Six years ago their kind was feared extinct, but 18 newborn ducklings from the world's most endangered duck species – the Madagascar pochard – met the public for the first time yesterday.

Welcome to Hancock's half-minute (and other utter failures)

A cape created from golden silk spun by more than a million spiders is going on display this week.

"Belt-tightening" and "austerity measures" are hardly buzzwords for Hollywood and those involved in movies that cost more than $100 million to make.

From jazz waltzes and groovesome modal vamps to the devotional operatic mash-up of "Agnus Dei" and an incredible version of "The Creator Has A Masterplan" recorded in Madagascar in 1969, this survey of the neglected French composer/pianist Gilson hits you like a bolt from the blue.

New British embassies are to be opened in El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Somalia and Southern Sudan as part of a radical redrawing of Britain's international diplomatic map.

A red seaweed found off the Pacific island of Fiji has been found to contain a powerful class of natural substances that can effectively destroy the malaria parasite, scientists said yesterday.

Madagascar's ousted president has been barred by officials in his homeland from returning from exile in South Africa today, the politician told reporters at Johannesburg's airport.

It's a little early to say whether Outcasts is going to be a hit or a space turkey. If it's the latter then nobody's going to have to worry too much about exoplanet locations for science-fiction series, since it will have effectively scorched the Earth for at least the next five years. If it works, though, there's going to be something of a rush on for vistas on this planet that look like they're on another. Might I suggest an early provisional booking for Madagascar, a wondrously unfamiliar landscape that comes helpfully accessorised with an otherworldly ecology. More than 80 per cent of the species are found nowhere else on Earth, which helps to maintain the frisson of alienation, and what's more many of the animals even sound like they've been invented by a science-fiction writer. Anyone for the tenrec, a kind of elongated hedgehog that produces a litter of up to 32 tiny (and spiny) little tenrecs? And if that doesn't take your fancy what about the fossa, a giant tree-climbing mongoose with a pair of vampire fangs? Or the sifaka, a white lemur that gallops sideways through the undergrowth?