The Simonyi Professorship

The tornado that struck Oklahoma City in the US on Monday was unusually large and powerful, and it came down at a bad time of day    

Leading authority on the chemistry of liquid crystals whose work led to the development of the ubiquitous LCD

The public gauges scientists by how their research affects everyday lives. The legacy of Professor George Gray, the world's leading authority on the chemistry of liquid crystals, could be measured by the quality of televisions, mobile phones and MP3 players and, at a deeper level, how we communicate with each other, whether through Twitter, Facebook or Skype. George, who has died aged 86, invented stable liquid crystal materials and in doing so unlocked the development of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) as everyday consumer items.

He was born in Denny, Scotland, to John, a pharmacist, scientist and botanist, and his wife, Jessie. After graduating with a degree in chemistry from the University of Glasgow in 1946, he moved to University College Hull, an outpost of the University of London, to take up the post of assistant lecturer. With the guidance of Sir Brynmor Jones he studied for his PhD in the new topic of liquid crystals. After graduation he spent the next decade laying down the rules on the design and preparation of liquid crystals formed by organic compounds, culminating with the publication, in 1962, of his book Molecular Structure and the Properties of Liquid Crystals, the first English text on the subject.

By the mid-1960s, George found it difficult to find support for his work on liquid crystals. With provision from the Medical Research Council and Reckitt and Sons (now Reckitt-Benckiser, a Hull-based consumer goods company), he moved his research into the closely related study of the chemistry of the cell walls of bacteria.

Towards the end of the 1960s, there were worries that the licensing of colour cathode ray tubes for TVs was costing the country more money than it took to develop Concorde. John Stonehouse, who was minister for technology and postmaster general, encouraged the scientists at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern to develop new technologies to replace such devices. Liquid crystals were already in the mind of senior scientist Cyril Hilsum as a leading candidate for exploration in displays, and potential exploitation, if only he could obtain suitable and stable materials.

At a scientific meeting Cyril met George, and subsequently the University of Hull, as it had become in 1954, was awarded a research contract by the Ministry of Defence to investigate "substances exhibiting liquid-crystalline states at room temperatures". George appointed two researchers, Ken Harrison and John Nash, and within two years they had success – not by designing favourable structures into molecules, but by leaving parts out, and so the stable cyanobiphenyls were born. They became the workhorses in the development of modern flat panel displays and inspired the creation of an international industry, such that now there are more liquid crystal displays in the world than there are people.

After the invention of cyanobiphenyls, more developments followed, including materials for colour-change thermometer strips, large screen LCD TVs and the eyepieces of digital cameras. In addition to technological developments, George made many fundamental contributions on the true nature of matter, including discoveries of new liquid crystal phases and their properties. His original research was published in more than 300 scientific papers and patents, and several textbooks.

George spent nearly his entire career in science at Hull, moving to work for Merck Chemicals at Poole in 1990. His research at Hull brought recognition to the university in the Queen's award for technological achievement in 1979, the first award of its type to a university, and, in 2005, a Historical Chemical Landmark was awarded to the university by the Royal Society of Chemistry to commemorate more than 50 years of liquid crystal research.

George won many awards for his research, including the Kyoto prize in 1995, and he became a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Irish Academy of Sciences. He was appointed CBE in 1991. Apart from his many honorary doctorates and medals for research, George was proud to have a train, which regularly ran from Hull to London, named after him.

George was once asked what advice he had for young scientists. He replied: "Science is a difficult field that demands great effort and dedication, but if you are willing to make the effort, there is much to gain."

He married Marjorie Canavan in 1953 and they were a warm, fun-loving couple. Marjorie died two weeks before George. Their daughters Veronica and Caroline survive them. Another daughter, Elizabeth, predeceased them.

• George William Gray, chemist, born 4 September 1926; died 12 May 2013

• Chemistry
• People in science
• Television
• Computing
• Scotland
• University of Hull
• Chemistry

John GoodbyPeter Raynes
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Farmers know that shrubs and trees can increase yields and act as a ready source of firewood. But the lack of data means the scientific and extension community are yet to be convinced

There's a received wisdom that tree stumps, shoots and bushes should be cleared from a field before planting crops. It seems logical, but the experience of farmers in southern Niger suggests otherwise. There, the practice of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) has been found to significantly improve soil quality and crop yields, along with additional resources and income from tree products.

FMNR takes advantage of living underground root systems of previously cleared trees. Rather than remove new shoots, farmers practicing FMNR will nurture five or so of the strongest, most upright stems, pruning the rest away. These stems are allowed to grow, and some are harvested for firewood and timber.

