes, really) and Mayan tomb holding a body, treasure and tales of a snake dynasty was uncovered. On a slightly more grim note, the first definitive markers for starvation were discovered in the teeth of Irish famine victims, which will help both archaeologists and, sadly, modern forensic investigators.
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Straight from the lab - top picks from our experts on the blog network
Medicine at the Olympics: a bluffer’s guide to 120 years of medical history | The H word
In Antwerp, 1920, only a few serious injuries occurred, the most common being trauma to the testicle (three cases) alongside broken bones and “a transfixion wound of the arm” caused by a javelin.
Forget Nessie, now is the time to spot basking sharks in Scottish waters | Notes & Theories
The water was a bracing fifteen degrees and I felt the chill through my thick wetsuit, but as we finned towards the fish, following directions from the boat, I quickly warmed up. And then, out of the murk the basking shark appeared.
Ancient pigments reveal the evolutionary history of our own eyes | Lost Worlds Revisited
Reconstructing the evolutionary history of the squishy soft parts of animals from fossil evidence is often difficult or impossible, and the vertebrate eye is a prime example of this problem. This is a pity, because the evolution of eyes, which have arisen independently in diverse animal groups, is highly contentious.
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Monday Mind Games
We all forget things - but are the things that we do remember as accurate as we’d like to believe? This week’s Mind Game challenges you to test your memory.
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Science Weekly podcast
Continuing our Big Unknowns series, we ask: is time a figment of the human mind or the most fundamental of phenomena? And what do the physical laws of nature reveal about its mysteries?
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Eye on science - this week’s top video
I adore an octopus, so this week’s video of the Macduff Marine Aquarium releasing an octopus into the North Sea was bit of a treat. Look at her go!
