Israel's intelligence agency was reportedly behind the operation that caused thousands of Hezbollah's pagers to detonate across Lebanon yesterday. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the "unprecedented" security breach, which killed at least 12 people and injured more than 3,000, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry – including many of Hezbollah's fighters and Iran's envoy to Beirut. But two senior sources told Reuters that Mossad was behind the attack.

After nearly a year of escalating tit-for-tat strikes between Israel and Hezbollah, "most people" in Lebanon assume that the exploding pagers are Mossad's work, said The Times. If so, it would "simply be the most striking example yet" of the intelligence agency's methods.

How far back do these methods go?
Mossad has a "decades-long" history of using telephones and explosives to track and assassinate targets abroad, said the Financial Times. But after the Palestinian group Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel launched a covert years-long campaign of car bombs and booby-tracked packages to kill members of the militant group and of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Most famously, Mossad operatives "swapped out the marble base" of the phone used by Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris, for a replica "packed" with explosives.

Have there been other notable operations?
Too many to count, said Foreign Policy. But Mossad's early rudimentary operations quickly developed into more "sophisticated" methods combined with advanced surveillance and cyber capabilities.

Most prominently, in 1996 Israel's internal security agency managed to trick Hamas's chief bombmaker into answering a phone call from his father. The phone had been brought into Gaza by a collaborator, and Yahya Ayyash was killed when the hidden explosives were detonated.

How does the pager operation differ?
Whether the pagers were packed with explosive substances or altered in some other way that caused them to explode is not yet known. But the execution must have been more "hands off" to remotely detonate up to 1,000 devices at the same time.

The militant group had only turned to pagers to avoid Israeli surveillance of smartphones. But in the same way that "killing Ayyash didn't stop Hamas", said The Spectator, the "pager bombs won't stop Hezbollah".

So many things change for a woman during pregnancy – and one of them could be her brain. New research suggests that "mommy brain" could be "a real thing", said The Washington Post, but the process is at odds with the "pop culture conception" of young mothers becoming "cognitively fuzzy and absent-minded".

Grey and white matter
The brain undergoes a "sweeping reorganisation" when a woman is expecting a baby, said The Guardian, and few areas are untouched by the process. In the new study, regular MRI scans from before conception until two years after childbirth revealed "widespread" changes in the mother's brain.

Some regions of the brain, "especially those involved in social and emotional processing", got smaller, possibly "undergoing a fine-tuning process in preparation for parenting", said The New York Times.
While grey matter decreased, there were significant increases in white matter, the nerve fibres that connect neurons and help different brain regions communicate. All of this remodelling, or neuroplasticity, took place across the brain at three times the rate seen in eight non-pregnant women who also had their brains scanned over the same period.

This "probably enables the onset of certain maternal behaviours", said New Scientist. The pattern had already been seen in rodents, in which increases in steroid hormones during pregnancy "trigger brain changes" that "enhance the mother's sensitivity to smells and sounds from her pups".

Scratching the surface
Pregnancy is a "linchpin of human existence", said The Washington Post, but the maternal brain has been "understudied and underappreciated" until now. Several experts have welcomed the progress – Gina Rippon, from Aston University in Birmingham, told The Guardian it was "a truly heroic" study.

Some of the brain developments were still present two years after childbirth, "hinting at cellular changes in the organ" that could be permanent, said the paper. The study "really opens up more questions than it answers" and "we're really just starting to scratch the surface", said Dr Elizabeth Chrastil, from the University of California, Irvine.

A greater understanding of the brain's "remodelling" could explain several pregnancy-related behaviours, said New Scientist, as well as helping people at risk of mental health conditions.

The latest Booker Prize shortlist features more women than ever before, and "it's the strongest in years", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. Five of the six books to make "the cut" are written by female authors – a stark departure from last year's list, which saw men with the name Paul outnumber women. Here is the line-up:

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood
The first Australian novel to make the Booker Prize shortlist in just under a decade, this tale about a conservationist living among nuns in a monastery in New South Wales is an "austere, enigmatic story", said Thomas-Corr.

Orbital, Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey was the only British writer to make the shortlist. Her "bewitching" novella follows the lives of a group of astronauts on the International Space Station, said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph.

James, Percival Everett
"Combining vertiginous comedy with stylistic bravado", said Allfree, Everett reimagines Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from the perspective of the enslaved Jim.

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner
"A philosophical novel of ideas wrapped up in a spy caper", "Creation Lake" follows an American secret agent as she infiltrates a commune of eco-activists in rural France, said Justine Jordan in The Guardian.

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden
Set in the Netherlands in the early 1960s, said Jordan, this "brave and thrilling debut" follows a "buttoned-up" young woman who undergoes an "erotic awakening" when her brother's Jewish girlfriend comes to stay.

Held, Anne Michaels
The most "formally experimental" book on the list comes from Anne Michaels, said The Telegraph. "Held" presents a "series of snapshots" of characters "bedevilled by war and tyranny but finding consolation in love".

Why this election could push US to the brink
Daniel Finkelstein in The Times
"Even the most celebrated experts" can't predict who will win the US presidency, writes Daniel Finkelstein, but "I am seriously worried" that the election won't end "conclusively and peacefully at all". One "chilling possibility" is that one or both candidates "don't make it all the way to election day". And if Donald Trump "were to lose by anything other than a total landslide", there "most certainly could be a violent attempt to seize power".

Prince Andrew will struggle to recover from A Very Royal Scandal
Alexander Larman in The Spectator
"Sensational dramas about the Duke of York are rather like London buses," says Alexander Larman. "You wait five years for one, and then two come along at once." While Netflix's "Scoop" portrayed Prince Andrew as a "buffoon", new Amazon Prime series "A Very Royal Scandal" dares to "hint that Andrew was actively bad" and that the Queen "was on her younger son's side". The series is a "piquant reminder" that "the wider royal family lives with the embarrassment every day".

For those who dislike politics, Lib Dems are least likeable party of all
Tim Stanley in The Telegraph
"My saddest duty is to report from the Lib Dem conference," writes Tim Stanley, as the "geriatric swingers" and "sandal-slapping delegates" gather in Brighton. "For those who dislike politics", the Lib Dems are "the least likeable party of all" because they exist "purely to get elected – minus any discernible philosophy". Ed Davey delivered his speech with a "permanent smile", his "self-satisfaction so self-intoxicating that I wondered if he might be drunk".