The presence of shrubs and trees helps fix nitrogen in the soil and lessens wind erosion so that seeds don't blow away and have to be replanted, while falling leaves scattering around fields enrich the soil.

The practice was first introduced in Niger in the 1980s on a small experimental scale in response to widespread drought and land degradation, and a new publication by the World Agroforestry Centre describes how transformational this straightforward practice has been.

It cites a farmer from the Maradi region in southern Niger who estimates that most farmers were getting yields of around 150kg of millet per hectare before FMNR became widespread. Many now get more than 500kg.

"The trees also increase the infiltration rate, and farmers are finding their local water table is going up," says Dennis Garrity, UN Drylands Ambassador and a senior fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre.

"This is all counter-intuitive to the paradigm of conventional agriculture, where we segregate crops and trees so they don't compete. Extension services have generally been brought up in the northern paradigm, so we still run up against that conventional paradigm that you ought to clean your fields and grow your crops like a nice crop of corn in Iowa."

That approach makes sense for northern climates with a short growing season, but in sub-Saharan Africa there's more scope for mixing tree and field crops. The local Faidherbia albida (or "gao") tree, for instance, sheds its leaves just before the planting season, enriching the soil.

"You can choose appropriate species such as these that are compatible with crops and if you manage the density and canopy appropriately you can get these dramatic benefits, which increase household income and crop production," says Garrity.

Tree management has been practised for centuries in Africa and elsewhere but the integration of existing trees into farms fell away as a result of extension practices which encouraged "clean" fields.

Since FMNR began to be encouraged in the 1980s, a previously barren area of around 5m hectares has now returned to significant levels of tree cover. These trees translate into income: the World Agroforestry Centre estimates the value of tree products among sampled households practising FMNR in Niger at about $1,000 (£650) each per year.

Crucially, the system also frees women from having to search off the farm for firewood. Instead, firewood and other tree products can be harvested on the farm itself, and also sold for additional income.

One of the drivers for scaling this up in Niger was the relaxation of strict forestry codes. Previously, farmers had no legal right to trees on their land. The enforcement of these laws gradually faltered from the 1980s, which emboldened farmers to adopt techniques such as FMNR, and by 2004 Niger's forestry law had been revised.

This is a common issue in many countries, and according to Chris Reij, a senior fellow of the World Resources Institute, it's one area where development actors can make a difference.

"Farmers are motivated when they perceive ownership of their on-farm trees," he says. "We are trying to create a grassroots movement around regreening, involving CSOs and NGOs, and are also discussing with national policymakers the need for adequate forestry legislation."

Another important issue is how to encourage adoption of the practice. In Niger, scaling up has been achieved through farmer-to-farmer learning and radio-based awareness raising. The spread can be rapid, because once a farmer adopts the practice, the impact is seen quickly, says Reij.

"Once a farmer decides to protect and manage natural regeneration, he will have to prune a tree possibly in the first year, and certainly the second year. The prunings can then be used as firewood in the kitchen. The first benefits in the field can be visible in the second year."

FMNR has also been taken up by farmers in other countries including Senegal, Burkina Faso and Mali. However, a paucity of strong data on it is still a stumbling block for development actors, according to Garrity, although DfID's recent UK climate week award for its Evergreen Agriculture project signals growing recognition of agroforestry techniques in the donor community.

"We know it's attractive to farmers, but convincing the scientific and extension community is more difficult. Development organisations want solid data to base their judgements on. We're increasingly doing research on yield, soil and water conservation benefits to fill those gaps."

As that evidence base grows, more widespread adoption of FMNR may depend on development actors continuing to help advocate for supportive forestry legislation where necessary, and also helping to develop supportive institutional environments within communities.

"As soon as farmers start to protect and manage trees, they need an affinity institution such as village organisations around it to set the rules for managing and protecting those trees, or farmers expose themselves to the risk of theft by those who don't do so," says Reij. "FMNR is low-cost and high-impact, and the actual technical part is simple. It's the institutional part that is a bit more complex."

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• Farming and food security
• Trees and forests
• Agriculture
• Farming

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The first 3D-printed copies of real human hearts will help surgeons prepare to work on the problems of the originals    

The race is on to revamp the accelerator that found the Higgs boson, doubling its energy by February 2015. Michael Brooks samples the action at CERN (full text available to subscribers)    

A comic yet scientifically accurate "Where's Wally"-style examination of how the human body factory works.

