And that, in itself, is part of the problem. The constant drip-feed of bad news on the environment has inured us to the litany of loss.

It's partly to break that spell, and partly because there comes a point in any spiral of decline when a line has to be drawn, that 25 of the country's leading wildlife and conservation groups have decided to pool the misery and publish a single, shocking stock-take of the British Countryside.

You can see more about the report State of Nature here but be warned, it's grim reading. More than 60% of the 3,000 species surveyed have declined over the last 50 years, including some much loved and familiar plants and animals like the lesser spotted woodpecker, the hedgehog, the natterjack toad and the High Brown Fritillary and Wood White butterflies.

The report is intended to act as a wake-up call, but it's also sparked a debate over the direction of conservation strategy. Business as usual - the orderly management of decline - is not an option according to the RSPB's Dr Mark Eaton.

"We have to make this loud and clear. The conservation business as it is is not succeeding. We're loosing this battle, and we need to get together and think about how we address that".

Time perhaps for a radical re-think. One alternative strategy being championed by George Monbiot is known as re-wilding. In his latest book , Feral, the environmental campaigner urges conservationists to abandon entrenched positions based on holding the line against development and defending ever smaller enclaves and reserves.

Instead, he argues, campaigners need to get on the front foot, actively encouraging and extending nature's access in all the places we don't specifically need roads or houses or crops.

"Re-wilding is not an attempt to return to some primeval state, that by definition is impossible. It's an attempt to allow the natural dynamism of the ecosystem to get started again, and actually if you take down the fences, block up the drainage ditches, have large enough areas of land and reintroduce some of the missing species, nature doesn't need our help at all".

Re-wilding may not be the answer everywhere, but it seems clear conservation strategies need to change. Speaking on the Today programme, Sir David Attenborough, who will launch the State of Nature report at the Natural History Museum this evening, described it as a stark warning.

"There's no single answer. What you have to do to help bats differs from what you have to do to help frogs or pond life. We've got this extraordinary expertise in destroying things, in poisoning things and in knocking things down, so perhaps it's not that surprising."

"So the animal has actually gone to the wrong panel. He's swum to the long black panel first and had to change direction to find the platform."

Deep in the bowels of Cardiff University's Behavioural Neuroscience Laboratory, Dr Julie Dumont is putting a rat through its paces in a water maze.

It is a classic test of spatial awareness and memory, but because the rat has been bred to incorporate a set of specific gene variants associated with serious psychological disorders in humans, it is also a useful model for studying the impact of conditions ranging from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to autism and ADHD.

The experiment is one of the first in a new initiative that aims to build on recent advances in genetics to develop a better understanding of the biological basis of brain function and mental illness.

Earlier this year, researchers based at Cardiff and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston demonstrated that five of the major psychiatric disorders - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, autism and ADHD - shared common genetic risk factors. In particular, two genes involved in the regulation of calcium in the brain seemed to play a role across all five disorders.

In a paper published in the Lancet and on the Today programme, one of the lead authors of the study, Prof Nick Craddock, argued that it could be used to help re-write the definitions of psychological conditions, reclassifying them on the basis of their causes rather than the descriptions of symptoms used today.

That process has now begun with the award of a £5.2m grant from the Wellcome Trust. Led by the professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University, Mike Owen, the DEFINE Consortium aims to build on the growing understanding of the genetics of brain function with insights from imaging studies, stem cell research and animal models, to create a biological model of mental illness.

"Recent findings in genetics have advanced our understanding of mental illness and psychiatric disorders in important new ways," says Professor Owen.

"The next step is to take the genetic findings and trace them into how the brain functions and influences behaviour."

A key component of this new biological model of mental illness comes from the analysis of neural cellular activity. Recent advances in the field of stem cells have enabled cell biologists like Prof Adrian Harwood to derive neurones from patients suffering from acute mental disorders like schizophrenia and study them in the laboratory.

"The genes that we've identified cause changes in proteins, and the proteins cause changes in cell behaviour. That's the arena where the important things are happening, so to understand these debilitating psychological conditions we really need to understand what's happening, the processes and biochemistry, in the context of the cell."

But not everyone is impressed with the idea of a biological model for mental illness. While Peter Kinderman, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, accepts that "every single thought anyone has ever had must have involved neuro-chemical processing in the brain," he argues that neuroscience has consistently over stated the statistical significance of its findings and marginalised the vital role played by social and environmental factors.

"The problem is that we're relying on a very reductionist way of looking at what the brain does," he says. "To say that the biochemistry is the driving force or cause of behaviour is taking the interpretation too far. Suicide rates have risen significantly since the financial crisis began, but to say that suicide is caused by a deficit in serotonin is kind of crazy."

If neuroscience has been guilty of biological reductionism in the past, Prof Owen says that is not the intention behind the Cardiff DEFINE Consortium. Building a better model of mental illness, and developing better treatments for conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autism will require insights from both biological and psychological approaches.

"It's not just the brain it's the mind as well, but we have to accept that understanding the biology, the neuroscience, is going to be a prerequisite for making progress on these conditions and in developing more effective treatments. It's necessary but it won't be sufficient," he says.

Outlining the Agency's $17.7 billion budget proposal for 2014, Nasa administrator Charles Bolden said the mission would ensure the United States remained in the forefront of space exploration and scientific discovery for years to come.

"This mission represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities and help protect our home planet".

You can watch a video animation of the proposed mission here. But the scheme is already attracting criticism: Republican Congressman Lamar Smith - who chairs the House committee that will have to review Nasa's budget proposals - dismissed the plan to "lasso" an asteroid as "creative".

Nasa's need to court support - and funding - with eye-catching or inspiring schemes is understandable. But with so many on the go at one time there's mounting concern that the big showcase missions are diverting attention from the Agency's primary scientific goals.

"The Nasa programme is looking quite lop-sided at the moment" according to Professor Andrew Coates, the head of planetary science at UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

"They're doing Mars with Curiosity obviously, but they're also going back to Mars with Curiosity Two in 2020. Then there's the replacement for Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has been very expensive with lots of cost overruns, and now this asteroid mission. It sounds fantastic, but they're missing out on some of the basic science and exploration Nasa should be doing."

