Matthew Hedges, the British PhD student accused of spying in the United Arab Emirates, has now been held in solitary confinement for almost six months. John Nagle recently spent four months as a visiting professor at UAE’s national university. He explains why Hedges’ PhD research could be seen as a security issue to the UAE authorities – and why the Durham PhD student’s arrest is just the latest attack on academic freedom in the UAE.

The theory that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a virus has been around for decades. But the strength of the evidence has steadily been growing. Ruth Itzhaki has found the strongest indication to date that the herpes simplex virus is a cause of this deadly condition.

A huge “floating net” has just been deployed to clean up plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Once brought back to dry land, that plastic will be turned into fuel or recycled. Peter King has looked at the economics of marine plastic and says there’s little money to be made cleaning up the oceans – but we should do it anyway.

The next time you visit a zoo, watch out for any chimps trying to copy you. According to Ig Nobel Prize-winning research from Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc and Tomas Persson, they could be trying to communicate. The two researchers explain how their findings that zoo chimps are just as likely to copy their human visitors as vice versa means we have to rethink our explanation for the evolution of imitation behaviour.

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