ABC Science

CARROT COLOUR: The humble supermarket carrot owes its deep orange colour to a newly-found gene, according to an analysis of the full carrot genome.

COPY KIDS?: Newborn babies are not born with the ability imitate us - we imitate them - according to the latest study in a long-standing debate about whether or not children are born with the ability to copy adults.

EMBRYO RESEARCH: For the first time, scientists have kept human embryos alive in the laboratory for six days beyond the point at which it would normally implant into the uterus.

INFERTILITY CLUES: Crocodile sperm is more like human sperm than scientists previously thought, according to new research that could help in the search for causes of male human infertility.

HUNGER GENE: Scientists have pinpointed a fault in a gene that should turn off hunger signals in Labrador retrievers making the dogs more inclined to become food obsessed.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE: What would it be like to only live in the moment? Or to relive the past over and over again? Dr Karl explores the extreme range of memory.

ULTRACOOL DISCOVERY: Astronomers have discovered three planets orbiting the habitable zone of an ultracool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth.

TWIN GENES: An international team of researchers has identified two genes that increase the chances of mothers having non-identical - or dizygotic - twins

SHAKE AND RATTLE: The secret of how male peacocks shake their tail feathers to mesmerise their mates has been captured on high-speed video.

HUMAN PREY: A large carnivore - most likely a hyena - ate an ancient human 500,000 years ago, according to the discovery of teeth marks on a thighbone found in a Moroccan cave.

EVOLUTION OF LEARNING: Scientists have discovered slime mould - a single-cell organism at the bottom of the food chain - can 'learn'.

BLACK HOLES: Three colliding spiral galaxies 1.8 billion light years from Earth have produced a monster black hole weighing in at 3 billion times the mass of the Sun.

BIG BABY: The offspring of the largest vertebrates to have ever walked the Earth were probably independent soon after birth, according to an analysis of a 67-million-year-old baby titanosaur.

PANAMA MONKEY: The discovery of seven little fossilised teeth during excavations to expand the Panama Canal provides the first evidence of a monkey on the North American continent.

AGEING BRAIN: People often find it harder to adapt to new situations as they age and now a new mouse study may have shed light on why.

TOWARDS 2050: A shift toward vegetarianism and lower meat consumption would feed the world population until at least 2050 without clearing more forests, according to new research.

BIG BEARS: Ancient bears evolved to become giants so they could scavenge prey killed by others, suggests a new study.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE: People in the US used to be among the tallest in the world, but now that honour goes to the Dutch. Dr Karl gets to the bottom of the slide in height.

EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Insects are conscious, egocentric beings, argue Australian scientists in a new paper that suggests basic consciousness may have first evolved in insects in the Cambrian Period.

SLEEP DEPRIVATION: Women's ability to perform tasks accurately is reduced when working night shifts into the early morning, according to a new study that details for the first time differences between men and women's sleep-wake cycles and circadian rhythms.