It's a view that's echoed within the Nasa family. Planetary scientists like Dr Robert Pappalardo at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have grown increasingly frustrated as proposals to explore the further reaches of the solar system have been sidelined in favour of Mars and the JWST.

"For reasons I don't really understand the outer solar system, and the potential for life there, has not been a high priority".

And things look set to get worse. While the 2014 budget proposals include $100 million in seed money to get Nasa's asteroid mission up and running (the eventual cost will run to several billion dollars), yet again there's no money for the Europa Clipper Mission to survey Jupiter's moon.

It's a decision Bob Pappalardo finds hard to comprehend. If the question is life - and that's one of the most profound questions we can ask, he says - the answer is almost certainly not Mars or an asteroid, but rather the icy moons orbiting distant planets like Saturn and Jupiter.

"I worry that if Europa exploration is delayed, but then finally it happens some day, we might look back and say 'why didn't we do that sooner?' Imagine 50 years from now we get a lander there and find signs of life. All this time we'll have been looking in the wrong place".

But if Nasa's attention has been diverted, the European Space Agency is looking in some of the right places. It's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE, mission will survey three of the distant gas giant's moons looking to confirm the presence of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces.

"What we want to understand is whether the moons of Jupiter have the environments you need to support life," says Imperial College's Professor Michele Dougherty, who's the lead investigator for the Magnetic Field Instrument, or magnetometer, which will fly on the JUICE Mission.

"You need there to be liquid water, you need there to be heat, you need stability over time and you need organic compounds. We think Ganymede Callisto and Europa have all of those, but we won't know until we get there."

The JUICE mission is set for launch in 2022 and should reach Jupiter in 2030. Not long to wait for perhaps the biggest scientific discovery since Copernicus proved that the earth goes round the sun - that we are not alone.

According to Cancer Research UK some 41, 000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year, but 10,700 will die of the disease, making it the fourth most common cause of cancer death - and second only to lung cancer in men.

Given such a dire prognosis, and let's face it, given the financial profile of its victims, you might be forgiven for assuming that prostate cancer would be one of the most highly prioritised and well researched areas of oncology. Not a bit of it. Perhaps it's because men are squeamish, or don't like to talk about their health or visit the doctor, but prostate cancer has long been dubbed "the Cinderella cancer".

"We just don't make enough of it" according to consultant oncologist Professor Neil Burnet. "On the whole men are less vocal about their health, and older men tend to be even more stoical, preferring to grin and bear it. But it means men are poor advocates, and as a result prostate cancer has been overlooked".

Based at Addenbrooke's Hospital on the outskirts of Cambridge, Prof Burnet is trying to improve the targeting and efficiency of radiotherapy treatments, and to reduce toxicity in the healthy tissue surrounding the prostate. The technique, called Image Guided Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy Treatment uses imaging provided by a CT scan to target the tumour before a powerful but precisely shaped radiation dose is administered.

"What limits what we can do with radiotherapy are the side effects of the treatment, the toxicity. And, since the prostate can move by up to a couple of centimetres from one day to the next, targeting the treatment is really important. The second half of this technology is in delivering intensity modulated radiotherapy, which allows us to match a higher dose of radiation to the shape of the tumour."

But if Image Guided IMRT offers the prospect of better outcomes for men with advanced or aggressive prostate cancer, how much better might it be to get in at an earlier stage?

That - at least in part - was the motivation behind the Collaborative Oncological Gene/Environment Study, or COGES, which has announced the discovery of 80 new genetic markers for breast, ovarian and prostate cancer. In one of the largest research projects of its kind scientists from Cambridge University and the Institute of Cancer Research in London looked at samples from more than 200,000 people - half with, and half without, cancer.

The results include 23 new gene variants associated with prostate cancer and 16 with aggressive forms of the disease. Initially at least that should help with the development of a viable screening test for the disease. In the longer term it may present new targets for drug treatment and better diagnosis, and a greater understanding of the mechanisms and basic biology of prostate cancer.

"It's shocking, but we still don't have an adequate screening test for prostate cancer," says Ros Eeles, Professor of Oncogenetics at the Institute of Cancer Research and COGES study leader on prostate cancer. "That's because the Prostate Specific Antigen, or PSA test, just isn't accurate enough and you'd have to treat between 12 and 48 men unnecessarily to save a single life. With this new information we could have a viable test in five to eight years".

If that still seems a long way off, surgical techniques have advanced dramatically when it comes to prostate cancer. These days consultant urologist Professor David Neal uses the DaVinci surgical robot to perform prostate surgery.

Sitting at a computer console that looks like it would be more at home in an amusement arcade than an operating theatre, Prof Neal can perform a prostatectomy without ever touching his patient. And because the robotic arms of the device (which looks a little like a crab hovering over the operating table) are much thinner than the surgeon's, and the grappling and cutting tools at the sharp end are much smaller, what was once a major operation is now less invasive.

As with Image Guided Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue is kept to a minimum.

"The DaVinci robot has made a huge difference to prostate surgery" says Prof Neal. "It's still a major operation, but we can be very precise about what we remove and the function we're able to save. That's got to be good news for the patient".

We've come a long way since 1995 when Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz claimed the first official detection of an exoplanet orbiting a distant star - the somewhat prosaically named 51 Pegasi b, orbiting a sun-like star some 51 light-years from earth in the constellation Pegasus.

According to Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that figure now stands at 932, with a further 2,717 planet candidates waiting to be confirmed.

Much of the heavy lifting when it comes to spotting these new worlds has been done by the Kepler Space Telescope. Trailing in the earth's wake as it orbits the sun, Kepler has been staring, unblinking, at a narrow patch of the Milky Way between Cygnus and Lyra for the last three-and-a-half years - waiting for the telltale dimming of a distant star's light as an orbiting planet passes in from of it.

Kepler's share of the planet-spotting booty, according to the latest tranche of data released at the American Astronomical Society in January, is 2,740 including 114 confirmed planets.

