Liam Shaw

Researchers at UCL have published a complete model for the inner workings and front display of the Antikythera mechanism. The ancient device, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901, has long been thought to have shown a model of the Greek cosmos, with the Sun, Moon and five classical planets rotating around the Earth, controlled by a fiendish set of gears. The UCL team argue that theirs is the first model to match all the existing evidence.

According to a study published in Nature last month, oceanic shark numbers have declined by 70 per cent since 1970. Three-quarters of ocean-going shark and ray species are now threatened with extinction. Yet we are still more likely to feel that sharks are a threat to us than the other way round. Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws – both symptom and cause of that feeling – was published 46 years ago, in February 1974. Production of the movie version began that summer, filmed in the village of Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard. A few years ago I went for a swim at the beach there. I had never considered myself afraid of sharks. But with every stroke I glanced backwards over my shoulder towards the open water.

Of all the mammals, the naturalist George Shaw (no relation) wrote when he first described it in 1799, the platypus ‘seems the most extraordinary in its conformation’, exhibiting ‘the perfect resemblance of the beak of a duck engrafted on the head of a quadruped’. Last week, the first near-complete platypus genome was published.

A stretch of the River Lugg was destroyed last week. ‘The river and its banks have been bulldozed, straightened and reprofiled into a sterile canal,’ Hereford Wildlife Trust reported, ‘with all bankside and riverside habitats completely obliterated.’ What used to be a gentle brook flowing between picturesque, entangled banks now looks like a storm drain: barren mud criss-crossed with the imprints of bulldozer tracks.