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LOOK INTO MY TEETH AND DESPAIR. (credit: Ray Troll)

Nicknamed the "buzzsaw shark," this 270 million-year-old creature is actually an extinct relative of the ratfish called a Helicoprion. Its bizarre tooth arrangement has confused scientists for over a century, but one artist finally got it right.

Ray Troll, whose art show about Hilicoprion has been touring the US for the past three years, has been on the front lines of scientific research about one of the strangest fossils ever found. When geologist Alexander Petrovich Karpinsky discovered the creature's tooth whorl in 1899, at first he thought it was a kind of ammonite because the teeth looked so much like the ammonite's spiral shell.

Paleo expert Brian Switek writes that it took Karpinsky a little while to realize that it was actually part of a larger animal. Over the next century, many different paleontologists offered explanations for what it might be, including a defensive formation on Helicoprion's nose, a ridge on its back, or even sticking out of its mouth like a spiky, curled tongue.

(credit: Wikipedia)

Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute in London have been given regulatory approval to genetically modify fertilised human embryos. This is the first time in the world that a proper regulatory system—in this case, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)—has approved such procedures.

The experiments will be carried out on donated healthy human embryos, which will be destroyed after seven days. The researchers, at least for now, won't be allowed to implant the genetically modified embryos into a woman.

The embryos will be edited using a technique called CRISPR/Cas9, the latest and most efficient tool available to genome researchers. The CRISPR system offers researchers an easy way of "knocking out" specific sequences of DNA. They then let the cell develop as usual to see what effect the knock-out had.

Every few years, cockroaches find themselves conscripted into humanity’s ongoing endeavours to build proper cyborgs. And this example from Instructables may be the cheapest venture yet. A user calling themselves bravoechonovember1 recently released guidelines on how to control a roach with an Arduino for under £30, a figure that does not doesn’t appear to include the cost of acquiring said insects first.

Nitpicking aside, the process itself seems relatively simple, if rather gruesome. The first step is to assemble a “backpack,” which consists of sheet aluminium cut into a rectangular shape, pin connectors, and wires. Then comes the actual surgical procedure.

You’ll need to anaesthetise your cockroach by submerging it into ice water before sanding down the top of its thorax (the bit between its neck and abdomen), attaching your Arduino, and trimming the antennae so you can insert wires into the hollows. Finally, and perhaps most disconcertingly, you’ll have to insert another wire into the creature’s thorax, by means of first creating a perforation with a pin. Ouch.

The design on the new alien creatures is impressive.

Corporal Alessandra Cancellara is heading into a mission on the Skyranger when I notice her. Most of my squaddies are present, looking cool, as the music theoretically pumps both them and me up. But Alessandra, suited up in green with needles holding up her ash-colored bun, stands out. She’s practically dancing in her seat, a bundle of nervous energy and quick grins. I’d probably look like that heading into a massively tense battle zone, so it suddenly hits me: XCOM 2 has managed to find an emotional core.

The first of the rebooted XCOMs, 2012’s Enemy Unknown, was a fantastic strategy game. So was its expansion, Enemy Within. Yet if there was an immediate criticism to be made of both games, it was that they were stylistically... well, dull. The near-future X-Files-like alien invasion storyline only allowed for the most generic science fiction, and the game structure never felt fully committed beyond “well, this is how the 1994 X-COM did it.” In that light, XCOM 2 having a distinct sense of style is a tremendously positive sign.

That sense of style manages to weave itself through the entire game, making XCOM 2 a notable improvement over its predecessor at nearly every conceptual level—but the game does miss the opportunity to make structural improvements.