Biology

The winner of this year’s John Maddox Prize talks about fighting to protect the planet and dealing with adversity

Female-only professorships will speed progress to gender equality in the academy, but the pushback shows how far there still is to go, says Clare Kelly

Book of the week: the continent’s ecosystems have been shaped and reshaped by alien species, says Tom Cameron

Chinese university features in global top 10 for life sciences for first time

After stockpiling land for decades, leading US university plans $1 billion (£774 million) science complex 

An otherwise strong account of America’s scientific pioneers largely forgets women, says Leslie Kemp Poole

Academia’s exacting standards on attribution are spot on. It is their inconsistent implementation that is the problem, says David Sanders

This unusual and intellectually invigorating book should be an essential starting point for feeling our way ahead in this field, says Shane O’Mara

Robert Montgomerie is impressed by a novel account of the backbone’s evolution

Describing the building blocks of life in terms of other structures plays a crucial scientific role, says Jon Turney

Book of the week: A ‘thought biography’ reveals elements that make for success in science, Rivka Isaacson finds

Nearly 50 years since war on cancer was declared, declarations of victory remain a distant prospect. Here, six cancer researchers assess the lie of the land

Cutting partner labs out of awarded grant budgets is a common but destructive phenomenon in modern academia, says Anne Carpenter

Scotland’s first black professor talks about life as an immigrant, his experiences of racism and why ‘better science makes better’

Study suggests reproducibility crisis may not be limited to psychology and biomedicine

Event will feature launch of four Times Higher Education subject rankings

The specialist in ancient DNA talks about caving, elephant birds and how tracking prehistoric genetic changes could help fix our dodgy hearts

Robert Montgomerie is fascinated by the wondrous, diverse structures that shape and support life

Book of the week: Taxonomy is a weapon wielded against myths that are difficult to kill off, says Steven Rose

Arizona State to be first university adopter of new technology, launching fully online biology degrees

The biologist on how a box of tulip bulbs encouraged her to research plants and why women must expand their comfort zone 

Tel Aviv University researchers face down religious objections with new museum attraction

World-first study suggests scientific societies may offer an underappreciated avenue for female academics to burst through the glass ceiling

Legal action should not be required to convince universities to do more to help expectant mothers graduate without delay, says John Kaag 

Book of the week: Laura Kehoe welcomes a significant contribution to our understanding of primates’ behaviour in the wild

It smacks of affirmations like ‘if you believe it, you can achieve it’, but men’s academic swagger has a dark side

Excluding local people from conservation is not the way to preserve vital vegetation, as it is they whose practices produce the ecologies we value, finds Steven Yearley

Andreas Prokop on an insect that has been vital in helping biologists to understand our world

permanent post for interim chief executive confirmed ahead of UKRI formation

An expanding research misconduct investigation has stretched its net from the chilly Baltic to an idyllic Queensland island and the grasslands of Saskatchewan

But growth in those completing postgraduate research degrees in physics appears have stalled, according to latest Hesa data

Females are the ‘biological puppeteers’ driving the evolution of allure, says Simon Underdown

Not far from the birthplace of preventative medicine, research institutes in the French capital are working together to launch a new era of technology transfer

Universities in the US dominate new Times Higher Education psychology ranking

Three scientists, based in UK, US and Switzerland, share prize for making it possible to see biological material at atomic level

Greater efforts must be made to ensure women aren’t overlooked – and to redress past failings, says Janet Shibley Hyde

A study of snakebite gives a good overview of the development of the written scientific method, says Geoffrey Cantor

Joanne Taylor and Genefor Walker-Smith on the importance of scholarly rigour – even when the media want answers fast

More than half of doctoral candidates surveyed at one university reported “abnormal” levels of stress and depression

Dundee life sciences undergraduate frustrated by lack of signs for many essential terms

Book of the week: Human actions have killed off some species but may be kick-starting new ones, writes Jules Pretty

Ability to access the cutting-edge technology needed for such research is one key factor behind the success of institutions featuring in the latest THE cluster analysis

Hotly anticipated figures on salaries show that for subjects such as economics and law, the university attended has stronger link to high earnings

Researcher talks of anger over job loss caused by federal hiring freeze

Prizes of £80,000 in unrestricted funding up for grabs for best junior principal investigators

Analysis of more than 700,000 biomedical texts reveals growing use of jargon

Book of the week: Simon Underdown enjoys a stunning view of Darwin at work on his less celebrated classic

Rivka Isaacson on her meeting with British crystallographer Olga Kennard, one of five female structural biologists whose portraits are in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection

Book of the week: Richard Joyner on a proselytiser for science who emphasised the ethical issues of advancement

Polyamory could shed light on whether love is mainly biological or social, says Jane O’Grady

Images of two beasts carried ideas about science and communication, says Simon Underdown

Only diligence and vigilance can keep us ahead of microorganisms that make us ill, Helen Bynum says

A subterranaut burrows beneath ice and sand in search of hidden depths, writes Lewis Dartnell

Bid to test key cancer findings uses a strict method to avoid bias, but this means some outcomes have proved inconclusive

Cait MacPhee on a gallop through the history of the universe, the planets, life on Earth and more

An expert’s personal guide helps Helen Bynum to get better acquainted with the fascinating ubiquitous microorganisms that live on and in us

A study focused on Singapore’s Biopolis centre concentrates on various global ‘currents’ in bioscience, says Flora Samuel

From atoll to reef, a coleopterist fears we may not know what we’ve got until it’s gone, says Jules Pretty

A biologist who spent 10 years in the African sun seeking to explain the wild horse’s pelage is in a class of his own, says Tim Birkhead

Book of the week: A study of our leviathan appetite for seafood dares to go deep and recovers pearls, says Philip Hoare