It's an astonishing achievement by any standards, but Kepler's enduring legacy may be much more profound that its contribution to a simple head count of exoplanets. According to David Latham at the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, a better measure of the project's success would be to acknowledge that it has shifted the goalposts of scientific debate. The question now is not are there planets orbiting distant stars, or even how many, but what do these planets look like and, crucially, could any support life?

"There are planets out there, but that's not the same as saying there's life on them. How often the Universe has planets truly like the earth - true earth twins, planets the size of the earth, rocky planets with a surface that supports liquid water - well, we don't have that number yet, but I'm optimistic we'll figure it out."

Some measure of how far the scientific debate has shifted can be gauged from the extensive list of sub-clauses in the title of a two-day Royal Society discussion meeting on exoplanets earlier this week. It reads "Characterising Exoplanets: detection, formation, interiors, atmospheres and habitability."

One of the key presentations at the conference was given by Dr Giovanna Tinetti who's leading the Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory, or EChO, mission recently selected for further development by the European Space Agency. EChO will use spectroscopy to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, hoping to spot the tell-tale chemical signature of life.

"EChO won't search for exoplanets directly." Dr Tinetti says "Instead we will observe planets we already know exist. We will study their composition to see if they're really similar to earth, and we'll look at the light of the star filtered through the atmosphere of the planet to tell us about the molecules present in those atmospheres and habitability".

And the EChO project is not alone. One of five European Space Agency missions being considered for launch in the early 2020's, Nasa also has a series of exoplanet projects at various stages of development, and both the James Webb Space Telescope and ground based observatories are getting in on the act.

And because what we're finding - planets that are bigger than Jupiter or smaller than Mercury, denser than iron or lighter than styrofoam - Bill Borucki, the Kepler Mission's principal investigator, believes the next ten or 15 years is going to be even more exciting than the last.

"Everything we're finding is different from what was predicted by the theorists. We didn't expect to find planets bigger than Jupiter. We certainly didn't expect to find small planets which are almost entirely gas. So lots of surprises in every way."

Well obviously you could ask any passing nine-year-old boy, but if you can't find one of those you're going to need The Complete Dinosaur, 2nd Edition. Eleven-hundred pages of rigorously researched and engagingly presented dino-facts and figures set out in 45 chapters covering everything from the earliest discoveries to the latest fossil-dating technologies and written by some of the world's leading palaeontologists.

Everything, in fact, from Aardonyx to Zephyrosaurus: the coffee table book to crush all coffee tables.

But there's a problem with The Complete Dinosaur, 2nd Edition, and the clue's in the title. Compiling such a weighty tome is a magnificent achievement, but inevitably it's taken a great deal of time and developments in the field are coming thick and fast. As the Smithsonian's At the Smithsonian's Brian Switek points out there has never been a better time to study dinosaurs.

"New species are named almost weekly, and refined techniques are telling us more about dinosaur lives than was ever possible before. The flood of information is so sweeping that it can be difficult for even specialists to keep up".

Even when the first edition was published in 1997 it was clear The Complete Dinosaur would have to be updated. The editors, including Thomas R Holtz, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Maryland, have tried to keep on top of developments by updating sections, amending footnotes and adding new chapters rather than jettisoning still relevant original material. But inevitably perhaps even their best efforts were overtaken by events long before the printer's ink was dry.

A paper published in the latest edition of the Journal Science aptly illustrates the point. Using Argon-argon dating - a technique based on the decay ratio of radioactive potassium - researchers at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Glasgow have revised both the date of the dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago, and the timing of the Chicxulub asteroid impact that occurred at around the same time.

The new date for the impact (66,038,000 years ago) narrows what's been dubbed the 'three metre gap' in the geological record between the demise of the dinosaurs and the asteroid impact to just 18,000 years. "Synchronous to within a gnat's eyebrow" according to Professor Paul Renne from the Berkeley Geochronology Centre, who argues that the asteroid clearly played a major role in global extinctions. "The impact was clearly the final straw that provided the tipping point".

Obviously data from the study is not included in chapter 43 of the The Complete Dinosaur - Extinction: Past and Present Perspectives written by San Diego State University's J. David Archibald. In that sense it - like the latest Argon-argon dating paper in Science - is just a snapshot, a moment in time detailing the state of our knowledge on all things relating to dinosaurs.

But what a snapshot! And there's always The Complete Dinosaur: 3rd Edition to look forward to.

It looks like a smear of clumsily spilt black ink, or perhaps (for the more romantically minded), a rip in the star-studded cloak of the cosmos.

But look a little closer - as the European Southern Observatory's 2.2 metre MPG telescope at La Silla in Chile has done - and a striking image of an immense swirling cloud of interstellar dust and gas begins to emerge.

Known as Lupus 3 this dense dark cloud lies some 600 light years from earth in the constellation Scorpius. And just to give you some idea of its size the main V-shaped splodge to the left of the central cluster of bright stars is some five light-years across.

Still waters run deep however, and far from indicating a lack of activity this black and apparently empty patch of the night sky hides a maelstrom of star forming activity.

Behind the scenes, dense swirls of cold dark dust are clumping together, heating up and beginning to shine as they condense under the force of gravity. Viewed at longer wavelengths, and in the infrared, Lupus 3 shines like a torch, but it's not until the stars get hotter and brighter - clearing the clouds around them as the cluster of brilliant blue stars in the centre have done - that they emerge in all their glory.

There's more to Lupus 3, and star formation, than meets the eye.

Yes that's right, the base metal element lead, Pb, or more exactly the lead-based chemical compound Pb(CH2CH3)4 added to petrol to make car engines run more smoothly.

Research in America shows a strong correlation between the build up of lead in the environment and - some 20 years later - levels of violent crime.

Crucially the correlation persists even when the figures are adjusted for confounding factors like social deprivation and drug use, but what's really remarkable is that they even seem to reflect the speed at which lead additives in petrol were phased out.

In states and cities where additives were banned outright the subsequent drop off in violent crime was equally dramatic, but where lead was phased out over time criminality tailed off less abruptly.

