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Each discipline within the natural sciences aims to produce knowledge about different aspects of the natural world. In this sense, each discipline within the natural sciences will tweak its methodology somewhat to fit its particular purpose and scope. Nevertheless, all disciplines within the natural sciences will broadly have a shared underlying scope, methodology and purpose.

You arguably trusted your teachers and believed that what they told you in science class was true. But under which circumstances should we accept second hand scientific knowledge? The motto of Britain's very first scientific society  (The Royal Society)  is "Nullius in Verba", which means "Take nobody's word for it".  One of the key features of the natural sciences is the necessity of being able to prove what you claim. Good science does not only require proof. It also actively invites peer-review and even falsification. For example, if your teacher claims that starch will turn blue when mixed with iodine, you will want to test this yourself. Within the natural sciences, you should be able to repeat experiments to see if a hypothesis is correct. But what should you conclude when an experiment 'does not work'? If this happens in you science lesson, you may have made a mistake.

In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, according to researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust.

Scientists found the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab medications led to a reduction in the size of tumours in terminally-ill head and neck patients. In some, their cancer vanished altogether, with doctors stunned to find no detectable sign of disease.

the immunotherapy treatment also triggered far fewer side-effects compared with the often gruelling nature of “extreme” chemotherapy,

An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold. "Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."

Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says.

That was the purpose of a recent oral history event at the Royal Society, involving four senior scientists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than simply reminiscing, they were asked to recall their publishing experiences in scientific periodicals over the last fifty years. How have things changed since they published their first paper?

It became clear that the hierarchy of journals has changed over the last fifty years, and the pressure to publish in those considered to have the highest impact has increased considerably, partly a result of the increased volume of data being produced and the need for readers to filter relevant information from the copious amounts of less pertinent stuff available.

What have also changed are the technologies available to write a paper. Frith related the process she went through in writing her first paper: “I wrote my papers by long hand and then typed them myself.” Writing a biological paper before computers is one thing, but Ashmore remembered the problems of producing mathematical formulae in a typed manuscript, explaining that “you wrote the paper and probably took it along to somebody to be typed… And then it came back with spaces where you had to write in the equations.”

A group of scientists and economists is calling for the equivalent of the Apollo space programme to produce cheap, clean energy.

Their report, launched at London’s Royal Society, says on current projections the world will exceed the 2C danger threshold of climate change by 2035.

Some experts believe that energy technology has developed so fast that it simply needs further price support to keep volumes rising and costs falling.

A new study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that the way sleep patterns change with age may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors survive the night by ensuring one person in a community was awake at all times. The researchers called this phenomenon the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis,” suggesting that an older member of a community who woke before dawn might have been crucial to spotting the threat of a hungry predator while younger people were still asleep. It may explain why people slept in mixed-age groups through much of human history.

The Hadza sleeping environment may have similarities to that of earlier humans, researchers said. They sleep outdoors or in grass huts in groups of 20 to 30 people without artificially regulating temperature or light. These conditions provide a suitable window to study the evolutionary aspects of sleep.

more than 220 total hours of sleep observation, researchers found only 18 minutes when all adults were sound asleep simultaneously. Typically, older participants in their 50s and 60s went to bed earlier and woke up earlier than those in their 20s and 30s. On average, more than a third of the group was alert, or lightly dozing, at any given time.

In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

The other big danger that comes from kids communicating more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. “Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone’s face,”

For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.

While modern science is built on the primacy of empirical data — appealing to the objectivity of facts — actual progress requires determined partisans to move it along.

Why wasn’t it the ancient Babylonians putting zero-gravity observatories into orbit around the earth,” Strevens asks, “the ancient Greeks engineering flu vaccines and transplanting hearts?”

transforming ordinary thinking humans into modern scientists entails “a morally and intellectually violent process.”

It’s tough out there for a mouse

Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.

Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.