Everyone is curious to learn how their body works, but understanding the details can often be a daunting task. But a new children's book rises up to meet this challenge, and it does so admirably: Human Body Factory by Dan Green [Kingfisher – An imprint of Macmillan Children's Books, 2012; Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK; Amazon US]

The author compares the human body to a factory filled with different departments (organ systems), each employing hundreds (thousands?) of workers busy with their own special tasks. Although this book does present anatomy, it focuses primarily on physiology -- the function -- of the human body, making it into an excellent companion volume to the book, Build the Human Body by Richard Walker, which focuses mainly on the body's structure. (Read my review.)

Detailed full-colour cartoons make this charming book into the "Where's Wally?" of the human body; where you'll discover amusing details such as the workers in dinghies mixing gastric juices in the stomach with a giant whisk, park rangers on the skin keeping things clean amongst glades of gently swaying hairs and sweat-gland sprinklers, or the worker hurrying to patch up a leaky blood vessel whilst a vampire lurks nearby, holding out an empty pitcher. As you explore the many "departments" that are essential to keep you functioning, you will learn interesting facts to share with your friends, such as what makes pee yellow-coloured, the number of bacteria residing in the average human mouth, and what is the body's largest organ.

Having taught anatomy & physiology in several universities, I was impressed by the accuracy and depth of scientific detail in this book. Despite being targeted to children, this charming book reminds me of Margaret Matt's and Joe Ziemian's excellent "Human Anatomy Coloring Book" that is often a recommended learning supplement for university biology and premed students.

This oversized hardcover is 48 pages long, and includes a glossary and index. A large full-colour poster summarising the material presented in the book is attached to the inside back cover. Shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society's Young People's Book Prize, this book will provide hours of education and entertainment for children and adults alike! Highly recommended!

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

GrrlScientist is an evolutionary biologist, ornithologist and freelance science writer who writes about the interface between evolution, ethology and ecology, especially in birds. As a judge who helped select the 2013 Royal Society Young People's Book Prize shortlist, she also has a deep passion for good books, especially good science books, which she reviews with some regularity. You can follow Grrlscientist's work on her other blog, Maniraptora, and also on facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and of course, twitter: @GrrlScientist

GrrlScientist
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The Bonobo and the Atheist and How Animals Grieve show that we must be careful when studying animals to learn about the origins of human traits and behaviours    

The climate sceptic's interpretation of my study as final endorsement of his position means we can move on

It isn't often, as a climate scientist, that you find your research being enthusiastically endorsed by climate sceptic Matt Ridley in the Times. We published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday giving a new best estimate of 1.3C for the warming expected due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the time when carbon dioxide levels reach double what they were before the industrial revolution (known as Transient Climate Response, or TCR).

Ridley is excited about this, because he feels it means that until his teenage children reach retirement age, they won't have to worry about global warming. And he is worried that government policies are misguided because they place their faith in climate models, like one of the Met Office models that puts the warming instead at 2.5C, almost twice our estimate.

But no one places their faith in any single climate model, and no one has done so for 20 years. Climate scienitsts are all well aware the Met's model (HadGEM2) is at the top end of the current range. The Met Office's advice to government is based on the range of results from current climate models, not just their own.

The relevant comparison is not with the 2.5C response of one model, but with the average of climate models used by the UN's climate science panel in its upcoming major report, which is 1.8C. Now 1.3C is 30% less than 1.8C, but this is hardly a game changer: at face value, our new findings mean that the changes we had previously expected between now and 2050 might take until 2065 to materialise instead. Then again, they might not: 1.8C is within our range of uncertainty; and natural variability will affect what happens in the 2050s anyway.

Despite this, our study seems to be being enthusiastically cited by Ridley and climate sceptics the world over as final endorsement of their position. If this means their position is that the most likely response is 30% lower than the average of our current models, then perhaps the debate on global temperature is indeed over: 30% is well within the range of uncertainty anyway. But that doesn't mean all debate about climate is over.

Is Ridley right that there is no actual evidence of harm as long as droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability? Try explaining to a casino bouncer that it doesn't matter you are using loaded dice because a triple-six is within historic variability – but that is a different story.

Where Ridley may well be right is that if you are confident that citizens of 2065 will be rich enough and smart enough to cope with whatever we bequeath to them; or if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway (what have unborn generations ever done for me?); or if, like Bjorn Lomborg, you discount future damages to give very little weight to anything that happens after 2065; or if you firmly believe that the "second coming" will occur before 2065 anyway – then there probably isn't much point in trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These are perfectly coherent ethical positions: they don't happen to be positions that I subscribe to, but if that is what Ridley thinks, so be it.