Of course correlation is not causality, but speaking on the Today programme this morning Alastair Hay, a professor of environmental toxicology at Leeds University, described the research as compelling.

"I'm very impressed with the studies that have been done. The authors have been very cautious and careful to exclude other factors associated with criminality, and the thing that stands out is this rise and fall in lead levels and a subsequent rise and fall in crime.

"It's very convincing."

There's plausibility here too. We've known for some time that lead is a potent neuro-toxin that can cause significant damage to a number of organs in the body, including the central nervous system, and can lead to behavioural problems in children. After all that's why it was banned in both paint and petrol in the first place.

So perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised to find it plays a significant role in violent crime.

According to President Bill Clinton it would "revolutionise the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases."

We were "learning the language with which God created life" and with this profound new knowledge "humankind would gain immense new power to heal".

Maybe this was hyperbole, but a study published today in the journal Clinical Science does help paint a picture of what this Brave New World of personalised medicine may actually look like.

The research, carried out by Prof Somnath Mukhopadhyay, at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and colleagues at the University of Dundee, focuses on the substantial minority of severely asthmatic children who respond poorly to the leading conventional drug treatment, Salmeterol.

The drug, is found in Seretide and Servant inhalers, acts on beta-2 receptors in the lining of the airways, but previous research has shown that as many as one-in-seven children carry a gene variant - arginine-16 - that undermines its effectiveness.

"For these children," Prof Mukhopadhyay said, "the leading drug treatment simply doesn't work, and there's some evidence that their condition may even be aggravated by the use of a long term controller medicine that isn't helping".

The study showed that by substituting salmeterol for an alternative anti-inflammatory medicine, montelukast, outcomes for severely asthmatic children with the arginine-16 gene variant were substantially improved.

The children experienced increased quality of life, and attendance at school and in sports activities improved, while the number of visits to out-of-hours GPs' surgeries declined.

You can read more about the study here, but perhaps its real power comes as a demonstration of the shape of things to come.

For the price of a simple spit test - about £15 a head - existing treatments for a chronic and debilitating condition can be revised and tailored to fit a specific genetic sub-group within a population.

"For the first time, we've shown that personalised medicine can work in the field of childhood asthma," professor Mukhopadhyay says. "It's a pretty striking result."

Professor Stephen Holgate, the MRC clinical professor of Immunopharmacology at the University of Southampton, agrees.

"This is a wonderful example of stratified or personalised medicine working its way into practice. While still a small trial the results are impressive," he says.

It may not measure up to the "language with which God created life", but the better targeting of existing medicines within groups of patients may show us how the hype over personalised medicine could begin to be realised.

The technique holds out the promise of new treatments across a range of previously intractable neurological disorders, from Parkinson's disease to epilepsy. And that promise is already being turned into tangible benefits - if only at this early stage in animal models .

Earlier this month researchers at University College London's Institute of Neurology used optogenetics to suppress epileptic seizures in rats. The study, published in the journal Science, involved inserting a light sensitive gene (taken from a species of algae) into the genetic code of a small population of neural cells associated with focal seizure.

The researchers used a virus to deliver the gene, which expresses the light-sensitive protein halorhodopsin. When they switched on the lights - from a 561-nanometre laser via a fibre-optic cable - the halorhodopsin pumped negatively charged chloride ions into the cell, suppressing activity and making it much harder for the neuron to fire.

"After a fortnight," lead author Dr Robert Wykes says, "the number of seizures dropped dramatically and the animals were effectively cured. It's the first time a gene therapy has been used in combination with optogenetics so its very exciting".

That excitement is shared by the Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University, Colin Blakemore, who points to optogenetics as one of the key new technologies fuelling a big leap forward in brain science.

"There's no doubt that neuroscience is going through a remarkable purple patch at the moment, and much of that excitement comes from the combination of the knowledge coming from genetics with these new ways of manipulating gene expression in neural cells. That's really marching ahead very fast and it's driving an enormous amount of discovery."

The pioneer of optogenetics, Professor Gero Miesenbock, is now so famous he's been immortalised as a manga comic character and as a children's action figure. "Dr Gero" is a brilliant, but evil, scientist whose skull has been replaced with a plexi-glass dome so that his thoughts can be controlled with light.

"It's exactly what I do," says the real Professor Miesenbock: "optical mind control. But in contrast to my evil twin I don't lust after world domination. I control the brain in order to understand how it works."

Working in fruit flies - whose skulls are thin enough for light to penetrate easily - Professor Miesenbock has been able to identify a number of individual neural cell-types responsible for a range of activities. But as we learn more about the specific function of neurons, he says, we create new opportunities to intervene.

"One can think of many different conditions in which the ability to interfere in the function of specific neural cells could lead to very very powerful new therapeutic avenues."

It is early days, but as the UCL team's work in an animal model of epilepsy shows, optogenetics has enormous potential to deliver new treatments across a wide range of debilitating neurological conditions. It may be years, perhaps decades, before we have the first optogenetic treatment for epilepsy, but Gero Miesenbock is confident there is at least a 561-nanometre laser light at the end of the tunnel.

Scientists and politicians promised much when the human genome was first sequenced back in 2000.

In a live transatlantic press conference President Bill Clinton proclaimed that it would "revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most if not all human diseases". Not to be out done Tony Blair called it the first great technological triumph of the 21st century.

"Let us be in no doubt. What we are witnessing today is a revolution in medical science whose implications far surpass even the invention of antibiotics".

It has to be said that cashing in our chips on this revolution has proved harder than anyone anticipated, but the potential for a step change in health care outcomes remains the same.

As if to prove the point scientists at the Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute - where much of that original ground-breaking genome sequencing work was done - have delivered the kind of tangential benefit no one could have predicted at the time.

By sequencing the DNA of the hospital superbug MRSA the team, led by Dr Julian Parkhill were able to follow the progression of an outbreak in the nearby Addenbrookes Hospital's Special Care Baby Unit - the Rosie Hospital - to identify the member of staff responsible for spreading the infection, and to intervene to control and eliminate the outbreak before anyone became ill.

