The number of new cars registered in the UK has jumped by nearly 18% but electric vehicle demand is flatlining, prompting the industry to call for a VAT cut to stimulate sales.

Annual figures released by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) on Friday show 1.9m new cars were registered last year, well up on the previous year’s figure of 1.6m and the highest level since the 2.3m registrations of 2019.

The increase is a boost for the automotive industry after the pandemic led to supply chain problems and a shortage of vital computer chips that slowed production.

Across the year, 315,000 new battery electric vehicles were sold. That was 50,000 more than 2022, but the number being bought as a share of total registrations failed to grow as expected. They represented just 16.5% of the total, slightly down on last year’s 16.6%.

The leader of Britain’s police chiefs’ organisation has become the most senior serving leader to say that policing is institutionally racist, as he called for a fundamental redesign of national policies and practices to eliminate discrimination.

Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), said black people should no longer experience disproportionate use of force, and that too little progress had been made to reform policing, with some leaders slow to accept the size of the challenge.

Stephens – elected by his fellow chief constables to lead their representative body – emphasised it was his personal view that discrimination in policing operated at an “institutional level”.

An international team of researchers has found that Africa's birds of prey are facing an extinction crisis. The study, co-led by researchers from the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews and The Peregrine Fund, warns of declines among nearly 90% of 42 species examined, and suggests that more than two-thirds may qualify as globally threatened.

The article, "African savanna raptors show evidence of widespread population collapse and a growing dependence on protected areas," was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on 4 January 2024.

Credit for discovering the first dinosaur bones usually goes to British gentlemen for their finds between the 17th and 19th centuries in England. Robert Plot, an English natural history scholar, was the first of these to describe a dinosaur bone, in his 1676 book The Natural History of Oxfordshire. Over the next two centuries dinosaur paleontology would be dominated by numerous British natural scientists.

But our study shows that the history of paleontology can be traced back much further into the past. We present evidence that the first dinosaur bone may have been discovered in Africa as early as 500 years before Plot's.

We're a team of scientists who study fossils in South Africa. Peering through the published and unpublished archaeological, historical and palaeontological literature, we discovered that there has been interest in fossils in Africa for as long as there have been people on the continent.

This is not a surprise. Humankind originated in Africa: Homo sapiens has existed for at least 300,000 years. And the continent has a great diversity of rock outcrops, such as the Kem Kem beds in Morocco, the Fayum depression in Egypt, the Rift Valley in east Africa and the Karoo in southern Africa, containing fossils that have always been accessible to our ancestors.

So it wasn't just likely that African people discovered fossils first. It was inevitable.

Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonized the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that scientists didn't know existed.

The new fossil animals have been named Timorebestia, meaning 'terror beasts' in Latin. Adorned with fins down the sides of their body, a distinct head with long antennae, massive jaw structures inside their mouth, and growing to more than 30cm in length, these were some of the largest swimming animals in the Early Cambrian times.

A new study has found that evolution is not as unpredictable as previously thought, which could allow scientists to explore which genes could be useful to tackle real-world issues such as antibiotic resistance, disease, and climate change.

The study, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), challenges the long-standing belief about the unpredictability of evolution and has found that the evolutionary trajectory of a genome may be influenced by its evolutionary history, rather than determined by numerous factors and historical accidents.

Primate social organization is more flexible than previously assumed. According to a new study led by University of Zurich, the first primates probably lived in pairs, while only around 15% of individuals were solitary.

Primates—and this includes humans—are thought of as highly social animals. Many species of monkeys and apes live in groups. Lemurs and other Strepsirrhines, often colloquially referred to as "wet-nosed" primates, in contrast, have long been believed to be solitary creatures, and it has often been suggested that other forms of social organization evolved later. Previous studies have therefore attempted to explain how and when pair-living evolved in primates.

More recent research, however, indicates that many nocturnal Strepsirrhines, which are more challenging to investigate, are not in fact solitary but live in pairs of males and females. But what does this mean for the social organization forms of the ancestors of all primates? And why do some species of monkey live in groups, while others are pair-living or solitary?

A new analysis of fossils believed to be juveniles of T. rex now shows they were adults of a small tyrannosaur, with narrower jaws, longer legs, and bigger arms than T. rex. The species, Nanotyrannus lancensis, was first named decades ago but later reinterpreted as a young T. rex.

The first skull of Nanotyrannus was found in Montana in 1942, but for decades, paleontologists have gone back and forth on whether it was a separate species, or simply a juvenile of the much larger T. rex.

Dr. Nick Longrich, from the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, and Dr. Evan Saitta, from the University of Chicago, have re-analyzed the fossils, looking at growth rings, the anatomy of Nanotyrannus, and a previously unrecognized fossil of a young T. rex.

The amount of electricity generated by the UK’s gas and coal power plants fell by 20% last year, with consumption of fossil fuels at its lowest level since 1957.

Not since Harold Macmillan was the UK prime minister and the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time has the UK used less coal and gas.

The UK’s gas power plants last year generated 31% of the UK’s electricity, or 98 terawatt hours (TWh), according to a report by the industry journal Carbon Brief, while the UK’s last remaining coal plant produced enough electricity to meet just 1% of the UK’s power demand or 4TWh.

Fossil fuels were squeezed out of the electricity system by a surge in renewable energy generation combined with higher electricity imports from France and Norway and a long-term trend of falling demand.

At night in the Cerrado, Brazil's savanna and second-largest biome, larvae of the click beetle Pyrearinus termitilluminans, which live in termite mounds, display green lanterns to capture prey attracted by the bright light.

In more than 30 years of expeditions with his students to Emas National Park and farms around the conservation unit in Goiás state to collect specimens, the phenomenon has never been so rare, said Vadim Viviani, a professor at the Federal University of São Carlos's Science and Technology for Sustainability Center (CCTS-UFSCar) in Sorocaba, São Paulo state.

"In the 1990s, we would see many of these termite mounds full of fireflies and other bioluminescent insects, even in pasture areas. Now, sugarcane is grown in most of the areas, and we hardly see any," he noted.

The dearth was one of the main findings of a study published in Annals of the Entomological Society of America.

Central features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental problems like climate change, says a recent study led by the University of Maine.

Humans have come to dominate the planet with tools and systems to exploit natural resources that were refined over thousands of years through the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. University of Maine evolutionary biologist Tim Waring wanted to know how this process of cultural adaptation to the environment might influence the goal of solving global environmental problems. What he found was counterintuitive.

In a report just published in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers argue that tackling inequality is vital in moving the world toward Net-Zero—because inequality constrains who can feasibly adopt low-carbon behaviors.

They say that changes are needed across society if we are to mitigate climate change effectively. Although wealthy people have very large carbon footprints, they often have the means to reduce their carbon footprint more easily than those on lower incomes.

The researchers say there is lack of political recognition of the barriers that can make it difficult for people to change to more climate-friendly behaviors.