World-first pilot in England helps identify those who could be offered statins, who would otherwise be ‘invisible’ to NHSGPs in the north of England have used predictive genetic tests to identify people most at risk of heart disease in the world’s first pilot of the technology.The NHS study, called Heart, offered genetic tests to nearly 1,000 people aged 45 to 64, in the hope of better predicting their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over the next 10 years. Continue reading...

Neuroscientists show clubbers move more to very low frequencies, even though they are not consciously detectableWhen it comes to getting into the groove on the dancefloor, it really is all about the bass, researchers have found.Scientists say when very low frequency (VLF) sound was introduced during a live electronic music event, gig-goers moved more even though they could not hear the frequencies. Continue reading...

The dramatic vanishing of polar ice sheets will cause catastrophic sea level rise that will threaten cities, according to a major new studyThe climate crisis has pushed the planet’s stores of ice to a widespread collapse that was “unthinkable just a decade ago”, with Arctic sea ice certain to vanish in summers and ruinous sea level rise from melting glaciers now already in motion, a major new report has warned.Even if planet-heating emissions are radically cut, the world’s vast ice sheets at the poles will continue to melt away for hundreds of years, causing up to three metres of sea level rise that will imperil coastal cities, the report states. The “terminal” loss of sea ice from the Arctic during summers could arrive within a decade and now cannot be avoided, it adds. Continue reading...

Fireball – ‘like a flaming basketball’ – seen in sky around the time rancher’s home destroyed north-east of SacramentoA northern California man has claimed that his home was destroyed by a meteorite on Friday, after several witnesses reportedly saw a ball of light descending from the sky.“I heard a big bang. I started to smell smoke and I went on to my porch and it was completely engulfed in flames,” local rancher Dustin Procita, whose home was destroyed, told the local television news station KCRA. Continue reading...

Total eclipse to be visible in North America, Asia and the Pacific, but Africa, Middle East and Europe will have to wait until 2025The moon is set to pull off a disappearing act on Tuesday, and those who miss it will have to wait three years for another chance to see something like it again.A total lunar eclipse will be visible throughout North America before dawn on Tuesday, giving those further west the best view. In Asia, Australia and the rest of the Pacific, it will be visible after sunset. Continue reading...

Happiness might seem like a noble goal – but striving for it can be counterproductiveWho doesn’t want to be happy? At the end of the day, you might think, it’s happiness that matters most – it’s the reason for everything we do. This idea goes back to classical antiquity. According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, whatever we pursue in life – “honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue” – we choose “for the sake of happiness” since happiness “is the end of action”. Around this all-consuming aim we’ve built a multibillion-dollar industry: self-help.Not that there haven’t been critics. “Humanity does not strive for happiness,” the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche quipped, “only the English do.” He was making fun of utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, for whom the point of morality is to achieve the greatest happiness for all. The irony is that Mill, too, had doubts about the pursuit of happiness. As he saw, the craze for contentment threatens to subvert itself. Continue reading...

Frustration growing at delays that leave some unable to take up prestigious posts for up to seven months

For those whose cultural backgrounds incline towards passive aggression, this self-preservation tactic is almost too naturalThere is a technique for dealing with hostile people that maps almost exactly on to the British national character. Do you know about this? I only recently discovered it, lagging behind followers of therapy Instagram and those seeking urgent strategies to survive the holiday season. It is called – with due deference to how Alan Partridge this sounds – “grey rocking”. But it might as well, for its evasive politeness, be called the “up to a point, Lord Copper” approach to neutralising aggressors.If you’ve ever smiled blandly in the face of someone you violently dislike; if you’ve ever done a flat, “oh, wow”, or “right” to everything they say; if you’ve ever given the sketchiest details when they ask what you’re up to – then, along with millions of other Britons, you have probably been unwittingly grey rocking it like a pro. Continue reading...

