- More than 100 of the world’s best female cyclists are taking part in the first ever Women’s Tour of Britain. It’s set to be the biggest ever women’s cycling race in the country. Competitors will set off from Oundle in Northampton shire and finish in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. The race is made up of five stages taking place over five days and some of Britain’s top cyclists, like Laura Trott and Dani King, will take part.
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- Three million euros (£2.5m) is being spent to help protect wild hamsters facing extinction in France. The Great Hamster of Alsace, has been on the decline since farmers started planting crops like maize which the hamsters can’t eat. Population figures fell in 2001 to 1,167 and dropped to an all time low in 2007 to just 161. The plan is for farmers to grow some of the hamsters’ favoured food alfalfa as well as their other crops. The aim is to bring the wild hamster back up to 1500 in five years. France launched the plan two years after a top court in Europe told them they were not doing enough.
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- An international group of doctors has warned the spread of the disease polio has become a global health emergency. Polio worst affects young children, but it can be prevented with a simple vaccine and is almost never found in the UK. It had been virtually stamped out worldwide, but in a few countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East there has been a rise in recent years. One of the worst affected countries is Pakistan – it has had 54 cases of polio so far this year. This is up from last year when there were 93 cases over the whole year.
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- Researchers have created a map using data from the Planck Space Telescope. Since 2009, Planck has charted the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the light from the Universe a mere 380,000 years after the Big Bang. But Planck also observes light from much closer than the farthest reaches of time and space. With an instrument called the High Frequency Instrument(HFI), Planck detects the light from microscopic dust particles within our Galaxy. (The density of this dust is incredibly low; a volume of space equal to a large sports stadium or arena would contain one grain.)
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- A new study has revealed that shrinking dinosaurs’ bodies may have helped the group that became birds to continue surviving evolution. Dr Roger Benson of Oxford University, who led the study, said that dinosaurs aren’t extinct; there are about 10,000 species alive today in the form of birds. He added that they have found exceptional body mass variation in the dinosaur line leading to birds, especially in the feathered dinosaurs called maniraptorans.