It is almost inevitable that a debate as acrimonious as this could only end with a firm declaration of victory on all sides. This appears to be what we are seeing. If this means we can move on from a sterile debate about the global response to much more interesting questions about regional impacts, the rights of different generations, and, most interesting of all, what to do about it, that's great. Ridley, welcome to the real climate debate.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change

Myles Allen
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Learn more about tornados, what causes them and why the one that struck Moore was so powerful

What is a tornado?

Tornados form under "supercell storms", which are very active cumulonimbus thunderstorm clouds. Beneath supercells, air rises rapidly through the atmosphere, and through a shearing process begins to rotate and form a tornado vortex.

How powerful was the Oklahoma tornado?

Tornadoes are measured on the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale from zero (weak) to five (very strong). The UK Met Office said the tornado that struck Moore city in Oklahoma on Monday was EF5. The power of tornadoes is often estimated after the event by assessing the devastation left behind.

How large was the tornado?

The width of the spinning air column varied from 100 metres to around two miles (3km).

How common are big tornadoes?

Moore has been struck by major tornadoes at least four times in the past 15 years, in 1999, 2003, 2010, and on Monday. The 1999 storm featured the strongest winds ever recorded, at 317mph.

Why are tornadoes common in the region?

The stretch of land through Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas is known as Tornado Alley for a reason. Here, the environment is perfect for spawning supercells and tornadoes. They form when cool and dry air that blows over the Rocky Mountains meets warm and moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.

Why was this tornado so dangerous?

The tornado was one of the most powerful ever seen, but other factors combined to make it so devastating. It touched the ground for 45 minutes, which is long for a tornado, and did so in an urban area, when schools and offices were filled.

Are tornadoes getting stronger with climate change?

"Tornadoes are too small-scale for current climate models to simulate, so it is not possible to say very much about how strength and occurrence might alter under climate change. But climate change means warmer temperatures and more moisture and that is providing more energy for the types of storms that produce tornadoes in a warmer climate," says Suzanne Gray at Reading University.

Does the UK get tornadoes?

About 30 to 40 tornadoes strike Britain each year, but they are far weaker and shorter-lived than those in the US. They cause little or no damage. A rare exception was the tornado that hit Birmingham in 2005, which damaged trees, houses and cars, and injured 19 people.

• Oklahoma City tornado
• Tornadoes
• Oklahoma
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• US weather
• United States
• Meteorology
• Climate change

Ian Sample
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Two baby girls who shared a liver have been separated by doctors in Lima, Peru

    

Vaccine will prevent a disease that causes severe birth defects and miscarriages in livestock

A new vaccine is being made available to prevent a disease which causes severe birth defects and miscarriages in livestock, it was announced today.

Schmallenberg virus, which emerged in the Netherlands and Germany in 2011 and has been seen in cattle and sheep in the UK since early 2012, has been identified on more than 1,700 farms across the country.

Adult animals infected during pregnancies in the autumn by virus-carrying midges, thought to have blown across the Channel, have given birth to deformed or stillborn lambs and calves.

UK farmers are the first in the European Union to have access to a vaccine against Schmallenberg, which will be available for vaccinating livestock this summer before most animals become pregnant again.

The Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) has licensed veterinary pharmaceutical company MSD Animal Health to provide the "Bovolis SBV" vaccine.

VMD chief executive, Pete Borriello, said: "This is the culmination of intensive activity on the part of MSD Animal Health and the VMD to make a safe and effective vaccine available to tackle Schmallenberg.

"Without in any way compromising the scientific rigour of our assessment process, we accelerated our assessment so that a vaccine will be available this summer."

This means it will be possible to vaccinate sheep and cattle before most of them become pregnant. This is important as it is during pregnancy when exposure to the virus can cause damage to the foetus."

The government's deputy chief veterinary officer, Alick Simmons, said: "The vaccine will give extra assurance against this disease on top of the natural immunity we expect sheep and cattle to develop after initial exposure."

• Farming
• Agriculture
• Animals

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This kit overcomes one of the main challenges for teaching anatomy by adopting a build-it-yourself approach. The book is concise, well-written and engaging and the kit is accurate and interesting and will provide many hours of enjoyment as children and adults work together to build the human body.

Sometimes, the best way to learn is to wrap your hands around stuff and ... build it yourself! This perhaps is never more important than when trying to learn anatomy, which is the reason that these courses include models and a "wet lab". But what if you don't have access to squishy things that you can cut up? This is where Richard Walker's accessible model/book kit, Build the Human Body, fills the gap [Templar Publishing, 2013; Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK; Amazon US].

