The Friends of Charles Darwin

Leading scientists plan to open up a priceless collection - ranging from a telescope built by Isaac Newton to a letter in defence of spiritualism by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - that has grown into a record of the making of the modern world. The archives could become part of a £10m permanent exhibition at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace in London's clubland. The aim is to complete the project by 2010, the Royal Society's 350th anniversary…

The society became the "club" of Britain's best brains: in 350 years, there have been just 8,000 members, ranging from Newton, Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday to the DNA pioneers Francis Crick and James Watson, Stephen Hawking the Cambridge cosmologist and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web. It pioneered scientific publishing. Its Philosophical Transactions is the world's oldest continuous scientific publication. Its 17th century members - Wren, Newton, Edmund Halley of Halley's comet, Robert Boyle of Boyle's law of gases, Samuel Pepys the diarist and maker of the Royal Navy - became part of history and their papers became the basis for that history.

Great tits are evolving in different ways less than 1½ miles from each other in the same wood. In one area of Wytham Wood, just outside Oxford, they are getting larger, while in another part they are getting smaller. The discovery, by Ben Sheldon, Professor of Field Ornithology at Oxford University, runs contrary to existing ideas about evolution. Since the days of Charles Darwin, it has been thought that differences established themselves among members of the same species only if they were totally separated from each other, such as the finches on the Galápagos islands…

Professor Sheldon, standing in Wytham Wood among hundreds of nest boxes that his team have put up, said that the difference appeared to be connected to the number of breeding sites available in the two areas.

The team in Wytham Great Wood has put up relatively few nest boxes. Fewer nests in an area means that there is more food available in the breeding season and the birds like to nest there. So the heavier great tits, who are bullies, drive away the smaller ones. The heavy birds have heavier youngsters and so a population of heavy birds has grown up in this area.

Meanwhile, the smaller, weaker birds go to nest in Marley Wood, where there are plenty of nest boxes on the trees. Here, the large number of families occupying them means less food and a smaller, weaker population has emerged. It makes no difference that the two populations nest so near to each other, or that they mix happily in winter.

Rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese, suggests a new study. But it is not because some spy agency has bioengineered them to eavesdrop on conversations in Tokyo or Amsterdam. They are simply recognising the difference in rhythmic properties of the languages, says Juan Toro, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, whose study is part of an effort to trace the origins of the skills that humans use to analyse speech.

Swordfish heat up their eyes to improve their tracking of fast-moving prey in deep, cold water, suggests a new study. Researchers already knew that certain large ocean predators - such as swordfish, tuna and some sharks - keep at least their eyes and brains warmer than the ambient ocean temperature. But this is the first convincing biological explanation for why, says the team led by Kerstin Fritsches at the University of Queensland, Australia.

An astonishing new fossil unearthed in China has overturned the accepted view about the relationship between dinosaurs and early mammals. The specimen belongs to a primitive mammal about 130 million years old and its stomach contents show that it ate young dinosaurs called psittacosaurs.

A growing number of scientists are challenging the sensational discovery last year of a new species of one-metre-tall intelligent humans whose 13,000-year-old bones were said to have been found in an Indonesian cave. According to some leading anthropologists in Australia, Indonesia and elsewhere, Homo floresiensis is not "one of the most important discoveries of the last 150 years" as was widely reported last October, but a pygmy version of modern Homo sapiens with a not uncommon brain disease. Now a leading critic of the Homo floresiensis theory is to send researchers to a village near the cave where the bones were excavated to measure an extended family group whose males may be just a few inches taller than the skeleton.

British Antarctic Survey researchers followed more than 40 grey-headed albatrosses as they flew around the world, identifying where they fed. All the birds which made a circumnavigation stopped for food in the same places. Banning harmful fishing methods from those areas of the ocean could help halt the decline of what is one of the world's most endangered group of birds.

A US federal judge has ordered a Georgian school district to remove stickers from its science textbooks which declared that "evolution is a theory, not a fact" which should be "approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered". The judge, Clarence Cooper of the Federal District Court, ruled that the stickers were contrary to the first amendment's promise to separate church and state because the stickers "convey a message of endorsement of religion". It also went against the state of Georgia constitution which prohibits the use of public money to aid religion. Jeffrey Selman, one of five parents who with the American Civil Liberties Union brought the suit against the school board, told the New York Times that he was "ecstatic... Science is religion-free, and it has to stay that way".

On the rocky beach betwen Staithes and Port Mulgrave in North Yorkshire there are rockpools with large colonies of periwinkles. Walking towards them, I spotted sudden movement at my approach: shells rolling off the sides of the rockpool into the mass of periwinkles in the bottom of the pool. After a few minutes of still observation out came eyes, feelers and legs, and the cascading shells turned out to be hermit crabs, which then carried on about their business.

A species of songbirds can gradually evolve into two that have distinct songs and colour variations without ever interbreeding, says a University of British Columbia biologist whose work would make Darwin swoon. Darren Irwin used a new genetic analysis technique to show that the greenish warbler native to forests in Asia changes characteristics as its population spreads across the Tibetan Plateau. Eventually, it becomes another species altogether. "No one's ever shown such a nice, gradual change between two clearly separate species before," said Irwin, associate professor in UBC's zoology department.

The human brain far outstrips that of its closest primate and mammalian relatives in both size and sophistication. Now new research suggests that the human brain developed as a result of frenetic genetic evolution, unique to humans. Lead investigator Bruce Lahn, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Chicago, says his study "offers the first genetic evidence that humans occupy a unique position in the tree of life."

Many Americans ventured west during the mid-1800s in search of riches and a new beginning. The westward journeys of Othniel Charles Marsh 1860 had much in common with those of speculators. He travelled with William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, faced a Sioux chief, and engaged in a long and bitter feud with a rival over claims. But Marsh sifted soil and river beds for dinosaur fossils, not gold. In his 66 years, Marsh established American paleontology and classified over 70 dinosaur species. Although his career was scarred by a petty dispute with his rival, Philadelphia paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, Marsh accrued many fossils and artifacts, literally adding tons of fossils to the Yale Peabody Museum's collection… After receiving a copy of the work, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to Marsh Aug. 31, 1880, stating, "Your work on these old birds, and on many fossil animals of North America, has afforded the best support to the theory of Evolution, which has appeared within the last twenty years."

The John Murray archive was secured for Scotland yesterday, though it came with a £31.2 million price tag. The National Library of Scotland won a £17.7 million lottery grant, the biggest ever awarded in Scotland, to help buy the unique collection of original letters and manuscripts by Lord Byron, David Livingstone, Jane Austen and many others… Over 150 years from 1768, the John Murray publishing house, founded in London by a Scottish family, amassed 150,000 original manuscripts, letters and documents by writers and explorers from Sir Walter Scott to Charles Darwin.

A sharp rise in global temperatures about 50 million years ago may have been responsible for the evolution of bats, Science magazine reports. This warming is linked to an explosion in the diversity of other mammals, but little was known about bat evolution. New DNA data traces the origin of four major bat lineages to a brief period in the Eocene Epoch when the average global temperature rose by about 7[°]C.

A venus flytrap snaps shut faster than you can blink. And now we know why. Whereas our sluggish movements are the result of muscles contracting, the plant snaps shut in the way that a torn tennis ball flips inside out.