It's been a good week for - cows

Our bovine friends have always been a useful bunch – they give us fine cheeses, smart shoes, designer handbags and the odd nice, juicy sirloin.

Now cows are going to save the planet. Specifically, cows that burp less.

An international team of scientists at the University of Aberdeen is ruminating on how to produce cattle that emit less methane into the atmosphere. The £6.5 million RuminOmics project plans to increase the efficiency of ruminant farming while lessening its negative environmental impact.

Methane gas is said to have a global warming potential 25 times that of carbon dioxide. Initial research supports the idea that the breeding of an animal influences the level of methane it produces.

Professor John Wallace, of the university's Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, is leading the study. He said: "The finding has led the team to ask whether animals which are low emitters [of methane] always emit low levels."

Fascinating stuff. Or is it a load of old bull?

It's been a bad week for - pedants

Words can barely describe the shock of the aghast audience at the Hay literary festival after an English professor suggested creating one word for "they're", "their" and "there" to remove confusion.

The perpetrator of such heresy was Professor Simon Horobin, of Magdalen College, Oxford, who almost pushed festival-goers over the very precipice of punctuation by questioning whether we even need the apostrophe at all.

"For some reason we think spelling should be entirely fixed and never changed. I am not saying we should just spell freely, but sometimes we have to accept spellings change," he said.

Horobin insisted that standardised spellings, like the apostrophe itself, were a "comparatively recent phenomenon", pointing out that in Middle English there were 500 different ways to spell "through".

Self-confessed language anorak though I am, the prof does have a point.

Language is, after all, a living thing and evolves as such. The conventions of punctuation, spelling, syntax and grammar that to one generation seems essential to proper communication, may not be a priority to the next.

In a society of text messagers, tweeters and Facebook posters, we can probably kiss goodbye to the apostrophe. Except, of course, when it forms part of a weepy emoticon- :'(