It should be a vintage year for the Edinburgh Science Festival, if the Malt Whisky Masterclass is anything to go by. The festival runs from 3rd to 17th April, hosting adults-only, big-name events—Richard Dawkins et al—as well as family extravaganzas. How they’ve shoehorned whisky into it is as much of a mystery as string theory, which will (allegedly) be explained by “The Rock Doctor” Mark Lewney, while riffing on a guitar: www.sciencefestival.co.uk

Ever since the philosopher Peter Singer asserted that an adult chimpanzee has a greater right to life than a newborn human, people have argued about whether homo sapiens deserves to be top species. In Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, out on 1st April, animal behaviourist Jonathan Balcombe asks whether we are fools to prize intelligence over sentience: www.jonathanbalcombe.com

All eyes will be on Bonn come 9th-11th April, to see if international agreement on measures