Earth will be directly between the sun and Uranus this week, making our solar system’s seventh planet appear brighter than usualIt is time to try glimpsing the seventh planet, Uranus, with the naked eye. It will certainly not be easy and could well take a few attempts over the next week but it is possible.To help ensure success, take a pair of binoculars with you. Uranus hovers at the limits of naked eye visibility but this week it gets a small boost. It will be at opposition, when the planet is exactly 180 degrees away from the sun, as seen from Earth. To achieve this configuration, Earth must be directly between Uranus and the sun, meaning that we will be closer to the planet than at any other time in the year. This helps make Uranus appear brighter. It is still a tough challenge though. Continue reading...

World first clinical test could be good news for people with rare blood groups and those who need frequent transfusionsLaboratory grown red blood cells have been transfused into volunteers in a world first clinical trial that could help revolutionise treatments for patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia.The manufactured blood cells were grown from stem cells from donors, which in future could allow donor blood to be expanded into much larger volumes for transfusion. The trial is studying the lifespan of the lab grown cells compared with infusions of standard red blood cells from the same donor. Continue reading...

She was with me through tough times and I craved her presence after she’d gone. Getting her memorialised was the best way I could keep her with meI am a proud Cat Lady. When my beloved Siamese of 16 years died in 2020, I realised immediately that I couldn’t live productively without a cat. I was 41 and had had her since I was 24, my entire adult life until that point. I not only mourned Lilu, but I craved the endorphin hit of feeling fur against my skin. The comforting way she’d walk across me in my sleep, waking me multiple times in the night, more so towards the end, than my very young children. I longed for the affection she offered my ankles as I filled her bowl, the endless hours I’d spent alone as a writer with her next to me, curled up in a ball, ready for me to bury my face into her when the frustration of a blank page became too much to bear.I missed keeping her alive, which was one of the things I was most proud of in my whole life. I’d have done anything for that cat, often sacrificing my own need for food for hers when I was in my 20s and broke. I have lost people in my life and sadly know grief and its vicious claws very well, but Lilu dying was different. The world had not lost someone, I had. I felt quite isolated. The words “it was just a cat” were what I feared people were saying behind my back when I couldn’t stop talking about it, no matter how hard I tried. Continue reading...

Wrinkled skin, painful muscles, aching joints – collagen is being marketed by the supplement industry as the answer to many of the problems of ageingOf all the 20,000 or so different proteins in the human body, there is one that dominates more than any other. Without it, our cells would simply collapse in on themselves, our skeleton and blood vessels would disintegrate and we would be little more than blobs of shapeless tissues.This vital component is collagen, a molecule that defines our existence in a multitude of ways that most of us are blissfully unaware of. According to some research, nearly a third of the proteins in humans and other mammals are composed of 28 different types of collagen, from type I collagen, which is found in skin, to type II collagen, which is found in cartilage. Continue reading...

Do bones and teeth found in Sussex share characteristics with Neanderthal fossils from northern Spain?They are the oldest human fossils ever found on British soil. Excavated 30 years ago at Boxgrove, in West Sussex, the leg bone and teeth of an early human species were subsequently dated as being around 480,000 years old.Other finds made at Boxgrove also revealed these ancient men and women were hunting horses, deer and perhaps even rhinos and butchering them. Crucially, they were doing so with sophisticated stone tools long before the appearance of Homo sapiens - though the exact identity of these individuals remained a puzzle. Continue reading...

The theoretical physicist and martial arts expert has written a new book that uses magic and wizardry as a portal to engage people with the important but overlooked field of condensed matterFelix Flicker is a theoretical physicist working on the quantum underpinnings of matter. Born in Devon, he studied at Oxford, the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada, and Bristol University, where he completed his PhD. Now a physics lecturer at Cardiff University, he is also a kung fu teacher and former British champion of shuai jiao (Chinese wrestling). Flicker, 35, has just published his first book, The Magick of Matter: Crystals, Chaos and the Wizardry of Physics, exploring the often overlooked field of condensed matter physics, which underlies our modern world.What prompted you to write this book?