You can read more about the Addenbrookes case here , but speaking on the programme this morning Dr Parkhill claimed the study showed the enormous potential for gene sequencing to help in unexpected ways.

"Our study highlights the power of advanced DNA sequencing to influence infection control in real time. The technology holds great promise for the quick and accurate identification of bacterial transmission in hospital, and could lead to a paradigm shift in how we manage infection control in practice".

The study is published in the latest edition of the Lancet.

Guy Fawkes' night may still be fresh in the memory, but astronomers are already jostling for ringside seats at an even more spectacular fireworks display.

Over the next few months the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy will set about consuming a vast cloud of interstellar dust and gas - somewhat prosaically known as G2 - that has strayed too close to the singularity's event horizon. It promises to be quite a show as all the material that doesn't get sucked into oblivion will be swept up, swirled around in a gigantic catherine wheel, heated, stretched, shredded and finally fired out again in a dazzling display of gravitational power. Not something astronomers get to see every day according to Dr Karen Masters from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at Portsmouth University.

"The black hole at the centre of our galaxy is normally quite quiet, docile even, but as this cloud begins to fall in the material is going to get very very hot and it's going to start emitting all sorts of radiation. We don't know exactly what's going to happen but we know it's going to be spectacular".

The galactic pyrotechnic display Sagittarius A* (as the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is known) is about to unleash couldn't have come at a more opportune moment. NASA's latest space based X-ray telescope, NuSTAR, was only launched in June but is already offering a grandstand view of G2's death throes.

"We got lucky" says the mission's principal investigator, the California Institute of Technology's Fiona Harrison, "and caught an initial outburst from the black hole during our first observing campaign in July. But that's just a taste of what's to come next year, and NuSTAR will be there to catch it".

The excitement among astronomers has been fuelled by a growing appreciation for the role black holes seem play in limiting the size, and influencing the structure, of the galaxies that surround them.

Until recently Caleb Scharf, the director of Columbia University's Centre for Astrobiology, says black holes were dismissed as little more than - admittedly spectacular - cosmic plugholes.

"Black holes have had a bad rap. We've always thought of them as these dark, brooding destructive entities, but it turns out their influence is much more creative. Black holes help to regulate galaxies, acting a bit like a pressure valve that prevents star formation from running away with itself".

In "Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes" Caleb Scharf takes this new appreciation for black holes to its logical conclusion, arguing that by dictating the large-scale structure of galaxies like the Milky Way, black holes have helped to establish the conditions necessary for life to emerge.

But it's the other, less creative, side of a black hole's personality that will be grabbing the headlines over the next few months. "It's very exciting" Dr Scharf says "because it's the first time we've been able to predict something like this, and the first time we've had the telescopes and instruments ready to watch it in detail. We hope we'll see some of the processes at play in converting matter into energy around black holes".

The close encounter between Sagittarius A* and the G2 dust cloud is set to start early in the New Year. The latest simulations from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California suggest the massive cloud of dust and gas will have been completely consumed in less than a decade.

Quite a meal, even for a super-massive black hole.

Over the next few months the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy will set about consuming a vast cloud of interstellar dust and gas - somewhat prosaically known as G2 - that has strayed too close to the singularity's event horizon.

It promises to be quite a show as all the material that doesn't get sucked into oblivion will be swept up, swirled around in a gigantic catherine wheel, heated, stretched, shredded and finally fired out again in a dazzling display of gravitational power. Not something astronomers get to see every day according to Dr Karen Masters from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at Portsmouth University.

"The black hole at the centre of our galaxy is normally quite quiet, docile even, but as this cloud begins to fall in the material is going to get very, very hot and it's going to start emitting all sorts of radiation. We don't know exactly what's going to happen but we know it's going to be spectacular."

The galactic pyrotechnic display Sagittarius A* (as the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is known) is about to unleash couldn't have come at a more opportune moment. NASA's latest space based X-ray telescope, NuSTAR, was only launched in June but is already offering a grandstand view of G2's death throes.

"We got lucky" says the mission's principal investigator, the California Institute of Technology's Fiona Harrison, "and caught an initial outburst from the black hole during our first observing campaign in July. But that's just a taste of what's to come next year, and NuSTAR will be there to catch it".

The excitement among astronomers has been fuelled by a growing appreciation for the role black holes seem play in limiting the size, and influencing the structure, of the galaxies that surround them.

Until recently Caleb Scharf, the director of Columbia University's Centre for Astrobiology, says black holes were dismissed as little more than - admittedly spectacular - cosmic plugholes.

"Black holes have had a bad rap. We've always thought of them as these dark, brooding destructive entities, but it turns out their influence is much more creative. Black holes help to regulate galaxies, acting a bit like a pressure valve that prevents star formation from running away with itself".

In Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes, Caleb Scharf takes this new appreciation for black holes to its logical conclusion, arguing that by dictating the large-scale structure of galaxies like the Milky Way, black holes have helped to establish the conditions necessary for life to emerge.

But it's the other, less creative, side of a black hole's personality that will be grabbing the headlines over the next few months.

"It's very exciting" Dr Scharf says "because it's the first time we've been able to predict something like this, and the first time we've had the telescopes and instruments ready to watch it in detail. We hope we'll see some of the processes at play in converting matter into energy around black holes".

The close encounter between Sagittarius A* and the G2 dust cloud is set to start early in the New Year. The latest simulations from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California suggest the massive cloud of dust and gas will have been completely consumed in less than a decade.

Quite a meal, even for a supermassive black hole.

"Growing up we were like two peas in a pod." "Even our best friends found it quite hard to tell us apart".

Dan and Scott Shillum are identical twins, genetic clones produced from the accidental division of a single fertilised egg into two embryos in their mother's womb some 40 years ago.

Which is quite surprising when you meet them because - apart from sounding the same, and finishing each others sentences like an old married couple - Dan and Scott don't look that similar at all. Brothers certainly, but not necessarily twins, and definitely not identical.

"I'm a couple of inches taller, and I've got a bigger frame" says Scott. "You mean fatter" laughs Dan. "We started to drift apart physically in our teens" Scott continues, rising to the challenge, "I played rugby because I was bigger, faster, stronger. Dan was more football."

