Richard Dawkins's review of The Social Conquest of Earth, by Edward O Wilson (WW Norton, £18.99, May)

The beauty of creation: an interview with Richard Dawkins
COSMOS Managing Editor, Heather Catchpole, caught up with Richard Dawkins to discuss evolution, the origin of life and his plans for his next book.

What kind of meta-ethical foundation has Dawkins provided for his ‘moral home’?

[Journalists] seem to feel let down when they discover that the real people aren't anything like the way they so relentlessly portray us; as if, since they've gone to the trouble of inventing extravagant caricatures of us, we should at least have the decency to live up to them in real life.
Also in Polish

Whatever else the Bible might be – and it really is a great work of literature – it is not a moral book and young people need to learn that important fact because they are very frequently told the opposite.

(Phys.org) -- In the course of its evolution, the architecture of the mouse brain may have barely changed. Similar to the tiny ancestors of modern mammals that lived about 80 million years ago, nerve cells in the mouse visual cortex are densely packed in a small area of ​​the brain. However, during the subsequent evolution of larger brains the architecture of the cerebral cortex was radically restructured. This is the conclusion of an international team of researchers led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, the University of Göttingen and the Bernstein Center Göttingen. The brains of larger mammals, such as humans, however, have a completely different structure to those of mice. Processes of self-organisation led to the emergence of modules in which neurons conjointly are responsible for specific tasks.

An "annular eclipse" will be visible from a 240 to 300km-wide swathe of Earth stretching from Asia across the Pacific to the western US on Monday.

Researchers in Spain have found that many of the individuals claiming to see the aura of people actually present the neuropsychological phenomenon known as "synesthesia".