This oversized hardcover book is affixed to a cardboard box that contains 66 slotted pieces to a model of a human body, printed in full colour on heavy stock. The book is 32 pages long and contains full colour diagrammes and a useful index. The model is a 3-dimensional puzzle that focuses mainly on the human skeleton (although major organs are also included). This kit allows you and your child to learn the fundamentals about the human body whilst examining its structure. This kit is an excellent companion to another of the Royal Society's shortlisted books, Human Body Factory by Dan Green, which mainly focuses on physiology -- the function -- of the body. (Read my review.)

The only (potential) problem that I foresee is the size of the book/box: it's taller than the typical bookshelf and also fills up rather a lot of space. And trying to fit the individual pieces back into the box will consume far more time than assembling the human model took, so you may wish to store them in a zippered bag for future use. Either that or never take the model apart after you've finished it.

Shortlisted by the Royal Society's 2013 Young People's Book Prize, this kit beautifully overcomes one of the main challenges for teaching anatomy by embracing a build-it-yourself approach. The book is concise, well-written and engaging and the kit is accurate and educational, and will provide many hours of enjoyment as children and adults work together to build the human body.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

GrrlScientist is an evolutionary biologist, ornithologist and freelance science writer who writes about the interface between evolution, ethology and ecology, especially in birds. As a judge who helped select the 2013 Royal Society Young People's Book Prize shortlist, she also has a deep passion for good books, especially good science books, which she reviews with some regularity. You can follow Grrlscientist's work on her other blog, Maniraptora, and also on facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and of course, twitter: @GrrlScientist

GrrlScientist
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Artificial intelligence expert Mark Bishop says a ban on weapons that can deploy and destroy without human intervention is vital    

It's nearly summertime in the northern half of the world – time to find out what the festivals are laying on to entice the rational reveller    

Do webcomics use an 'emergent system'? Maybe not but it's enough for Dean Burnett to shoehorn an interview with the authors/artists/web gurus behind Exterminatus Now in the Guardian science section

Webcomics are increasingly widespread and popular. It could be argued their proliferation is linked to the decline of print comics, in the same way that free news sites and blogging are often blamed for the decline in newspapers. Webcomics don't get nearly as much mainstream publicity though (at least none that I've seen). Even the more popular examples like XKCD seemingly go largely unmentioned in other media formats, despite their considerable success.

Webcomics are interesting from a scientific perspective. They rely on both new and ancient technology (the internet and drawing, respectively) being fused seamlessly. They seem to be based on established rules and systems that appear to be the result of a bottom-up organisation, the result of numerous individuals contributing and responding to the responses obtained, rather than some structure put in place by some unspecified authority; a sort of "emergent system", if you will, only not as profound. It's enough to shoehorn this into the Guardian science section, at least

I could be wrong about all this; I'm not involved in webcomics at all. So, like any good scientist, I thought I'd investigate. To this end, I got in touch with the authors/artists/web gurus behind my personal favourite webcomic, Exterminatus Now.

For a detailed background on how it all came about, read this interview here. But in brief, Exterminatus Now is a webcomic about a four-man team of "Men in Black" in the Inquisition: a secretive international organisation who are responsible for policing and combating the constant attempts by occult forces to enslave society. It's a mix of sci-fi, fantasy, video games, wargaming, action movies and sitcom. Also there's swearing.

And every character is an anthropomorphic animal. I probably should have mentioned that first, if anything.

It's the work of Garry Webber, Alan Graham, Stuart Edney and Martin Faulkner, or as they're known in the comic, Lothar (homicidal cyborg echidna), Virus (bookish rat), Eastwood (boorish silver fox) and Rogue (arrogant ninja cat) respectively.

Here's how it works. Sort of.

It seems there's four of you responsible for the webcomic. Who does what, exactly?

Garry: We mostly all share in the writing duties. In the early days of the comic I was probably the most prolific writer. Today it's far more even, we constantly bounce ideas off each other. We all look after our forum as well. Alan does the art but there have been times and surely will be again where Martin has drawn the comic, though presently his time seems to be spent maintaining/designing the site.

What's the connection between you and the characters? Is it that they're named after you, based on you, inspired by you? It seems like the opposite of a writer publishing under a pseudonym, where you have clearly fictional characters that are meant to be "you". What's the deal there, basically?

