By Helen King, Professor of Classical Studies at The Open University 

Gwyneth Paltrow stirred up an interesting discussion with her latest recommendation for the spa fan: the Mugworth V-Steam. As she put it: “You sit on what is essentially a mini-throne, and a combination of infrared and mugwort steam cleanses your uterus, et al. It is an energetic release …”

By Jon Hoover, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Faculty of Arts a University of Nottingham

The killing of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh by Islamic State has been explained as an act of retaliation for the air campaign against it. But there have been many questions about whether immolation is a valid form of punishment in Islamic law – and many Muslim scholars have argued that it is not.

The UK has just recorded its second outbreak of bird flu in less than three months. At the end of November, the relatively new subtype H5N8 – which was first spotted in late 2009 in China and which has since made its way westwards as far as the Netherlands – turned up in Yorkshire.

In 1971 Richard Nixon declared “War on Cancer” with the signing of the National Cancer Act. Significant progress has been made in the intervening 44 years – and Europe has been at the forefront of many of the advances.

But on February 4, World Cancer Day, it is worth asking whether we are winning the war on a disease which affects more than 22m people annually?

First, the good news – more people are surviving cancer than are dying of the disease. The recent European Cancer Registry shows that in Europe there were almost 16m cancer survivors in 2012.

By David G. Myers, Hope College

By Sue O'Neill; Iva Strnadová, and Therese M. Cumming