Lab briefing

The discovery of Australopithecus sediba, a new intermediate between ape-like and human-like hominids, was made in one of the world’s most well-studied fossil sites: South Africa’s “Cradle of Humankind.” Lee Berger, a palaeontologist, used Google Earth to map caves with known fossil remains and identify new ones. When he and geologist Paul Dirks visited one they came across the unusually complete remains of an adult female and a juvenile male hominid. Some 1.78-1.95m years old, they had long ape-like arms but more advanced pelvises for striding and perhaps running, like our large-brained ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus. The Large Hadron Collider works. On 30th March, beams of protons smashed into one another in the collider’s tunnels at Cern. The first goal is to confirm the existence of the celebrated “God particle”—the only particle described by the standard model of particle physics yet to be observed. But other experiments are searching for “hidden” dimensions and evidence of elusive dark matter. As these lie outside the existing model, they could prove much more exciting than the God particle. Litigation is a hallmark of dodgy science—as evidenced by the British Chiropractic Association’s decision to sue science writer Simon Singh over accusations of “bogus” cures. The Court of Appeal’s latest ruling, that “scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than the methods of litigation,” would be more heartening had this self-evident conclusion not cost Singh £200,000. The BCA has now dropped the case. Whether or not this leads to much-needed libel reform, it has exposed the BCA’s lack of faith in the “methods of science.”