A family festival, where children learn courageous feats, helped me break my over-protective habitsOne Saturday this summer I stood in a field and held my breath as I waited for my nine-year-old daughter Sofya to jump through a ring of fire. Despite her enthusiasm, the hours of practice she’d had with expert adults and the many fire marshals on duty, I could see she was in conflict: afraid of...
Google has built a super-fast computer, but whether it can break the encryption we take for granted is mootSomething intriguing happened last week. A paper about quantum computing by a Google researcher making a startling claim appeared on a Nasa website – and then disappeared shortly afterwards. Conspiracy theorists immediately suspected that something sinister involving the National Security...
British zoologists part of global project to release 15,000 endangered partula species vital to French PolynesiaThey are some of the smallest animals on our planet, measuring from 1cm to 2cm in length. But the recent return of thousands of tiny tropical tree snails to French Polynesia represents one of the biggest reintroduction programmes ever attempted by conservationists.More than 15,000...
Half of people live five years or more with combination immunotherapy treatment, study findsHalf of people diagnosed with advanced melanoma, which once had dismal survival rates, are now living for five years or more when they receive a combination immunotherapy treatment, a study has shown.A decade ago, only one in 20 patients were still alive after five years. Most died within six to nine...
The health secretary wants to introduce genetic screening to the NHS – but many firms are already selling cheap testing kitsThe buzz phrase among a small army of biotech companies looking to get a foothold in the ever-expanding health market is “personalised medicine” or, as it’s also known, “precision medicine”. At the core of this concept is the understanding that we are all...