Alan: The webcomic self-insert is an odd convention. When we started out, a lot of webcomics were "two guys on a couch" style, where the characters were literally caricatures of the authors, hanging out talking about video games. Even non-autobiographical comics in more fantastic settings would often have characters who were clearly meant to represent the author. We also came out of the online forum scene, the user's handles, signatures and avatar pics were often used to create characters that were imagined to convene in cyberspace. These two influences meant that when we started, it just seemed natural to have the main characters be our forum handles.

Garry: For myself, Alan, and Stuart, our characters are "us" in a small way, taking our funniest/worst traits and amplifying them. Take Lothar for example. During the comics early days I was a typical 18-year-old internet user, i.e. full of self importance, righteous indignation, along with a smattering of being as dumb as a post. Lothar kind of typifies that "Internet Tough Guy" persona I put out there. It's definitely less true these days, mostly thanks to my wife putting up with me and making me calm down, but there is definitely a lot of my younger, more embarrassing self in there. Rogue is a different matter, an existing character of Martin's who is nothing like him aside from proficiency in martial arts.

Martin: As Alan says, forum culture around the time lent itself to building a character around ones username. Thing was, I'd taken my forum handle from a project I'd been working on before I met these guys, and associated myself with a character for that project. Rogue was made for some of EN's pre-existing material, and got used because he shared enough physical design traits with my existing character (Silversword) to act like a surrogate version, but was never conceived with the same over-exaggeration of our worst traits.

A lot of fiction these days presents worlds where magic and technology mesh, but you really take it to another level (angel-powered computer cores, various machine-Gods etc.). Do you have actual technical backgrounds/expertise, or is this a case of knowing the right words to use?

Stuart: I've read far too much pulpy sci-fi and fantasy, so I've gotten the feel for it over the years. My proudest moment was one comic that came to me marked "words words words" on the script Garry had, and it ended up with a full page of technobabble. I found it funny. No-one else did. But I'm about as technically minded as anyone schooled in the humanities instead of the sciences, which is to say not. I am, however, a good bullshitter.

Garry: Indeed, a good example of such is issue #322, written by Stuart. It's all techno-babble fluff, but he manages to make it at least sound somewhat convincing

From inception to launch, is it possible to say how long a typical episode takes? Even a quick, short blog takes me a few hours, lord knows how long it must take you.

Garry: It really depends on the bolt of inspiration.. A lot of the times comics come from a conversation we have and can get written in near complete form within half an hour.

Alan: An artist as plodding and ponderous as me really has no business doing a regularly updated comic. A typical strip takes Too Damn Long.

Martin: It's the drawing that takes the most time - if even our shorter 8 or 12 page storylines take a few months to actually make it to web, you can see how easy it is for us to build up quite a backlog any time one of us writes something.

How do you differ from the big print comics, your DCs and Marvels? I'd imagine you don't have to deal with the problems they have (market demographics, constantly changing writers/artists, questionable reboots to consolidate decades long back stories and contexts, stuff like that), but are there any particular issues that plague webcomics?

Alan: It's funny, we do actually have a decade long back story now. And those early strips do feel quite rough and in need of reboot. That's one of the pitfalls: being a complete amateur when starting out. I feel like we grew into something to be proud of, but those first couple years, in hindsight? Tough to look at.

Garry: I think schedule slippage can be a bit more detrimental to a webcomic than print, especially for people who make a living out of their work. If you don't provide new content on a regular basis, you will lose readers and then your source of income. We do it for fun and have recently started selling T-Shirts, but we're not big enough for us to be able to do that yet. A lot of webcomics die simply due to lack of updates, sometimes for good reasons and bad.

Stuart: Occasionally Hellboy and Atomic Robo. I find most superhero comics to be soap operas for nerds (says the nerd). I nick most of my ideas from other places.

Martin: Print comics are meant to be read very quickly. A page with very little on it is fine when the next page is already right next to it, but webcomics have to take into account their update schedule. We do a lot of work to make sure each page packs a lot of punch, both in terms of humour and story development.

I've seen mention of you having a following among the Furry communities. Given that the comic is based in a world of anthropomorphic animals, this makes sense, but do you find you have followings or fans among certain communities or groups?

Alan: Curiously, we have a small, but visible Russian contingent. A majority of our readers are from English-speaking countries, obviously. But a .ru site frequently appears in our top referring URLs, and a handful of Slavic speakers frequent our comment sections. There's even been an attempt by fans to translate the comic into Russian.

