People check their smartphones an average 85 times a day without even knowing they are doing it, a study suggests.

The average person uses their device for five hours a day – about a third of the time they are awake – and checks it about 85 times, Nottingham Trent University found.

The study, which also involved Lancaster University, the University of Lincoln and the University of the West of England, asked 23 participants aged 18 to 33 to estimate the amount of time they spend on their phone and compared it with their actual usage. An app was installed on their smartphones which recorded their usage over a two-week period. The work, published in the journal Plos One, found people were accessing their phones twice as often as they thought.

‘Eco-home’ from Stone Age

Archaeologists have uncovered a Stone Age “eco-home” which provides evidence of the earliest settlement discovered around Stonehenge.

But experts fear the highly significant find – and much as yet undiscovered archaeology – could be lost or damaged if the government presses ahead with its plans to build a tunnel to remove the A303 from the World Heritage Site landscape.

The discovery has revealed a Mesolithic home, dating from between 4336 BC to 4246 BC, formed from the giant base of a large fallen tree used to make the wall of the house, with roofing likely to have been made from animal skins. David Jacques, archaeology project director at the University of Buckingham, said the residents would have been “sophisticated and clever”.

Spooky doll as passenger

A man has tried to use a creepy Halloween doll to gain access to a carpool lane in Washington.

He was caught in Tacoma with a doll buckled up in the passenger seat, violating the rule that requires two or more people in carpool lanes. The doll, dressed in a pink outfit with a black hat, sported a creepy red skeletal face.

Trooper Guy Gill said on Twitter that the driver got a $136 ticket for the carpool lane violation.

Flamingos go off-course

A Russian fisherman has been met with an unusual sight while out on his boat near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk: a stray group of flamingos.

Pavel Shanushnikov spotted the seven flamingos swimming on the icy Tom River. Temperatures in Novosibirsk last week ranged from 0 to minus 3 Celsius, with over 11 centimetres of snow on the ground.

Nikolai Skalon, a zoologist at Kemerovo State University, said that the flamingos likely had flown off course during their yearly winter migration from Kazakhstan, going north when they should have headed south. One flamingo was later caught and taken to a nearby zoo.

‘Mandela’ is shark attraction

The National Marine Aquarium in the UK has welcomed two new sharks, with the arrival of what it says are the first captive-bred sand tiger sharks in the northern hemisphere.

They travelled from South Africa, where they are known as ragged tooth sharks – one female, called uShaka, and one male, called Mandela. They were born at the uShaka Seaworld, Durban, in March 2013 and December 2014 respectively.

The new sharks are currently in quarantine at the Plymouth aquarium, and will be released into the Atlantic Ocean tank in the coming weeks. There they will have their own private area to allow them to settle before joining fellow sand tiger sharks Howard and Enzo, as well as the aquarium’s rays, nurse sharks, tarpon, barracuda and southern stingrays.