Laterality is the preference of human beings for one side of our bodies; being left-handed or right-handed, for example, or having a preference for using one eye or ear or the other.

In the view of primatologist Eder Domínguez-Ballesteros, "lateralized behavior in humans may in some way have been reflected in their technological products, in particular, in the things they made. Besides, flint knapping -inherent in our genus since the first stages in its evolution- is an excellent source of information for studying lateralization in humans."

Ice cream sellers Ben&Jerry's, which are a division of a giant multinational food conglomerate, seem to have a lot of marketing leeway, because they are claiming global warming is coming for your ice cream freezer.

Many nutrition groups think global warming is the best thing that could happen to their ice cream, with its loads of fat and sugar and implications for diabetes, but they are not selling to those people anyway, they are selling to fat people who like to buy organic, or people who think ice cream is health food if it was made using free-range peanut butter, or something.

Many people today believe they possess a soul. While conceptions of the soul differ, many would describe it as an “invisible force that appears to animate us”.

It’s often believed the soul can survive death and is intimately associated with a person’s memories, passions and values. Some argue the soul has no mass, takes no space and is localized nowhere.

Shrubs are more widespread than trees in nature and on Earth. A new study explains their global success. It turns out that the multiple stems of shrubs are of key importance. This feature contributes to both better growth and better survival than in trees of similar size, according to the research team behind the study.

Shrubs with flowers and berries are popular in parks and gardens, and in nature they are far more widespread than trees: shrubs grow on at least 40 per cent of the world’s land surface while for trees the figure is only 28 per cent. Still, relatively few efforts have been made to fully understand them.

The group known as Islamic State (IS) reportedly used a sulpur-mustard gas against US troops in Iraq.

In nuclear reactors, energetic neutrons slam into metal atoms that are ordered in a lattice, displacing them with enough force to trigger a cascade of collisions. Laurent Béland,Yuri Osetsky and Roger Stoller, of the Energy Dissipation to Defect Evolution Energy Frontier Research Center at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modeled radiation damage and discovered that the number of defects ultimately created in a material correlates with atomic displacements that high-pressure shock waves generate early in the collision cascade.

Researchers produced the first molecular map of the genes that are active in the various cells of the human pancreas. They have also revealed differences in genetic activity between people with type 2 diabetes and healthy controls. 

So now we know what the news is, as expected, Hubble has found new evidence of possible plume activity on Europa. In a series of ten observations, they saw them on three occasions. Here are the images they created.

The possible plumes are in the seven o'clock position, not far from the South pole - though the central image here has another possible plume that's close to the equator.

Interestingly, they spotted them in the same position as the previous plume detection in 2012:

For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn’t, and one popular notion was that methane, with 23-34 times (yes, it is unclear) the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide, could have reigned supreme for most of the first 3.5 billion years of Earth history, when oxygen was absent initially. 

Environmentalists today are in a panic about greenhouse gases, but between 1.8 billion and 800 million years ago, microscopic ocean dwellers really needed them. The sun was 10 to 15 percent dimmer than it is today—too weak to warm the planet on its own. Earth required a potent mix of heat-trapping gases to keep the oceans liquid and livable.

Jeremy Corbyn has recently been re-elected to leader of the labour party in the UK with an even stronger mandate than before of 62% of the vote, as many of you will know. This opens up the possibility of a future prime minister of the UK who has said that he will never authorize use of nuclear weapons to kill civilians. So is he right to say this? Well yes I’d say he is right. For my whole life ever since I understood what it meant, since the 1960s, I’ve been against the bomb and in favour of unilateral disarmament by the UK. The situation is more complex for the US and if I was in the US I don't know what I'd say.