They are the images that made us sit up and take notice. As world leaders gather for Cop27, these pictures prove that global heating isn’t a distant possibility – it’s already hereFor a week in July 2018, a giant 100m-tall iceberg loomed over a tiny village on the west coast of Greenland. Villagers were evacuated, and the world watched in suspense: if a chunk of the 10m-tonne iceberg had broken apart or “calved”, it would have caused a tsunami and obliterated the settlement of Innaarsuit. Eventually, it drifted away from the shore – but as glaciers melt, we can expect to see more masses of ice breaking off and floating dangerously close to land. Continue reading...

I’ve always been a fussy eater. Could an expert show me a life beyond the kids’ menu?Is anyone more reviled than fussy eaters? Exclude the obvious candidates (murderers, estate agents, Piers Morgan) and it seems unlikely. It’s unfortunate that an era in which half the population identify as “foodies” has coincided with one in which the other half are convinced that eating wheat, gluten or nightshades will result in certain spiritual death. Worse still are people who swerve entire food groups on the basis of bizarre childhood whims that should have been abandoned with their teddy bears. I should know, I am one of them.My diet is comfortably one of the top three most annoying things about me, and I say that as someone whose signature karaoke song is a 10-minute Taylor Swift epic about Jake Gyllenhaal losing her scarf. A non-exhaustive list of foods that I have never eaten includes lettuce, onions, carrots, cucumber, tomatoes (unless in a sauce or ketchup), mushrooms, eggs of any kind … I could go on. Continue reading...

New study, carried out using tiger sharks in the Bahamas, extends total known global seagrass coverage by more than 40%Tiger sharks are notoriously fierce. The huge animals, which can grow to more than 16ft, are ruthless predators and scared of absolutely nothing – recent research found that while other shark species fled coastal waters during strong storms, tiger sharks “didn’t even flinch”.But recently they have a new role that could help burnish their reputations: marine scientists. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Findings add weight to view that decreased serotonin response could play an important role in depressionScientists claim to have found the first direct evidence that people with depression have a reduced capacity for releasing serotonin in the brain.The findings from a brain-imaging study reignite a debate within psychiatry over the so-called serotonin hypothesis of depression and challenge the conclusions of an influential review published in July that found “no clear evidence” that low serotonin levels are responsible. The latest work, led by scientists at Imperial College London, suggested that people with depression have a decreased serotonin response. Continue reading...

Lucy Ward on the roles played by Edward Jenner and Thomas Dimsdale in the development of inoculation against diseaseYour article on challenge trials raises fascinating questions, as the world seeks to address the risk of new pandemics (Should we give people diseases in order to learn how to cure them?, 31 October). It refers to Edward Jenner, who did indeed “challenge” his patient James Phipps, the eight-year-old boy he had test-inoculated with cowpox (the process that would become known as vaccination), by subsequently having him inoculated with live smallpox to ensure he was immune to the disease. However, by the time he did so in 1796, the latter technique was a widely used and highly successful procedure which, conducted safely by experienced practitioners, had a negligible risk.Arriving in Britain from Turkey in 1721, and used for centuries in India, China and parts of Africa, inoculation involved giving healthy individuals a minute dose of smallpox virus via a scratch on the skin, leading to a mild dose of the disease and then lifelong immunity. Thomas Dimsdale, the Essex-born Quaker physician featured in my book The Empress and the English Doctor, reported having inoculated about 6,000 patients with just one death at the time he went to St Petersburg to treat Catherine the Great and her son. The empress underwent the procedure in 1768 to show her subjects how safe it was. Continue reading...

Huge chunk of Long March 5B rocket launched four days previously re-enters atmosphereA hefty chunk of the massive rocket used to deliver the third module of China’s Tiangong space station has fallen back to Earth uncontrolled, triggering the closure of some of Spain’s airspace and leading to hundreds of flight delays.Four days after blasting off from southern China, a large part of the Long March 5B (CZ-5B) rocket broke up as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the south-central Pacific ocean at 10.01 UTC, according to European and US space authorities. Continue reading...

