This week’s biggest stories
It’s been an emotional rollercoaster, and now it has come to an end - the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission has been an incredible 12-and-a half-year journey. We’ve been following it live today. For the non-space-minded amongst you, there has been other excitement this week, most notably an incredible breakthrough in creating synthetic blood vessels that can grow and develop with the human they are implanted in - potentially transforming the treatment of children with heart defects. We’ve also seen the birth of the world’s first baby from a new procedure using the DNA of three people, a truly incredible piece of work that has resulted in “programmable” sheets of polymer, plus the the most definitive evidence yet that some people are destined to age quicker and die younger than others - regardless of their lifestyle.
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
Sharks fascinate us - but are we prepared to protect them from extinction? | Notes & Theories
The status of sharks in European seas is particularly critical with around half of all species being threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming endangered
‘Three-eyed’ extinct reptile was a bone-headed dinosaur mimic 100 million years early | Lost Worlds Revisited
Triopticus is a small animal – the preserved dome of the skull is only around 5 cm long even though it is from an adult animal, but what there is of it is very unusual.
Has a software bug really called decades of brain imaging research into question? | Head quarters
The key finding from the PNAS paper is that, one method typically used in fMRI analysis can give a much higher false positive rate than expected – in some cases, a chance of up to 70% that the software might produce a false positive when 5% was expected.
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Alex Bellos’s Monday puzzle
There was a televisual theme to this week’s puzzle - did you solve it?
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Science Weekly podcast
What happens without proprioception, our innate ability to know where and how our body is moving through space? This week’s podcast follows the story of Ian Waterman, the man who lost touch.
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Eye on science – this week’s top video
A bit of a recap of the Rosetta mission as we say farewell ...
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