While I'm listening to this fraternal trip down memory lane, dermatologist Dr Dan Glass is scrubbing-up for surgery. We're on a ward at St Thomas's Hospital, where Dan and Scott have agreed to undergo a battery of tests as part of the Epitwin Project. Today's procedure is a skin biopsy that will be used to study the genetic markers in their subcutaneous fat.

The Epitwin Project is the brainchild of Tim Spector, who heads the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas's and is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College London. Rather than looking at the similarities between identical twins, as most of the research tends to do, Epitwin will look at the differences. Differences that explain why identical twins - who share exactly the same DNA and very similar environments - can sometimes look so different, and often develop and die from different diseases.

"We used to think the most interesting thing about identical twins was in the similarities" Professor Spector explains, "but it's the differences, the discordance, that tells you more."

Professor Spector is looking for the subtle effects of epigenetics - the chemical instruction manual that overwrites the genetic code, dictating when genes are switched on or switched off. "Epigenetic switching is like a dimmer switch for gene expression" he explains, "It's the third element in our make up alongside nature and nurture."

It's precisely because identical twins like the Shillums have exactly the same genetic code - and shared a very similar environment as they grew up - but have developed so differently as adults, that makes them an ideal case study. By comparing the patterns of epigenetic switching between them - and 5,000 other discordant identical twins enrolled in the project - Professor Spector hopes to identify the subtle differences that give rise to disease.

And this new approach is already paying dividends. The first of a series of papers produced by Professor Spector's team looking at epigenetic switching in breast cancer has identified one particular gene, DOK7, that - when stuck in the on position - appears to increase an individual's risk of developing the disease.

It's a finding that may offer both a new way to diagnose breast cancer, and a novel target for drug development that aims to turn down the dimmer switch on overactive gene expression.

The fact that genes may not be so immutable after all comes as no surprise to Scott Shillum. "It was always obvious to us that there must be something else there, because the DNA element is identical but we're very different people."

"As far as badger culling is concerned it has nothing to offer in terms of controlling TB in cattle, and could indeed make the situation worse".

That was the emphatic, and damning, conclusion reached by Professor John Bourne, the man charged with assessing the biggest and most comprehensive scientific experiment ever conducted in the British countryside - the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, or RBCT, in June 2007.

Devised by Sir John, now Lord, Krebs in 1996, the RBCT involved the slaughter of thousands of badgers over a ten year period at a cost of some £50 million.

The results showed that culling badgers - a natural reservoir for bovine TB - did reduce the incidence of disease in cattle within the trial area, but that infection rates increased in the surrounding countryside as badgers were displaced. The net benefit was marginal, and given the huge costs associated with culling, was not economically viable.

So what's changed? Well, the incidence of disease in cattle has continued its remorseless rise. Last year some 3,741 farms suffered outbreaks, and 34,183 cattle were slaughtered after testing positive for bovine TB.

That's ramped up the pressure on politicians to come up with a solution. "We simply can't go on while TB increases its vice-like grip on family farms" argues the president of the NFU Peter Kendall. "I can't stress strongly enough what a disaster it's been for UK agriculture. The spread of the disease is doubling every nine years and we have to find some way to roll it back, to put a break on this catastrophic disease."

Ongoing research around the RBCT culling sites also shows that while the benefits of culling within the trial zone persist for some time, the spike in infections around the edges - the perturbation effect - tends to dissipate over time.

By tweaking the design of a cull - expanding the central killing zone, and choosing sites carefully to take advantage of hard boundaries like rivers and motorways - Defra's chief veterinary officer Nigel Gibbens argues it should be possible to maximise the positive impact on bovine TB infection rates in cattle.

"The evidence is different now because we have six years more data. We've learnt from the lessons of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial and turned it into a policy that can be delivered and gives us the benefits of culling in the long term."

This new interpretation of the data is about to undergo the ultimate test. Culling in two pilot zones - around Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, and in west Somerset - could start as soon as this weekend.

Covering some 400 square miles of open countryside, the trial sites are much larger than the ten-by-ten kilometre box squares used in the RBCT, and have been carefully chosen to take advantage of natural barriers to the movement of badgers like the M5 and M50 motorways and the river severn.

But not everyone's convinced by this reworking of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial with the benefit of hindsight.

The scientist who came up with the original idea for the experiment, Lord Krebs, says it smacks of fitting the facts to the answer you want to achieve in the first place.

"I have to say I've not found any scientists who are experts in population biology or the distribution of infectious disease in wildlife who think that culling is a good idea. People seem to have cherry picked certain results to try and get the argument they want."

According to Aesop "A crow, half-dead with thirst, came upon a pitcher of water..." to cut a long story short, the crow realised that by dropping a succession of stones into the pitcher it could raise the level of the water and "...quench his thirst and save his life".

And the moral of the story? Little by little does the trick.

It's a nice story, and - even better - it's true. Researchers at the University of Cambridge showed some time ago that rooks (a member of the crow family) can not only solve the puzzle, but can distinguish between useful pebbles and pieces of cork that will merely bob about on the surface.

So where do the children come in? Experimental psychologist Lucy Cheke wanted to know a bit more about how the birds were doing it, what it says about the way they construct a mental picture of the world around them, and how that differs from the way children learn about cause-and-effect.

"We wanted to find out what, and how, the birds were learning. Was it intuition, simple trial and error, or did the birds understand something of the laws of physics?"

Crucially, Lucy Cheke wanted to know if the birds were simply solving the logical problem, or whether - like children - they had a wider understanding of the possible. Could they learn about new cause-and-effect relationships?

To find out she devised this cunning counter-intuitive apparatus. Unlike Aesop's pitcher, when you drop stones into one of the tubes the water level remains the same, but rises in another. It doesn't make sense, but if all you want is the water, that shouldn't matter - simply drop in the stones and collect your prize from the wrong tube.

No matter how many times they tried the birds - in this case Eurasian Jays - just couldn't get it. The children, on the other hand, seemed to accept the illogical consequences of their actions with relative ease.

