What the scientists are saying…

Dogs know life isn’t fair Dogs have a sense of fair play – but they didn’t learn it from us, new research suggests. On the contrary, their domestication may have taught them to accept that sometimes, life isn’t fair. For a study in Austria, researchers subjected both wolves and dogs to an experiment in which they were trained to respond to a command to press a buzzer, and given a treat as a reward in return. The animals obliged when they were performing the task solo – often even when they were not given rewards. But when a partner animal was introduced into the experiment, in an adjacent cage, their behaviour changed: if the partner animal got a prize when they didn’t, or got a better prize than they did, they began to refuse the command. This was true of both the dogs and the wolves – but once the wolves realised that they were not being treated equitably, they refused to take part noticeably quicker than the dogs. The findings suggest that a sense of fairness in dogs predates domestication, say the researchers in their study, published in the journal Current Biology, and that relationships with humans may actually have resulted in a “higher tolerance for unequal treatment, at least from humans”.

Aspirin danger for older patients Taking an aspirin a day could be far more harmful than previously realised. A new study has found that among over-75s, it significantly increases the risk of a major, possibly fatal, stomach bleed. The Oxford University researchers say people who take the low daily dose of aspirin to reduce their risk of a heart attack should continue to do so – but that older people should be simultaneously prescribed PPI (proton pump inhibitor) drugs to protect their stomachs. The ten-year study, published in The Lancet, involved 3,166 patients who, having had a stroke or heart attack, had been prescribed aspirin, or a similar drug, to thin their blood. Among patients aged under 75, they found that each year, around one person in every 200 taking the medication had a disabling or fatal bleed. But for people aged 75 to 84, this figure tripled to three people in every 200.

A fishy dilemma in Scotland Using wrasse fish to eat the lice that infest salmon farms sounds like a simple, ecofriendly alternative to chemical pesticides, which can pollute nearby waters. But it turns out there’s a catch: marine conservationists have warned that so many wild wrasse are being caught in pots in England, and taken to live in salmon pens in Scotland, that natural stocks could be under threat. This, in turn, could affect the marine ecosystem, says New Scientist: among other things, wrasse play a key role in controlling the population of sea urchins that deplete sea-floor kelp forests – which provide a vital sanctuary for many marine species, including young cod. Though anglers in England (who usually put wrasse back) say they are seeing fewer of the fish, there’s no official data on the impact on wrasse populations here. In Norway, however, where annual catches of wrasse to supply fish farms have risen tenfold since 2008, scientists have found that stocks have shrunk in the fished areas. There are now calls for research into the effect on English waters and, if necessary, rules to limit catches. But the salmon industry insists there are no signs of depletion here, and that, in any case, it is moving towards sustainability. “We have set up farms for both wrasse and lumpfish, which also eat lice, and the aim is that we will produce our own ‘cleaner fish’ in a few years,” Scott Landsburgh, of the Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation, told The Observer. There are more than 200 salmon farms along the Scottish coast, producing 170,000 tons of salmon a year.

Health statistics More than half of the women who had abortions last year were already mothers, according to the latest figures from the Department of Health. In 2016, 55% of the women who had terminations in England and Wales had already given birth, up from 47% in 2006. The overall number of abortions fell slightly last year, to 190,406; 98% of them were funded by the NHS, and 1,564 were given to girls under 16. More than 90% of abortions were carried out at under 13 weeks’ gestation, and 81% at under ten weeks’ (up from 68% in 2006). Most abortions are now medical, as opposed to surgical: 62% were medical last year, up from 30% in 2006.