If you need a present for the curious person / nerd in your life, my book The Genesis Quest is what you want It's about how life on Earth began - one of the biggest mysteries in science - and it's full of fascinating ideas and personalities THREAD🧵 on where to buy it: 1/9

Feedback in @NewScientist: Some bright spark has built a robot that can pretend to serve you an ice cream, only to jerk it away at the last second. In other words, someone built an irritating robot. https://t.co/zezNVcvN6C

Glaucoma remains one of the most common causes of avoidable blindness. So glaucoma patients and specialists (including @glaucoma_uk) came together to map out a better approach to care. The result is "The future of glaucoma", which I helped write. https://t.co/uLnfQctSzc

For @NewScientist, I interviewed Christopher Bae (@paleobae): an anthropologist who has proposed two new species of ancient human, Homo juluensis and Homo bodoensis. https://t.co/07gh3EkX7h

New for @NewScientist: We have a second high-quality genome of a Denisovan: a group of ancient humans who lived in east Asia. It tells us so, so much about them. https://t.co/OBDHm4eeiW

Feedback in @NewScientist: Have you ever played Minecraft and thought "you know, I could build a miniature version of ChatGPT out of all these blocks"? Well, someone did, and they followed through. https://t.co/8mHQvl6mDd

@Nature There's also an editorial, which I didn't write, but with which I pretty much entirely agree:

New for @Nature: Here are seven examples of curiosity-driven research that had massive impacts on society. This is what Donald Trump's gutting of the US science budget could destroy - and what Republicans in Congress could still save. https://t.co/TiXSD2BC2R

New in @NewScientist: #Fibromyalgia causes #ChronicPain and we don't understand why. Now two big genetics studies have given us pointers to the real causes of the condition. https://t.co/dmeIhqnqX9

Feedback in @NewScientist: Many scientists emphasise their achievements. And then there's the researcher who wrote: "Sometimes you just kinda phone it in for a year, you know?" https://t.co/1NyORr7ZPY

New for @NewScientist: Banning phones in schools may make students a little more lonely, rather than rescuing their mental health as is often claimed https://t.co/wBUhG12YRh

Bad news, everyone: the human species will go extinct by the year 2339. At least, so says one of the silliest scientific papers @NewScientist's Feedback has ever encountered. https://t.co/p36t6zMP69

New "Our Human Story" in @NewScientist: Who were the first ancient humans to settle in the British Isles? And why did it take them so long to get there from Africa, given they made it to Indonesia much quicker? https://t.co/N9MdyurZ7b

New for @BBC_Future: In north-west England, the foundations are being laid for the world's first commercial-scale liquid air energy storage facility. If successful, it will enable the electricity grid to handle even more renewable energy. https://t.co/8uHlC2tP79

Hold your head so it doesn't explode: roses don't have thorns. Those sharp things are prickles. In @NewScientist, Feedback takes up the task of rewriting the vast corpus of poems and songs that are now wrong. https://t.co/THjLN8VXwp

Here's a strange lacuna in our knowledge: we know a lot about ultrasonic vocalisations by mice, but hardly anything about their audible squeaks. They can't all mean "oh shit, a cat" - can they? @NewScientist https://t.co/WGTMyzsr9c

Neurodiversity just got more diverse: Some autistic kids get diagnosed much later than others, and that's partly because they're actually developing in different ways. They also carry different genetic variants. #neurodiversity #autism @NewScientist https://t.co/4euG4blr87

Here I am talking about a million-year-old skull from China, and what it means for the story of human evolution, on the @NewScientist podcast. NS: https://t.co/jaSaNeMxiE Apple: https://t.co/6NKenZ1anT YouTube: https://t.co/nzisqvzebR

This is a million-year-old skull from Yunxian, China. It belongs to an extinct species of human. And it suggests that our own species had a much longer prehistory than we thought. @NewScientist https://t.co/xgDJmUgic1

How can we get disaffected high-schoolers to take an interest in botany? Why, by using the music videos of @TaylorSwift13 of course - as Feedback learns in @NewScientist. https://t.co/aPC8hLQT2o

It would mean splitting up families: separating husbands from wives and parents from children. It's a political stunt that, if enacted, will ruin people's lives. 2/2 https://t.co/W8zLqcGMgP