The fascinating story of two Nasa rovers that ended up spending 15 years on Mars verges into cloying territoryDusty, colder than cold, 142m miles away from the sun, Mars isn’t the most hospitable of environments. Nor is it the most universally compelling of film settings. Not everybody, after all, wants to go on a space odyssey, let alone one whose protagonists are robotic vehicles. Ryan White, the director of a feelgood documentary about a recent feat of American space exploration, came up with a solution: take a subject that is literally lifeless, and draw parallels – however improbable – to the human condition.Co-produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and narrated by Angela Bassett’s soothing voice, Good Night Oppy faithfully if somewhat cloyingly relays the story of a 1993 mission to Mars that was supposed to last for 90 days but ended up going for 15 years. Spirit and Opportunity, the marvelous machines at the heart of the movie, might look more like ostriches than people, with their long necks and camera eyes sitting on the sides of their boxy heads. But this is a film engineered to unleash swells of connection and emotion, and part of that involves presenting the rovers as adorable and quirky 5ft 2in humans. Continue reading...

Experiment finds electrical charge can alter size of water droplets and cause them to ‘explode’Gloomy foggy days are frequent in November, but there’s not a lot we can do about them. Or is there? A new experiment has shown that zapping clouds with electrical charge can alter droplet sizes in fog or, potentially, help a constipated cloud to rain.Last year Giles Harrison, from the University of Reading, and colleagues from the University of Bath, spent many early mornings chasing fogs in the Somerset Levels, flying uncrewed aircraft into the gloop and releasing charge. Their findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, showed that when either positive or negative charge was emitted, the fog formed more water droplets. Continue reading...

Insecticide-resistant newcomer caused unprecedented urban outbreak in Ethiopia and can survive the dry season, scientists sayScientists are warning that the invasion of an insecticide-resistant mosquito could change Africa’s “landscape of malaria” after research showed it caused an unprecedented urban outbreak in Ethiopia.An investigation into a steep rise in cases in the Ethiopian city of Dire Dawa during a dry season this year identified the mosquito as the cause of the outbreak. Scientists say it is the strongest evidence to date that it could prompt surges of malaria in areas typically less affected by the disease. Continue reading...

On Sunday, world leaders, negotiators and industry representatives will begin to arrive in Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt for Cop27, the UN’s climate change conference. A UN report set the stage for talks last week, stating that there is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” and that progress on limiting global temperature rises has been “woefully inadequate”. So will governments take the opportunity to press ahead with their promises or could the conference live up to accusations of greenwashing?In the first of five special episodes covering Cop27, Madeleine Finlay hears from Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor Adam Morton about what’s happened since Cop26, our current path to catastrophic heating and what’s likely to be on the agenda over the next two weeksArchive: WION, BBC News, DW News Continue reading...

A masterclass in cell function that will leave you in awe of biologyCells build organisms from the ground up, and therefore to choose to write about them is to give oneself permission to explore almost any aspect of the living world. They are “a life within a life” as Siddhartha Mukherjee puts it in his latest book, which takes advantage of that licence to offer a comprehensive account of basic biology, alongside a history of the many great minds that have helped us to see beyond widespread misconceptions to scientific truth.This is not just about clear-cut successes: alongside the stories of diligent scientists, there are intriguing tales of the many eccentrics whose contributions were vital to the transformation of medicine. As such, this is a book filled with missteps, arguments and prejudices. It almost made me feel sorry for my scientific colleagues, painstakingly working away in labs, trusting that systematic hard work is all that is required to achieve a big breakthrough. Continue reading...

Research could help explain how virus got so out of control this year, while also refining efforts to combat itBritish researchers have identified evidence of “considerable” transmission of monkeypox in the few days before symptoms of the virus emerge.If replicated, the finding would upend received wisdom about how the virus spreads. It could help explain how monkeypox, which causes sometimes excruciatingly painful lesions, got so out of control this year, while also refining efforts to combat it. Continue reading...

Nearly third of patients on largest trial using psychedelic compound went into rapid remissionThe psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms can help alleviate severe depression when combined with psychotherapy, according to a trial that raises hopes for people failed by existing antidepressants.Nearly a third of patients with severe depression went into rapid remission after a single 25mg dose of psilocybin followed by therapy sessions, which aimed to help patients identify causes and potential solutions to their depression, researchers said. Continue reading...

