“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool.”

John Zardus, an invertebrate zoologist at The Citadel college in Charleston, comments on what ScienceNews calls “the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant”.

“The ability to repair damage and replace cells, we discovered in the last 50 years, show how radiation doesn’t cause damage except under extreme circumstances. The radiation that a patient gets in one day from a course of radiotherapy treatment, it would take a million hours of exposure for someone standing in the radioactive waste hall of Sellafield.”

Wade Allison, of the University of Oxford, tells the Guardian that the risks from nuclear waste have been overstated.

“We are currently keen to talk to some one who, faced with the knowledge of their own terminal illness and all that it entails, would nonetheless consider undergoing the process of an ancient Egyptian embalming.”

Channel 4, a television channel in the UK, advertises for a volunteer for its latest ‘scientific’ programme (Independent).

“The urgency of the situation demands that as a global community we not only reverse the rate of loss, but that we stop the loss altogether and begin restoring the ecological infrastructure that has been damaged and degraded over the previous century or so.”

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, launches International Year of Biodiversity (BBC).