Scientists have reconstructed in detail the collapse of the Eurasian ice sheet at the end of the last ice age. The big melt wreaked havoc across the European continent, driving home the original Brexit 10,000 years ago.

The Eurasian ice sheet was an enormous conveyor of ice that covered most of northern Europe some 23,000 years ago. Its extent was such that a skier could have traversed 4,500 km continuously across its expanse from the far southwestern isles in Britain to Franz Josef Land in the Siberian Arctic. Its existence had a massive and extremely hostile impact on Europe at the time.

This ice sheet alone lowered the global sea level by over 20 meters. As it melted and collapsed, it caused severe flooding across the continent, led to dramatic sea level rise, and diverted mega-rivers that raged on the continent. A new model investigating the retreat of this ice sheet and its many impacts has just been published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The connection between slowed walking speed and declining mental acuity appears to arise in the right hippocampus, a finger-shaped region buried deep in the brain that is important to memory and spatial orientation, according to research from the University of Pittsburgh.

The findings suggest that older patients may benefit if their doctors regularly measure their walking speed and watch for changes over time, which could be early signs of cognitive decline and warrant referral to a specialist for diagnostic testing.

"Prevention and early treatment may hold the key to reducing the global burden of dementia, but the current screening approaches are too invasive and costly to be widely used. Our study required only a stopwatch, tape, and an 18-foot-long hallway, along with about five minutes of time once every year or so,"

says lead author Andrea Rosso, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh.

A leading eco-toxicologist has warned that the quantity of synthetic chemicals entering our watershed is feminizing fish populations to such a degree that several species now boast transgender and intersex fish, with eggs in their testicles.

"If you look in terms of what gets into a fish's liver or gonad, the analysis of the chemicals it contains is a bit of a blueprint in terms of what's flushed down the toilet," Professor Charles Tyler, of the University of Exeter said, speaking to The Independent.

"We're starting to establish not just effects on gender, but that they can also affect other physiological processes in the fish as well," he added.

Tyler will give a keynote speech on the topic of 'transgender' or 'intersex' fish at the 50th Anniversary Symposium of the Fisheries Society in the British Isles at Exeter University from July 3 to 7.

Europe's most active volcano welcomes tourists every day, but now it's hosting some rather unusual visitors - lunar robots whose skills are being tested for future landing missions on the moon and Mars.

Located on the Italian island of Sicily, Mount Etna exhibits seismic activity similar to what scientists believe will be found on the Earth's lunar satellite.

"We choose Etna because the volcanic, the seismic [activity] here is near that [which] we could expect it to be on the lunar surface," researcher Armin Welder told Reuters.

Scientists from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS) have agreed to develop software that will combine information from all experiments carried out in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border.

"Scientists of the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of SB RAS and CERN signed an agreement on developing software, which is designed to unify information platforms of all experiments of the Large Hadron Collider. It is called CRIC - Computing Resource Information Catalog, and it will start operating in CERN at the end of 2017," read the press release from the SB RAS official site.

Around A.D. 79, Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia that concrete structures in harbors, exposed to the constant assault of the saltwater waves, become "a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger."

He wasn't exaggerating. While modern marine concrete structures crumble within decades, 2,000-year-old Roman piers and breakwaters endure to this day, and are stronger now than when they were first constructed. University of Utah geologist Marie Jackson studies the minerals and microscale structures of Roman concrete as she would a volcanic rock. She and her colleagues have found that seawater filtering through the concrete leads to the growth of interlocking minerals that lend the concrete added cohesion. The results are published today in American Mineralogist.

Roman concrete vs. Portland cement

Romans made concrete by mixing volcanic ash with lime and seawater to make a mortar, and then incorporating into that mortar chunks of volcanic rock, the "aggregate" in the concrete. The combination of ash, water, and quicklime produces what is called a pozzolanic reaction, named after the city of Pozzuoli in the Bay of Naples. The Romans may have gotten the idea for this mixture from naturally cemented volcanic ash deposits called tuff that are common in the area, as Pliny described.

Within three decades people will no longer be having sex to procreate, a professor from Stanford University has said.

Hank Greely, the director of Stanford's Law School's Center for Law and the Biosciences, believes the reproductive process will begin with parents choosing from a range of embryos created in a lab with their DNA.

Although this can already take place, Mr Greely believes it will become far cheaper to do so and couples will opt for this method to prevent diseases.

The process involves taking a female skin sample to create stem cells, which is then used to create eggs. These eggs are then fertilised with sperm cells, resulting in a selection of embryos.

Stephen Hawking thinks President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement and the British Brexit decision might trigger a chain of events which leads to the destruction of the world. My question - where is the evidence?

Hawking says Trump's climate stance could damage Earth

By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News
2 July 2017

Stephen Hawking says that US President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement could lead to irreversible climate change.

Prof Hawking said the action could put Earth onto a path that turns it into a hothouse planet like Venus.

He also feared aggression was "inbuilt" in humans and that our best hope of survival was to live on other planets.
...
In its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC authors wrote: "The precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger tipping points (thresholds for abrupt and irreversible change) remain uncertain, but the risk associated with crossing multiple tipping points in the Earth system or in interlinked human and natural systems increases with rising temperature."
...
"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," he told BBC News.

"Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it's one we can prevent if we act now. By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children."
...
And on Brexit, he feared UK research would be irreparably damaged.

"Science is a cooperative effort, so the impact will be wholly bad, and will leave British science isolated and inward looking".
...

Solar-powered drones could one day provide 4 billion people in poorer parts of the world access to the internet, Facebook said after a "successful" test of its drone, Aquila. The internet company intends to share the blueprints for the technology.

Facebook co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, posted video of the drone which landed in Arizona after flying for an hour and 46 minutes over the desert. The previous test of Aquila in December resulted in a crash.

"We successfully gathered a lot of data to help us optimize Aquila's efficiency. No one has ever built an unmanned airplane that will fly for months at a time, so we need to tune every detail to get this right," wrote Zuckerberg on Facebook.

The world's leading drug companies are turning to artificial intelligence to improve the hit-and-miss business of finding new medicines, with GlaxoSmithKline unveiling a new $43 million deal in the field on Sunday.

Other pharmaceutical giants including Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are also exploring the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help streamline the drug discovery process.

The aim is to harness modern supercomputers and machine learning systems to predict how molecules will behave and how likely they are to make a useful drug, thereby saving time and money on unnecessary tests.

AI systems already play a central role in other high-tech areas such as the development of driverless cars and facial recognition software.

"Many large pharma companies are starting to realise the potential of this approach and how it can help improve efficiencies," said Andrew Hopkins, chief executive of privately owned Exscientia, which announced the new tie-up with GSK.

Hopkins, who used to work at Pfizer, said Exscientia's AI system could deliver drug candidates in roughly one-quarter of the time and at one-quarter of the cost of traditional approaches.