Broken by my parents’ divorce, I was all too ready to be remade by Margaret and her circle. But the ‘training’ was brutal and demeaningIt’s 1994, I’m in a school gym, 16 years old, examining the intersecting lines for basketball, badminton and tennis because it feels less confusing to stare at the floor than watch the spectacle unfolding in front of me. A woman, who I think is very old but who is probably in her 30s, is sweating and yelling: “I am sex. I love fucking.” People are clapping, cheering, telling her she is beautiful. She hollers at the ceiling, thrusting her pelvis. I feel repulsed. Nothing is more gross to a teenager than an adult thrusting, especially in public.I had ended up there because I was depressed after my parents’ bitter divorce. I had stopped going to school, spent all day in bed, mainly in tears. Around then, an old friend of my mum’s from the 60s – whom I will call Margaret – resurfaced. They revived their friendship, and Margaret started helping my mum through the emotional fallout of her divorce. “Sarah might benefit from being trained,” she said. Continue reading...

Altering packaging process could allow pasta to be kept for 120 days, tackling food wasteA new twist on packaging combined with a special ingredient could extend the shelf life of fresh pasta by a month, researchers have revealed.Heat-treated, industrial fresh pasta has a shelf life of approximately 30-90 days, if stored appropriately. However, by taking a triple-pronged approach, involving new forms of packaging, a different packaging atmosphere, and the addition of “good” bacteria, researchers have been able to extend this to 120 days. Continue reading...

With a diameter of 1 to 2km, space rock named 2022 AP7 crosses our orbit but has ‘no chance’ of hitting EarthAstronomers say they have discovered the largest planet killer-sized asteroid in eight years, and that the huge space rock will cross Earth’s orbit.The asteroid, named 2022 AP7, was reported by researchers looking for space rocks within the orbits of Earth and Venus. Continue reading...

The world’s richest man promises more than he has delivered. His social network purchase is likely to go the same wayElon Musk is a fan of the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. When his spacecraft company SpaceX successfully sent its Falcon Heavy rocket payload into orbit around the sun in 2018, the cargo included a digital copy of the author’s classic work: the Foundation trilogy. One of the main protagonists in that series is the Mule, a mutant, megalomaniacal telepath who uses his powers to inspire fanatical loyalty, upend history and conquer the galaxy. No one could miss that Mr Musk has a Mule-sized desire to own the future.His plan to make humanity a multiplanetary species includes nuking Martian polar ice caps to release carbon dioxide, warm the red planet and make it more hospitable for human life. Yet Mr Musk has a history of making promises he has never delivered on. His disease-curing “brain-machine interface” is way behind rivals. In his defence, the billionaire inventor has disrupted the car industry with his Tesla electric vehicles to save the planet. He has become an iconoclast in the public imagination. Continue reading...

California scientists surprised at amount of human-made pollutant whales consume in addition to usual diet of fish and krillMicroplastics have infiltrated nearly all our environments – from human lungs to the Antarctic. Now, scientists have estimated that whales are consuming millions of microplastics per day, in a study that deepens our understanding of plastic pollution in oceans and animal bodies.Scientists from a group of institutions around California used 191 suction-cup tags to follow whales – blue, fin and humpback – along the California coastline to quantify how much plastic they were swallowing, and where it was coming from. They determined the vast majority of plastics are consumed through whales eating krill and other food, instead of coming from water filtered into their mouths. A krill-eating blue whale may ingest 10m pieces of microplastics each day, they estimated, while fish-eating whales probably eat 200,000 pieces of plastic each day. Continue reading...

A new scientific paper has confirmed the power of curse words – and not only to shockName: SwearingAge: It varies: some ancient words became profane over time, other swearwords are more recent coinages. Continue reading...