Garry: I've also found we have a few fans in military service, at least the US and UK. We previously had an application on the site that showed us where in the world our fans were, and we had a few in surprising parts of the world, including one in Israel who kept coming every week. Kinda makes me feel happy that we get people all around the world come and read our work.

Martin: The comments section, our forum – those show me some level of our demographic, but I'm never quite certain how the readership at large spreads

Do you deal much with other webcomics? I've seen mention of conferences and the like, but this is a community completely alien to me.

Alan: We're pretty insular, unfortunately. I'm wont to go off drawing and not get back to even my co-authors for days or weeks, let alone stay in touch with other creators. If a strip appears on the site, the guys assume I'm still alive.

Garry: We sometimes have interaction with other authors online, such as Alan Forman of PoisonedMinds.com, but aside from that, not really. I think the most successful collaboration is that of the "Big Three" webcomics creators. Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny-Arcade.com, Scott Kurtz of PVPonline.com and Kris Straub of ChainsawSuit.com (among others). These guys all started out separately and now all work in the same building in Seattle.

Stuart: I read a fair few, but as far as I know the webcomic community is primarily a North American one, so I tend not to dabble with it.

Martin: We tend to do our own thing. Certainly we all read other webcomics, and it's not unheard of for webcomics to reference and cameo each other regularly, or set up little rings of cross readership. At least one group set themselves up an entire publishing label to work under. Conventions, particularly, are a big thing across the states and Canada for webcomics artists to communicate with each other and their fans, and it's only been since Alan moved to Canada that we've actually found it feasible to try being a part of that ourselves.

So there you have it. Exterminatus Now, go read it and be one of the cool kids. If not that, then some other webcomic.

Dean Burnett's onlne creativity barely covers this blog and his Twitter account, @garwboy

Exterminatus Now is updated approximately every Tuesday.

• Comics and graphic novels
• Internet
• Science fiction
• Fantasy

Dean Burnett
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As the first official British astronaut, Major Tim Peake will surely rescue his first name from derision

The sickly child in Dickens and the dog in Blyton – the literary canon was never especially kind to Tims but it was Harry Enfield who finally did for them. After the "nice but dim" caricature, the "Come on, Tim" mantra that accompanied the annual Henman heroics in SW19 was waspishly dismissed as the three most depressing words in the language; and the highbrow likes of Will Self and Martin Amis felt free to trade lowbrow gags about the life-chances of Tims being constrained. Stemming from Chichester, Major Tim Peake will not entirely dispense with the home counties image, which still dogs a name that's never graced a Labour MP. But as the first astronaut who will spacewalk with bona fide British credentials, he can surely achieve a Tim take-off. Not every namesake will scale the same giddying popularity peaks, but for all a page will be turned – opening, what the Charlatans frontman, Tim Burgess, has called Tim Book 2.

• Space
• European Space Agency
• Harry Enfield
• Charlatans

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Almost half the animals onboard a Russian spacecraft died during a study of the long-term effects of weightlessness. Should space agencies experiment on animals?

    

Coombs Dale, Derbyshire: The land is scarred and nicked, like the face of a veteran fighter, but the blackthorn is smothered in blossom

The high limestone country north of Longstone Edge has its own strange energy, a consequence perhaps of the quarrying there, both ancient and modern. The land is scarred and nicked, like the face of a veteran fighter, a blue-collar countryside.

It's also rich with tales of horror, now recruited for the purposes of tourism. The notorious highwayman Black Harry, hanged at nearby Wardlow Mires, has lent his name to a network of bridleways for horse riders to explore.

Running across this landscape is the drawn bow of Coombs Dale, with its own legacy of mine workings but now a refuge for nature in the green mosaic of white-walled pasture with, in Ted Hughes' phrase, its "reluctant nibbled grass".

One moment I'm on the main road through Stoney Middleton Dale, rattling with quarry traffic, the next in an almost secret world, at the bottom of a steep-sided valley, and bathed in spring sunshine.

Coombs Dale is known for its rarities: dark green fritillaries that congregate near Sallet Hole Mine, the woolly-headed thistle, maiden pink and leadwort. The southern slopes are covered in cowslips.

Alongside the path are hazel and willows thick with catkins. But the real pleasure is the blossom smothering the blackthorn. Last month I cycled up this lane under grey skies and barely noticed them. Now I'm shrouded in their scent.

It's not just the raw appeal of the dale threaded with creamy white flowers. Blackthorn has an almost sculptural appeal, the thick thorns spreading horizontally, which adds a spiky depth to the overall effect.

Most wood is useful, but blackthorn has an intimate, tactile quality to its utility: wands, walking sticks, shillelaghs and, in the hands of Black Rod, parliamentary doorknockers.

