The Simonyi Professorship

A synthetic antivenom may one day lead to a vaccine against the bites of deadly spiders    

Once a hardened criminal, Tommy McHugh had a stroke that gave him a compulsive urge to paint and talk in rhyme – and unable to hurt a fly    

The WHO is beginning what it hopes will be its final push to eradicate polio, involving the fastest, largest roll-out of a vaccine in history    

A good year for crops has a cruel twist as billions of insects devour harvests, threatening more than half the country with hunger    

An aluminium water filter embedded with silver nanoparticles is being tested in India in the hope of reducing waterborne diseases    

We may soon reap the benefits of quantum computing now that a D-Wave quantum device has beaten a regular PC in a number-crunching face-off    

A satisfied customer writes, take the stairs to make friends, designer animals, and more (full text available to subscribers)    

A system uses lasers to detect traces of explosives left on car door handles by would-be bombers    

It took the first four-legged animals 80 million years to evolve jaws that could chew plants    

Bubbles are messy to model since their behaviour changes with size – a model that copes with this has led to the best foam simulation yet    

High-altitude cirrus form around rare mineral dust and specks of metal in the atmosphere    

Glass embedded in Apollo moon rocks hints that early Earth was born wet, and it held on to that water long enough to donate some to the moon    

All the latest stories on newscientist.com: why we couldn't think without analogies, Cleveland captives' path to recovery, Mars, galactic bubbles, and more    

A smartphone app uses face detection and a voice feature to let users take a photo without having to see the subject    

Giving old mice blood from young mice reverses the age-related thickening of heart tissue – offering a possible way to rejuvenate hearts and other organs    

The neatly defined bubbles emerging from the centre of the Milky Way seem to have been caused by cosmic winds coming to an abrupt stop    

We take for granted our ability to reason using analogies, but the skill is at the core of human cognition, argue Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander (full text available to subscribers)    

It's normal to see a former prime minister and a maple leaf gracing a new Canadian banknote – but now they must make way for the robots    

The results of the largest clinical trial of a potential autism drug are in: the drug treats some symptoms but misses others    

We talk to forensic psychologists about the mental health issues the three women just rescued from a house in Cleveland, Ohio, will have to face