Latest research news

Time running out for Earth
Global warming could reach "the point of no return" in as little as ten years, and urgent action is needed now before it is too late, an international task force of politicians, business leaders and academics has warned. A report by the Climate Change Task Force says carbon dioxide concentrations will become so great within the next ten to 20 years that any attempt to reduce them will be futile.
The Scotsman

Painkiller linked to 140,000 heart attacks in patients
A blockbuster drug launched five years ago as a revolutionary treatment for arthritis may have caused up to 140,000 heart attacks in US patients of whom 44 per cent died, scientists said on Monday, making it the world's worst drug disaster.
Independent

Ancient inbreeding linked to illness
The human race owes its susceptibility to many diseases to widespread inbreeding early in our evolutionary history, new research has suggested. Analysis of the human and chimpanzee genomes by British scientists has revealed that damaging genetic defects accumulated in both species because both are descended from a common ancestor that existed in very small numbers.
The Times

The lost ancestor shared by hippos and dolphins
The missing link between whales and dolphins and their unlikely closest land relatives - hippopotamuses - has been identified by scientists. A group of four-footed, semi-aquatic herbivores that lived between 50 and 60 million years ago was the common ancestor of both modern hippos and the cetacean group of marine mammals, a new analysis of fossils has revealed.
The Times

£1.7m keeps medieval book in UK
The Macclesfield Psalter, a compendium of medieval piety and outrageously bawdy jokes, will stay in East Anglia, where it was made in about 1320, thanks to a national appeal which has raised the £1.7m to match the auction price offered by the Getty Museum in California. The Getty withdrew its offer yesterday and the book will go to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
The Guardian