Not telling your child that this hereditary condition is in the family can be devastating later onOn a lazy Sunday morning in May last year, Isobel Lloyd was at her boyfriend’s house, having coffee with his mum. The conversation had worked around to Lloyd’s grandma – her mother’s mother – who’d died in her 50s, when Lloyd was very young. Lloyd’s only memories of her had been hospice...

The discovery that carbon atoms act as a marker of time of death transformed everything from biochemistry to oceanography – but the breakthrough nearly didn’t happenMartin Kamen had worked for three days and three nights without sleep. The US chemist was finishing off a project in which he and a colleague, Sam Ruben, had bombarded a piece of graphite with subatomic particles. The aim of their...

Populations of great freshwater species, from catfish to stingrays, have plunged by 97% since 1970Populations of the great beasts that once dominated the world’s rivers and lakes have crashed in the last 50 years, according to the first comprehensive study.Some freshwater megafauna have already been declared extinct, such as the Yangtze dolphin, and many more are now on the brink, from the...

Use of military terminology can make people more fearful and fatalistic, say psychologistsThe ubiquitous use of war metaphors when referring to cancer may do more harm than good, according to research into the psychological impact the phrases have on people’s views of the disease.Framing cancer in military terms made treatment seem more difficult and left people feeling more fatalistic about the...