But glaring inconsistencies in the standard methods used to test for date rape drugs in hospitals and labs across America meant Kendall, like many other victims, would never learn what made her pass out that night — or what happened to her while she lay unconscious. A BuzzFeed News investigation has exposed gaping irregularities in date rape drug testing procedures at hospitals and state crime labs all over the country — subjecting victims to what the head of the FBI toxicology lab recently described as a game of “roulette.” And some labs rely entirely on a type of drug screen so notoriously fallible that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recommends that it never be used in drug-facilitated sexual assault cases — noting that “false negative results” caused by its “insufficiently sensitive methods” risk bringing investigations to a premature end.

Not only did the book pave the way for other natural philosophers (the word “scientist” wasn’t coined until 1834), it inspired an entirely new genre of writing: popular science. Researchers Johanthan Topham and Simon Burrows even created a database for 18th-century Swiss publisher Société Typographique de Neuchatel that reveals tens of thousands of popular science books written in French that were purchased across Europe—everywhere from the United Kingdom to Russia. In addition to Fontenelle, other science writers of the Enlightenment era include Émilie du Châtelet (who translated Newton’s work into French), chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (who created a system to identify chemicals) and Nicolas de Condorcet (who argued for the use of scientific reasoning in democratic governance).

The tube-like structures embedded within the rock.Image: A. El Albani and A. Mazurier/IC2MP CNRS – Université de Poitiers
The reported discovery of 2.1-billion-year-old fossilized track marks etched in sedimentary rock is pushing back the earliest evidence of self-propelled movement by an organism on Earth by a whopping 1.5 billion years. New research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests ancient life on Earth had acquired the capacity for self-propelled locomotion at least 2.1 billion years ago, and not 570 million years ago as previous research suggested. Image: A. El Albani and A. Mazurier/IC2MP CNRS – Université de Poitiers
Back in 2010, the lead author of the new study, Abderrazak El Albani from CNRS-Université de Poitiers, discovered the earliest evidence of complex multicellular life at the Francevillian Basin in the Haut-Ogooué Province of Gabon in central Africa.

Late Tuesday night, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent their final data uplink to the Opportunity rover on Mars. And yet from that moment on, Opportunity and its sister rover, Spirit, began plugging along the surface of Mars. When the dust storm originally engulfed Opportunity last year, mission scientists were hopeful they might yet recover the rover.

In 2017, the World Health Organisation (WHO) surveyed 77 countries and found that 81 per cent had detected gonorrhoea strains resistant to azithromycin, and two-thirds had strains resistant to one or both of the two ‘last resort’ antibiotics. That means there’s little point in just rolling out a new antibiotic like zoliflodacin on its own – gonorrhoea has already developed resistance to penicillin, spectinomycin, tetracycline and now ceftriaxone and azithromycin too. Bacterial cultures can help confirm that an infection actually is gonorrhoea, while sophisticated molecular tests or DNA sequencing can identify whether the bacteria is vulnerable to the usual antibiotics, or whether new ones will have to be used.

In Cascadia, for example, slow slip events registering as magnitude 6.0 quakes can last two or three weeks and can repeat every 15 months, on average. There is a chance that slow slip events are driven by strange mechanical properties of fault material that we simply don’t yet understand. The International Ocean Discovery Program has also drilled into the subduction zone there to directly sample the sediments involved with these slow slip events, while also sending seismic waves through the region to better map out the fault networks there.

Beaton and her colleagues have launched a trial to try to disrupt the progression from strep infection to heart disease. By the time people in Uganda get a diagnosis of rheumatic heart disease, Beaton says, 85% are in a severe condition. Overall, the trial has screened the hearts of more than 102,000 schoolchildren, reaching its goal of finding 916 kids with early-stage rheumatic heart disease who can be enrolled into the next stage, being randomly assigned into one of two groups.

The objection to this theory is that ape tickle-play vocalisations don’t sound like human laughter at all – they are more like heavy breathing, with inhalations and exhalations equally audible. By contrast, when humans meet up on social occasions, the most frequent sounds you’re likely to hear are not grunts and screams but ripples of laughter. This has become so habitual that our instinctive social signals, inherited from our primate ancestors, have been largely repurposed: the tense primate fear-grin has given way to the relaxed human smile, while the angry mobbing cry has transformed into uproarious laughter.

We know that humans have gone 25,000 miles per hour going to the moon—the speed itself is not an issue, it was mainly the acceleration to get out of the Earth’s atmosphere that they had to endure. The two programs I was involved with, the Red Bull Stratus and the space dive—the goal was for a human without a vehicle to break the speed of sound, and that was accomplished because they wore a pressure suit. The reason they didn’t have aerodynamic flail issues was that there’s very little atmosphere above a hundred thousand feet
You can attain very high speeds—at least supersonic ones—as long as you’re protected, or (if you’re free falling from space) you’re at an atmospheric density that’s not going to cause that flail to develop.

The bird hospital is one of several built by devotees of Jainism, an ancient religion whose highest commandment forbids violence not only against humans, but also against animals. Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. Read: What mirrors tell us about animal minds Singh told me this crow would soon move upstairs, to one of the roof’s exposed cages, where the birds have more space to test their still-fragile wings, in view of an open sky that must surely loom large in a bird’s consciousness.