"The children were able to learn what to do to get the reward even though the chain of events was apparently impossible," she says. "They were able to ignore the fact that it shouldn't be happening and concentrate on the fact that it was. The birds, however, found it much harder because they were put off by the fact that it shouldn't be happening."

So what have we learnt? Lucy Cheke believes the children's success, and the birds' failure, tells us something about the difference between the way that birds and children think.

"It makes sense because it is a child's job to learn about new cause-and-effect relationships without being limited by ideas about what is or is not possible."

It tells us something about the plasticity of children's brains. This openness to new ideas helps to explain why children believe in magic, or can become convinced that if you smile at a traffic light it turns green. Over time, incorrect assumptions about the world are whittled away by trial and error. It may also help to explain why animals with the longest childhoods are typically the most intelligent.

And just in case you're wondering if John is still in the studio dropping stones into the tube and trying to work out why he can't get a drink of water... you might think so, but I couldn't possibly comment.

It's a question that has posed serious problems for astronomers who, in the absence of observational data, have been left pretty much in the dark about this vital stage in the evolution of the cosmos.

According to the theory of galaxy formation immense clouds of diffuse gas and dust created in the aftermath of the big bang must have formed in this early, lightless period in the universe's history. Under the influence of gravity this material began to clump together, eventually condensing into the building blocks of the first stars.

But how to check? Well, the answer it seems, is surprisingly simple: shine a light on it.

And that's exactly what scientists from the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich and the University of California Santa Cruz have done. Using the ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile, the team took advantage of the ultraviolet light emitted by a very bright quasar to tease out the reflected signal of a series of dark galaxies nearby, confirming their existence for the first time.

"We searched for the fluorescent glow of the gas from dark galaxies when they are illuminated by the ultraviolet light from a nearby and very bright quasar," says Simon Lilly from the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich. "The light from the quasar makes the dark galaxies light up in a process similar to how white clothes are illuminated by ultraviolet lamps in a night club."

The team detected almost a hundred dark galaxy candidates within a few million light-years of the quasar, HE 0109-3518, which is one of the brightest in the night sky. After carefully excluding all those where the faint glow might be attributed to hidden internal star-formation - rather than the reflected light from the quasar - they were left with just 12.

Discovering these dark, starless, proto-galaxies has already helped to improve our understanding of the early universe. According to Sebastiano Cantalupo, from the University of California Santa Cruz, the mass of the gas present in each is about a billion times that of the Sun - confirming theories about the structure of gas-rich low-mass galaxies during the Universe's dark age. The team's observations also show that the efficiency of star formation in dark galaxies is suppressed by a factor of more than 100 relative to typical star-forming galaxies.

"We've made a crucial step" he says "towards revealing and understanding the obscure early stages of galaxy formation".

The study "Detection of dark galaxies and circum-galactic filaments fluorescently illuminated bya quasar at z=2.4" will appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Slightly larger than Jupiter, HD 189733b is a huge gas giant orbiting very close to its parent star (HD 189733A), some 60 light years from Earth.

Although the planet has a blue sky, that's about where the similarities with earth come to an end. In fact it's so close to its parent star that a year lasts just 53 hours and temperatures hover at around 1000 degrees Celsius.

This proximity means that HD 189733b is constantly battered by space weather. Even so, researchers based at the Institute of Astronomy in Paris were astonished to witness the planet's atmosphere being blown away by a particularly violent burst of solar X-ray radiation.

The team, led by Alain Lecavalier des Etangs, used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture an image of the planet's atmosphere exiting stage left at a rate of a thousand tonnes a second.

"We haven't just confirmed the idea that some planets' atmospheres evaporate," Lecavalier claims, "we've watched the physical conditions in the evaporating atmosphere vary over time. Nobody has done that before."

The spectacle puts the Carrington Event of 1859 - the largest solar storm ever observed to hit the earth - into some sort of perspective.

Aurorae were seen all around the world - so bright that gold miners in the Rockies assumed the sun was coming up and got up to make breakfast - as a huge solar flare triggered a coronal mass ejection that took just 17 hours to reach the earth.

Telegraph systems across Europe and North America failed, sparks flew from pylons, and some operators - unlucky enough to be working at the time - got a nasty shock.

As it happens British and American astronomers have been meeting to discuss our vulnerability to space weather at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory this week.

After a prolonged period of relative calm the sun is cranking up again on its eleven-year cycle of activity.

That means a greater number of more powerful solar storms and flares with the potential to disrupt power supplies, transport and communications systems. And unlike 1859, when global electronic infrastructure was in its infancy, our dependence on high- tech computer systems and space-based satellite communications means the consequences could be much more profound than an admittedly spectacular atmospheric fireworks display and a few downed power lines.

Speaking at the conference the government's chief scientist Sir John Beddington welcomed the decision, taken earlier this year, to include severe space weather events on the National Risk Register.

"In the past it's fair to say we've been a bit blase about the threat posed by solar flares and storms" he said, "but the vulnerability of modern society is such that a space weather event would have enormous consequences for communications and satellite navigation systems and cause significant damage to the power grid network."

Even relatively small events can cause significant disruption.

Already this year Bob Routledge, from the US Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder Colorado, says long-haul flights crossing over the arctic have twice had to be re-routed to avoid potential disaster, while farmers in the mid-west were left unable to spray their crops after a solar flare caused a temporary shut-down of the GPS network controlling precision agriculture systems.

A temporary disruption to smart-farming systems, however, would be the least of our worries if we were ever exposed to the kind of atmosphere frying X-ray radiation currently bombarding HD 189733b. On reflection perhaps we should change that rather clumsy, technical name to Icarus.

That's a problem that has been exercising minds at the Agricultural Biotechnology Council, which is urging the government to adopt a strategic plan for agriculture that includes a central role for biotechnology.

Ministers will discuss their proposals, outlined in a new report Going For Growth, at a meeting with industry representatives, scientists and farmers later today.

The report sets out a comprehensive plan for investment in agricultural research its authors hope will put the UK back at the cutting edge of plant science, boost productivity and profitability in the farming sector, and help to resolve global issues of food security.

