There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Imminent arrival of tardigrade aliens greatly exaggerated
The half a millimetre-long creatures that look like a tiny eight-legged caterpillar are resiliant beyond imagination and fascinate scientist as much as science-fiction writers
(L to R) SEM (scanning electron microscope) image of Milnesium tardigradum in active state and a drawing of a tardigrade on a grain of sand from 1840
[(L to R) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045682.g001 and E de Laplante - Doyere/both Creative Commons] 
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
Lithopanspermia is a proposed method of life being distributed around the universe, whereby extremely hardy organisms might travel on rocks ejected from one planet that crash land on another. It means alien life forms travelling from one planet to another to start a new life.
The organisms that could potentially complete this journey would need to be very tough indeed. In the first place, they would need to survive within a rock travelling through space, which would subject them to very high doses of cosmic radiation.
The precise radioactive dose would depend on how long the rock is travelling between the two planets. Rocks that travel between Earth and Mars would be travelling so long that the dose received even deep in the centre of the rock would be enough to kill any known living organism.
More from this author
What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society
While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Nature's self-reconstruction is both intriguing and beneficial and as such merits human protection, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
