An analysis of footage of octopuses off the coast of Australia “throwing” shells and silt suggests that they intentionally target – and often hit – other octopuses. In most cases, it is females that do the throwing, often at males that are harassing them.

In contrast to traditional species-naming practices, which only recognise one of two distinct genders with the suffixes “-ae” for women and “-i” for men, a new ant species from Ecuador has been named using the gender non-binary identifier “they” instead. The ant Strumigenys ayersthey was named after artist and human rights activist Jeremy Ayers.

Getting more women into space is essential if we're ever to run longer missions or even set up colonies off-planet. To do so we need a better understanding of how human bodies will cope in outer space.

Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck has become the first woman to win the Abel prize, sometimes called the Nobel prize of mathematics. In addition to her research, Uhlenbeck has always blazed a trail for women in mathematics. Her plenary lecture at the 1990’s International Congress of Mathematicians was the first delivered by a woman since Emmy Noether in 1932.

Alessandro Strumia at the University of Pisa, Italy, was speaking to an audience of women beginning their careers in science at a CERN workshop on gender and high energy physics. He gave a talk claiming that the reason men are so over-represented in the field of physics is because they are “over-performing”, and that physics was “invented and built by men”. Strumia also claimed that women have “been allocated too much funding” and been “promoted into positions of power unfairly”.