UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has agreed an initiative that will promote co-operation on scientific issues between the UK and Israel.

The Today Memorandum of Understand on Scientific Cooperation was signed by Mr Hague and Yaakov Peri, the Israeli minister for science, technology and space.

The Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, has been won by an Israeli for the second time in a row.

Professor Shafi Goldwasser of the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv won the 2012 prize along with Prof Silvio Micali of MIT for their work creating the foundations of internet security.

I have spent less than three minutes in the company of Jared Diamond and he assures me that he does not pose a threat to my life.

“I can promise you that I have not made a move to kill you yet. Nor have I detected any move on your part to kill me. But in a traditional society both of us would have made a move to kill each other by now, or else run away,” he says solemnly.

In the summer of 1666, the English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton is said to have pondered the falling of an apple while in the gardens of Woolsthorpe Manor, his family home in Lincolnshire. This apocryphal story describes the seminal moment which prompted him to realise that there must be a force acting on the apple which draws it to the centre of the earth.

Tributes have been paid to an Italian scientist who won a Nobel Prize in spite of her career being hampered by antisemitism.

Rita Levi-Montalcini, who was 103 when she died on Sunday, received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1986, along with her Jewish colleague Stanley Cohen. The pair had made significant progress in the field of nerve growth factor.