Thousands of climbers trekking up Mount Kilimanjaro are taking unnecessary risks with their health, experts warned today.

With the Foundation Programme set to be oversubscribed due to increased demand, Sarah Morrison looks at what the future holds

A patient who was partially paralysed as a result of an injury to the spinal cord has become the first person to be injected with millions of stem cells derived from early human embryos created by IVF.

Scientists have discovered why women who smoke have a higher risk of developing ectopic pregnancies, a new study revealed today.

At 45, J K Rowling is now the same age as her mother was when she succumbed to the ravages of multiple sclerosis. Anne Rowling's untimely death in 1990 – five years before her daughter first gave the world Harry Potter – has had a profound and lasting influence on the writer, who has been a vocal champion for sufferers of the degenerative disease ever since.

In 2008 Ella Hickson burst on to the Edinburgh Festival scene with Eight, a play she wrote and directed at the tail end of her final year studying at Edinburgh University. Debuting in the perhaps less-than-fashionable venue of the University's own Bedlam Theatre, this series of monologues would go on to win a Fringe First and enjoy successful transfers to New York and London. Hickson's age at the time, 23, surely helped convince people they had a singular talent on their hands.

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Alexander McCall Smith is a one-man literary industry. He has sold 40 million books, travels obsessively and churns out four or five new novels a year. But what he really likes are Belgian shoes, saddleback pigs and leisurely strolls around his beloved Edinburgh neighbourhood

The parents of a student who died in a suspected suicide pact have insisted it was a "tragic accident".

With youth unemployment at record levels, young people have been hit hardest by this recession. The situation will be compounded at the end of this month when another year of school-leavers and university graduates tries to enter the labour market.

Michael Burleigh announces a book about "the prevailing moral sentiment of entire societies and their leaderships... as well as what might be called the moral reasoning of individuals", in the moral cauldron of the Second World War. Not a military history, then, but a mentality history: "There is also the matter of moral judgement," he adds, with a touch of menace, by which he means understanding on-the-spot behaviour, as he calls it, and avoiding armchair hindsight. "Wars are not conducted according to the dessicated deliberations of a philosophy seminar full of pursed-lipped old maids," he writes, characteristically, "and the threshold of what could be countenanced evolved over time and under the pressure of circumstances as sensitivities dulled and scruples relaxed."

Human nerve cells carrying a critical mutation linked with motor neurone disease have been created in the laboratory for the first time from the skin cells of affected patients. The breakthrough could lead to new treatments for the debilitating disease.

Dream team keep it surreal

That's the theatre for you – all socks and violence