Harry Cliff (Cavendish Laboratory) discusses the potential discovery of a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider and its implications for particle physics.

Azim Surani (Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute) discusses gene editing of the human germline.

Five hundred years ago the masons working on one of the world’s most famous buildings completed the stonework of a chapel conceived some 70 years earlier. For several decades, King’s College Chapel had stood partially built in the heart of Cambridge. The story of the chapel is told in riveting detail by John Saltmarsh, who died in 1974 before completing his magnum opus.

New research shows a cereal familiar today as birdseed was carried across Eurasia by ancient shepherds and herders laying the foundation, in combination with the new crops they encountered, of ‘multi-crop’ agriculture and the rise of settled societies. Archaeologists say ‘forgotten’ millet has a role to play in modern crop diversity and today’s food security debate.

New research suggests that feeding our food waste, or swill, to pigs (currently banned under EU law) could save 1.8 million hectares of global agricultural land – an area roughly half the size of Switzerland, including hundreds of thousands of acres of South America’s biodiverse forests and savannahs – and provide a use for the 100 million tonnes of food wasted in the EU each year.

Unique threats to girls displaced by conflict prompt exceptional initiative.

Alternative models of watershed protection that balance recreational use and land conservation must no longer be ignored to preserve water supplies against the effects of climate change, argues a new study. Researchers claim that the management of Salt Lake City’s Wasatch watershed in Utah provides a valuable example contradicting the dominant view presented in academic literature that informs many current conservation strategies.

David Norman (Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences) discusses the fossil discoveries that really made a difference to science.

David Greenberg (Department of Psychology) discusses how musical preferences are linked to thinking styles.

Andy Martin (Department of French) discusses the year he spent sitting behind author Lee Child as he wrote the latest Jack Reacher novel.