Worry — it does a body good. And, the mind as well. A new paper by Kate Sweeny, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, argues there’s an upside to worrying.

Taxpayers have spent more than $3 million on unreliable academic research, as science experts warn that research fraud and plagiarism in Australia is not being properly policed.

Twenty-one research projects largely funded by the federal government breached integrity standards in the past two years, figures from the Australian Research Council reveal. The federal government body, which provides tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research grants, stopped funding three grants, recovered funding for one grant, and placed restrictions on funding for one researcher.

The role of sleep changes with every stage of life, from infancy to old age. The latest neuroscience is discovering how crucial sleep is to an infant’s growing brain, while the latest epidemiology is discovering how irregular sleep doubles the risk of death as we grow older. To mark National Sleep Week, Thrive Global spoke with some of the top researchers in sleep science to give you a map of how sleep changes through your lifespan.

Image copyright: BRET HARTMAN/TED

A British inventor, who built an Iron Man-style flight suit, has flown it at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. Richard Browning’s short flight took place outside the Vancouver Convention Centre in front of a large crowd.

Since he posted the video of his maiden flight in the UK, Mr Browning has had huge interest in his flying suit. But he insists the project remains “a bit of fun” and is unlikely to become a mainstream method of transportation.

Image copyright: SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

A study that claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago – much earlier than previously suggested – has run into controversy. Humans are thought to have arrived in the New World no earlier than 25,000 years ago, so the find would push back the first evidence of settlement by more than 100,000 years. The conclusions rest on analysis of animal bones and tools from California. But many experts contacted by the BBC said they doubted the claims.

Image copyright: OLEG YAKOVLEV

Image copyright: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SSI

The Cassini spacecraft is sending data back to Earth after diving in between Saturn’s rings and cloudtops. The probe executed the daredevil manoeuvre on Wednesday – the first of 22 plunges planned over the next five months – while out of radio contact.

Nasa’s 70m-wide Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna at Goldstone, California, managed to re-establish communications at 06:56 GMT (07:56 BST) on Thursday.

Despite Saturday’s so-called “March for Science,” the almost simultaneous release of a Second Edition of a Research Report showing the exact opposite of what some of the marchers claim to be the conclusions of climate science has brought home the Orwellian reality that the marchers have gotten their claims concerning what the science says exactly backwards. The Climate March website says their forces of “The Resistance” won’t tolerate institutions that try to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.” If the marchers really support science, they should be supporting climate skeptics, not the climate alarmists. How Orwellian can you get? The science is clear.

….  The next time a warmist starts blathering on about carbon pollution, hand him a glass of tonic water and say “Here, have some carbon pollution.” Yes, that seltzer water contains plenty of the dreaded carbon dioxide. And because the media have warned of “carbon pollution” so often, the public now confuses CO2 with perceived soot emissions. But America’s modern coal-fired power plants use advanced scrubbers to remove mercury, nitrous oxide, sulfates, and particulate matter, leaving only a mixture of water vapor and carbon dioxide to rise up the “smokestack.” Of course, CO2 is also a key nutrient for all plant life and, according to NASA, is making the Earth greener.

“[The robots] are expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts”

You might think — or hope, if you’re a nerd deep inside — that this excerpt belongs to an unpublished novel from Isaac Asimov. Sadly, at least for sci-fi lovers, it actually comes from “The Rise of the Robots”, a book that explores the impact of technology on the future of our society.

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Could advances in technology, genetics and artificial intelligence lead to a world in which economic inequality turns into biological inequality? asks the historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari. Inequality goes back at least 30,000 years.

Hunter-gatherers were more equal than subsequent societies. They had very little property, and property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality. But even they had hierarchies. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, however, something changed. Equality became a dominant value in human culture, almost all over the world. Why?

Another March for Science is tomorrow and no one in their right mind would say they are against it because of its name. First of all, you are standing against the right of people to march for whatever cause they wish. Second, you would be portrayed as someone who is against science.

I am all for science. I think the climate changes. It always has and always will. Yet I have been portrayed as anti-science and a climate change “denier” by many who will be marching for things I certainly believe in.

Earlier this month, the first installment in the accumulating list of hundreds of new peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting a skeptical position on climate change alarm was made available. Included on the list were 38 papers linking climate changes to solar forcing: 38 Sun-Climate Scientific Papers, January-March 2017

Just in the last few weeks alone, another 20 scientific papers were identified which link solar variations to climate changes, which means 58 papers have already been published in 2017.

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Doing moderate exercise several times a week is the best way to keep the mind sharp if you’re over 50, research suggests. Thinking and memory skills were most improved when people exercised the heart and muscles on a regular basis, a review of 39 studies found. This remained true in those who already showed signs of cognitive decline.

The Biobag may not look much like a womb, but it contains the same key parts: a clear plastic bag that encloses the fetal lamb and protects it from the outside world, like the uterus would; an electrolyte solution that bathes the lamb similarly to the amniotic fluid in the uterus; and a way for the fetus to circulate its blood and exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. Flake and his colleagues published their results today in the journal Nature Communications.

Image copyright: GETTY IMAGES

Many people are unsure about exactly what machine learning is. But the reality is that it is already part of everyday life. A form of artificial intelligence, it allows computers to learn from examples rather than having to follow step-by-step instructions.

The Royal Society believes it will have an increasing impact on people’s lives and is calling for more research, to ensure the UK makes the most of opportunities. Machine learning is already powering systems from the seemingly mundane to the life-changing. Here are just a few examples.