By the time I emerge into the upper dale, the sky has darkened and a brief hailstorm stings my face while the lambs curl up for warmth.

• Wild flowers
• Spring
• Derbyshire
• Rural affairs
• Peak District
• United Kingdom
• England
• Mining
• Plants

Ed Douglas
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UK space businesses set sights on £1bn orders as Major Tim becomes first official British astronaut chosen to visit ISS

There is the urge to explore the endless heavens, there are the mysteries of the starry cosmos to solve, but above all there is the faltering economy to revive.

Of all the reasons nations give for sending their citizens into space, making money has always mattered. For British ministers, high hopes now rest on Tim Peake, the UK's first official astronaut, to inspire the next generation and boost further an industry that has defied gravity throughout the financial doldrums.

Major Peake, a former helicopter test pilot, was selected on Monday for a six-month mission to the International Space Station. The 41-year-old from Chichester, who joined the European Space Agency's astronaut corps in 2009, will blast off on board a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur cosmodrome in November 2015.

"I'm absolutely delighted by the decision," Peake told reporters at a press conference in London. "It really is a tremendous privilege to be assigned to a long-duration mission to the ISS."

Britain's space industry is a rare success story, and one that ministers see as crucial to the rebalancing of the UK economy. Since 2007, it has grown more than 8% and now employs nearly 30,000 people. The rise of the industry has prompted the government to boost its funding for the European Space Agency in the hope of even greater returns. Britain now contributes £240m a year to ESA, from which it expects to make £1bn in orders for British businesses.

For the next two and a half years, Peake will train as a flight engineer for the six-month mission, during which he will carry out scientific experiments in Europe's Columbus module, and be eligible for spacewalks. The experiments will investigate how life in space affects human physiology, research that could help understand the ageing process on Earth. For every month in orbit, astronauts lose 1% to 2% of their bone mass, and without exercise, their muscles weaken dramatically.

Peake is the fourth of six astronauts who graduated from the European Astronaut Corps in 2010 to be assigned a mission to the International Space Station. He will fly to the station with two other crew, and join three already on board.

The last mission to the space station saw the rise to fame of Commander Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to take charge of the ISS, and the first man in space wholly to embrace social media, photography and guitar-playing. His cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity, complete with microgravity guitar spins, went viral.

Asked whether he intended to follow in Hadfield's footsteps, Peake said he would tweet, but perhaps not repeat the Canadian's virtuoso performances. "I do play the guitar, but very badly, and I wouldn't impose my singing on anybody," he said.

Hinting at what might be to come, Peake confessed that a friend had offered to teach him the didgeridoo.

He has trained on the US and Russian equipment he will use on board the space station, and practised for spacewalks in a huge swimming pool used to recreate some of the conditions in orbit. To prepare for life aboard, Peake spent a week in Sardinia living underground and another 12 days in an underwater laboratory off the coast of Florida.

Peake, who has a wife and two sons, aged four and a half and 18 months, said he expected to move his family to Houston, where Nasa's astronaut training centre is based. "Tim represents the very best of British. He will become a powerful role model for the young people we need to bolster this country's science and engineering workforce," said David Willetts, the science minister. "Not only will we have the first UK astronaut for over two decades, but Tim Peake will be the first ever Briton to carry out ground-breaking research on the International Space Station," he added. David Cameron said: "I am sure he will do us proud, and I hope that he will inspire the next generation to pursue exciting careers in science and engineering."

In 1989, Helen Sharman became the first Briton in space when she flew to the Mir space station. As she had secured private funding she was not considered an official British astronaut. Three other British-born astronauts – Michael Foale, Piers Sellers and Nicholas Patrick – have also flown into space, but under the American flag.

"Whereas even just a decade ago, space was considered a 'nice-to-have' activity, today space has become critically important to the UK economy, our wellbeing and security," said Sir Martin Sweeting, chair of Surrey Satellite Technology, a world-leading manufacture of small satellites.

"The UK has a very active and very successful space industry that needs the very best engineers, scientists and technicians to maintain its position in a competitive world," he added. "A UK astronaut will, undoubtedly, act as an inspiration and role model for young people, but the visible commitment by the UK to space that it represents will also strengthen the position of UK industry amongst our European partners and send a clear message to the international community that Britain is open for space business."

• International Space Station
• Space
• European Space Agency

Ian Sample
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Vitamin supplements seem to prevent atrophy of brain regions such as the hippocampus, which waste away in people with Alzheimer's