"Britain has a strong pedigree in agricultural research, including biotechnology," the report claims. But we're in danger of being left behind as other countries including China and Brazil encourage investment and surge ahead.

"The sector requires stronger political support to regain its competitive edge, to remove barriers to the commercialisation of research, and to put the UK at the centre of global agricultural innovation."

Of course agricultural innovation is about much more than just genetic modification, but it's the inclusion of a substantial section on the potential of biotechnology that's likely to raise the hackles of anti-GM campaigners.

After the bruising rows of the 1990's - culminating in a series of public debates under the banner GM Nation, and the biggest open air experiments ever undertaken in the shape of the farm scale trials of genetically modified crops - an uneasy standoff has held sway. Although not illegal, to date no GM crops have been grown commercially in the British countryside.

But while this de facto moratorium has persisted the pressure to adopt a technology that is widely employed elsewhere around the world has intensified.

Price spikes for basic commodities in 2008 and 2010 have helped to focus attention on a series of interrelated and escalating problems - climate change, population growth, resource depletion and environmental degradation - that the government's Chief Scientist Sir John Beddington warns are brewing into "a perfect storm that presents a serious challenge to global food security".

Launching the government's Foresight Report: The Future of Food and Farming in 2011, he claimed we couldn't afford to turn our backs on any of the tools available to address these challenges.

"The fact is that we're not making any more land. If we're going to feed a growing population, raise the poorest out of poverty and address these problems of food security, then in some cases GM may actually be the answer. We've got to look for a significant and sustainable intensification of agriculture".

And the signs are that these arguments are beginning to gain some traction.

Recent polling suggests public hostility towards GM crops may have eased, and while the latest crop trial - of a variety of GM wheat that's been engineered to resist aphids - has re-ignited the controversy, attempts to organise a day of action to de-contaminate the countryside failed to attract enough protesters to force the issue.

Today's meeting, which has been organised by the MP George Freeman who chairs the Commons all party group on Science and Technology, will attempt to hammer out a strategic plan for agricultural research that will boost the UK economy and help meet the global food security challenge.

"The irony" he says "is that the UK is still regarded as a world leader in the field. We still have great research institutes around the country, but we need to build on those strengths, unlocking growth here and contributing to sustainable development around the world.

Of course not all views will be represented at the meeting. A fact that's not lost on Friends of the Earth's Clare Oxborrow. "A great many promises have been made about the potential of GM technology to feed the world" she says, "but so far precious little has been delivered. The government should take a long hard look at the evidence before accepting the industry's view".

Even so, the author of the report, the Agricultural Biotechnology Council's Dr Julian Little, believes it's time to seize the initiative.

"If we get it right, if we capture this opportunity, then we could really see the UK benefit. If we get it wrong then we'll see museum agriculture in Europe for the next 20 years".

Taking care not to damage the brittle, yellowing pages the Royal Society's chief archivist and librarian Keith Moore turns to one of the seminal scientific papers in both the Society's - and science's - history. Edmund Halley's 1716 essay - A New Method of Determining the Parallax of the Sun.

Although Halley wasn't the first to observe a Transit of Venus - when the planet passes in front of the sun - his paper threw down a gauntlet to the then nascent scientific community. A challenge to use the pair of transits predicted to occur in 1761 and 1769 to transform astronomy into a fully fledged empirical science by calculating the distance of the earth to the sun.

It was a call to arms that would launch a thousand ships according to Andrea Wulf, the author of Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Astronomers from all over the world took up the challenge, organising expeditions and overcoming enormous obstacles to make their observations from the farthest corners of the globe.

"This is a time when clocks are still not precise enough to determine longitude," she says. "A time when a letter from Philadelphia to London takes two or three months to arrive."

"It was clear right from the beginning that it would have to be an international scientific collaboration. Countries which were at war would have to work together. Just the logistics of it must have been absolutely extraordinary."

Halley's idea was to observe and measure the transits from separate points, as far apart as possible, giving a wide base-line from which to use basic trigonometry to calculate the distance between Venus and the earth.

Because astronomers had a good idea about the relative distances between the celestial bodies, it should be possible to use this one empirical measurement to calculate the dimensions of the entire solar system.

"What the observers of the Transit of Venus were after was the fundamental unit of astronomical measurement" according to the Oxford astronomer Dr Chris Lintott.

"Once you get that then the scale of everything else falls into place, and that's why there was this huge effort and enthusiasm to travel to the far ends of the earth to get this one fundamental measurement."

From Jean Chappe's gruelling trek across Siberia, to Captain Cook's voyage to Tahiti (and eventual discovery of Australia), the swashbuckling exploits of the transit scientists read like the chapters in a boys-own adventure story.

Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (later to divide America along the Mason-Dixon line) team up for the first time at the Cape of Good Hope, while Guillaume Le Gentil spends 11 years travelling the globe, sees only cloudy skies, and returns home to find his heirs have declared him dead and divided his estate.

But perhaps the most enduring legacy of the transit decade, Andrea Wulf argues, was the model of collaborative international scientific research and exploration it helped to forge.

"The whole idea of a modern scientific expedition is formed in this time. From now on if you go to another place on the globe, its accepted that you have to take a scientific team with you. So we get Charles Darwin on the Beagle, and even Napoleon, when he invades Egypt, takes two hundred scholars with him. It all stems from this single endeavour to measure the size of the solar system."

And transits still form a vital component in the astronomer's arsenal. The Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009, uses the tell-tale dip in the luminosity of distant stars to spot extra-solar planets orbiting in front of them. To date it's spotted 61 new worlds, with a further 2321 planet candidates awaiting confirmation.

You can find out more about the events and viewing opportunities for next week's Transit of Venus here, and while you're watching that small black dot march across the surface of the sun, spare a thought for the adventurers and explorers who travelled to the farthest corners of the globe to measure the transits of 1761 and 1769.

They put a figure of 93,726,900 miles on the distance from the earth to the sun - less than 800,000 miles off today's calculation - and built a model for international scientific collaboration that endures to this day. An astonishing achievement.