The Simonyi Professorship

How did a unique and now extinct wolf-like creature come to make its home in the Falkland Islands? New DNA evidence backs an unlikely explanation (full text available to subscribers)    

Steve Jones's scientific retelling of the Bible in The Serpent's Promise is lively and amusing, but it is hard to tell what audience the book is intended for    

Big data might one day allow us to project how conflicts will develop, but choosing whether and how to intervene will always be difficult    

If Mercury was an orange, the juicy bit would all be dense metallic core, while planets further out would be peaches with pit-like cores – here's why    

Brain cells turn out to have a timetable for genetic activity, just like cells elsewhere – but this pattern is out of sync in people with depression    

Tiny middle ear bones belonging to two of our australopith forebears reveal that the hominins lacked our sensitivity to speech frequencies    

All the latest stories on newscientist.com: dark energy, the posthuman condition, plane flies 800km without a pilot, making a Majorana particle, and more    

Experiments on iron's behaviour at extreme pressure may help explain why seismic waves' speed through Earth's core is affected by their direction    

A database of over 200 million global events could help understand and forecast how conflicts will play out (full text available to subscribers)    

Russia and six allies have blocked the move to require countries to develop policies on asbestos imports    

A new field, a new force, the power of our own ignorance? It's two-thirds of the cosmos but it just keeps us guessing, says Stephen Battersby (full text available to subscribers)    

Bioscience and medical technology are propelling us beyond the old human limits. Are Extremes and The Posthuman good guides to this frontier?    

Physicist Leo Kouwenhoven ended a 75-year hunt for the tricky Majorana fermion – a particle that is its own antiparticle – by creating one on a chip    

A plane has flown an 800-kilometre round trip in civilian airspace, controlled entirely from the ground, as the on-board pilot took it easy    

A heap of new evidence from space telescopes and underground detectors could be pointing the way to the first solid sign of dark matter    

The universe is strangely magnetic – and a process of runaway expansion at its birth can now explain why    

All the latest stories on newscientist.com, including: hunting car bombs, secret lives of bubbles, the ex-con who became a painter via a stroke, and more    

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