Eilish Rothney’s first instinct was to get rid of the wasps entering her converted shipping container in Norfolk. Now she enjoys their constant hum

When wasps began streaming through a rusted gap in her office door one June morning, Eilish Rothney’s first instinct was the same most people would have: get rid of them. The reserve manager for the Trinity Broads, part of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, had discovered a wasp colony taking up residence in her office, a converted shipping container.

“They just built the nest inside my door,” she says. “My first thought was: ‘Oh no, I have to get rid of that now.’ But then I realised: ‘Wait, why? Why do I have to do that?’”

Books have never been trendier, but studies show that as more and more things compete for our frazzled attention spans, we’re reading less and less. This is a problem because reading has a wealth of cognitive benefits that we’re in danger of missing out on.

To find out why declining literacy could affect everything from memory to IQ, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample. She also hears from Prof Falk Huettig, an experimental psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and author of The Perks of Being a Bookworm

Tenacious and confounding, the horseshoe crab pre-dates dinosaurs and has copper-based blood vital to vaccine safety

They pre-date dinosaurs, eat food using their legs and contain blue blood that we use to keep us healthy. Horseshoe crabs are the supreme, if offbeat, survivors of the invertebrate world.

Often called “living fossils” for visually obvious reasons – horseshoe crabs resemble a sort of prehistoric helmet (their Japanese name translates as “helmet crab”) – these animals have barely changed appearance along a lineage that stretches back 445m years.

It’s invertebrate of the year again! From 3-12 August, every day we will profile one of the thousands of amazing invertebrates that our readers have nominated. And then, when you’ve heard about all of them, we’ll open the voting so you can choose your favourites. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with thoughts and ideas: email us at environment.desk@theguardian.com with Invertebrate in the subject line.

Jaw-dropping documentary Whatever It Takes details an aggressive stalking campaign targeted towards a couple whose reporting criticized the tech company

When Massachusetts husband-and-wife team Ina and David Steiner launched their reporting careers covering Silicon Valley at the turn of the century, the tech beat was still cozy enough to feel personal. The startups were still emerging from garages, and the journalists covering them were often filing stories from their own kitchen tables. Ebay was still a young online auction company founded on the principle that “people are basically good.”

As digital retail took off, the Steiners launched an e-zine called EcommerceBytes, catering to a growing community of small business owners who were increasingly using platforms like eBay to sell their wares. “We talked about this being an opportunity for just average people, disabled people, elderly people to make extra income,” says David of a community that has grown alongside EcommerceBytes, which now has more than 600,000 readers. “We were really excited about that.”

On August 12, the moon will pass in front of the sun, completely obscuring it in a solar eclipse. According to Nasa, parts of Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Russia and Portugal will experience a total solar eclipse. In the UK, there will be a partial eclipse, with up to 96% of the sun covered, the deepest eclipse the country has seen since 1999.

But no matter where you’re hoping to watch from, it’s important to protect your eyes. The Guardian’s Sarah Ann Harris explains.

When he saw a messy yard being criticised on social media, Stephen Jalland grabbed his trimmer and decided to help. An overgrown garden, he discovered, often hides an overwhelmed owner

Anita Thursby had been dreading the gas engineer coming to service her boiler. They would have needed to enter her kitchen, where the window looked into the jungle of swirling, 2-metre-high brambles that made up her back garden, and her shame had spiralled. “I would have been horrified,” she says. For the same reason, the 54-year-old had stopped inviting friends over to her house and had been living in fear of a complaint from her housing association.

Maintaining the garden had slipped from her grasp, becoming a source of constant worry, yet pride had stopped her asking for help – and tight finances from paying for it. Family barbecues had become a distant memory, even though she longed to have her 83-year-old mother round to sit in the sun; weeks ago, she bought a grill in Tesco with little hope of ever using it.

Key tourist route closed and residents rallying round as battle against wildfire expected to go on for several days

The battle to contain a large wildfire spreading across the New Forest will go on for several days, experts have said, as wind changes and a desiccated landscape fuel the flames.

Smoke billowed above the deserted A31 road, the main tourist route into the New Forest national park where tens of thousands of families are on holiday, late on Tuesday while a helicopter flew above the blaze. Firefighters at the scene said they were trying to contain several hotspots across the more than 100 hectares (247 acres) of dried heathland as winds swirled over the area.

Union chief says vote is about staff ‘warning they cannot protect the public properly’

In his pooled TV interview, Andy Burnham repeated the point he made in his Facebook post earlier (see 9.58am), saying he was confident that more could be done to free up space in the prison system (which would allow the early release system to be changed so that PC Andrew Harper’s killers are excluded). Burnham said that since becoming PM he had been pushing the system “every single day” to go further.

Explaining how extra space could be found (see 9.19am), he particularly singled out the more than 2,000 prisoners on indeterminate IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences. He said:

[The] plan will include issues like returning more foreign national offenders to their country of origin, and looking at the injustice of IPP sentences, which have led to young people, or young when they were imprisoned, being imprisoned indeterminately, and that clearly is unfair.

My office was in touch with the family last night [see 10.04am], and I know the justice secretary is in regular touch as well.

So, we will keep close to the family through this whole process because we understand how difficult this process has been for them.

Staff at North Devon district hospital given training in difficult births in case mothers-to-be cannot get to Exeter

Doctors at one of England’s remotest hospitals have been given a “crash course” in birth emergencies after its maternity unit was shut and as fears grow that the safety of women and babies may be put at risk.

From Tuesday, the maternity service at North Devon district hospital (NDDH) in Barnstaple has been suspended indefinitely owing to staff shortages, leaving many pregnant women facing a journey of at least an hour and a half when they go into labour.

Exclusive: Court service says anyone trying to enter buildings with glasses will have them confiscated and returned when they leave

Courts in England and Wales have joined a number of restaurants, theatres and pubs in banning Meta glasses, amid a mounting backlash against what has been described as “spyware”.

Last month courts in New York announced a ban on the controversial glasses, which can record video footage while being worn.