Apple supplier Foxconn raises daily bonuses to $55 to ease discontent after strict Covid measures prompted some workers to flee the siteApple supplier Foxconn said it has quadrupled bonuses on offer for workers at its Zhengzhou plant in central China as it seeks to quell discontent over Covid curbs and retain staff at the giant iPhone manufacturing site.Daily bonuses for employees, who are part of a Foxconn unit responsible for making electronics including smartphones at the site, have been raised to 400 yuan ($55) a day for November from 100 yuan, according to the official WeChat account of Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant. Continue reading...

Researchers say change could be result of selection pressures as human hunters preferred to target animals with larger hornsRhinoceros horns have become shorter over the last century, researchers have found, adding the development could be a result of hunters and poachers targeting larger prizes.Rhino horns were much sought after among hunters over the centuries, while modern poachers sell them for use in traditional medicines in China and Vietnam. Continue reading...

A new trial is exploring if prescriptions of surfing, gardening and dance classes can reduce anxiety and depression in people aged 11 to 18. NHS mental health trusts in 10 parts of England will use a range of sports, arts and outdoor activities with 600 young people to see if it can stop conditions worsening while the sufferers are on waiting lists for care. This kind of support is known as ‘social prescribing’, allowing health professionals to refer patients to a range of community groups and organisations. But while social prescribing programmes are being rolled out around the world, a recent review has found scant evidence of their effectiveness. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Prof Susan Smith about the ideas behind social prescribing, its potential benefits for those with complex issues, and why more studies are urgently needed Continue reading...

The answers to today’s conundrumsEarlier today I set you these laugh-out-loud puzzles by the incomparable king of quizzers Frank Paul, winner of Only Connect, part time TV presenter and author of a new book of festive conundrums (of which more later.)Here are the puzzles again, with the answers. Continue reading...

With the right ethical safeguards, could ‘challenge trials’ defend against future pandemics?In the 1770s an English doctor called Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids didn’t seem to catch smallpox, the terrifying disease that caused around a third of the people who caught it to die. He thought that their frequent exposure to cowpox, a similar but less severe virus, might be what protected them. In order to test his hypothesis he gave his gardener’s eight-year-old son cowpox and then deliberately infected him with smallpox to see if he had become immune. He had, and Jenner successfully repeated the experiment. “Vaccination”, from the Latin word for cow, soon became commonplace.It was of course highly irresponsible to expose a child to a deadly disease with no sure knowledge that he would survive. Even so, with hindsight, we can see that the benefits were immense: the vaccine was safe and highly effective. Demonstrating that fact and publicising it encouraged untold numbers of others to follow suit. Continue reading...

Company spun out of Oxford University makes DNA and RNA sequencing devices to identify viruses and variantsNot far from Didcot, once a halfway stop between London and Bristol on the Great Western Railway celebrated for Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s engineering, innovation has returned with a hi-tech factory manufacturing DNA and RNA sequencing machines.Oxford Nanopore, a spinout from Oxford University, produces devices used to identify viruses and spot variants in the genetic makeup of humans, animals and plants. Its sequencers have been used to track Covid-19 variants globally and are now being trialled on intensive care patients with respiratory infections at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals in London, and in the fight against the 200 drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, the second-biggest killer worldwide after Covid in 2020. Continue reading...

Frank Paul’s finest lexical recreationsUPDATE: Answers can be read hereHe is the sultan of spoonerisms and the Aga Khan of anagrams. Today’s word puzzles are set by Frank Paul, a legend in the world of quizzes and puzzles.Paul is known to British TV viewers as a champion of Only Connect, and was co-host of Channel Four’s Answer Trap. He is also a fine artist, the son of artists Celia Paul and Lucian Freud. Continue reading...

Birds showing most self-control score higher in cognitive tests, suggesting they are more intelligentThe old saying states a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush but it appears Eurasian jays may beg to differ: researchers have found the corvids shun an immediate reward for a tastier, but delayed, treat.What’s more, the team found the birds that showed the most self-control scored higher on a variety of cognitive tests, suggesting they were more intelligent. Continue reading...

Faint constellation of Lacerta is now perfectly placed for northern hemisphere viewers to identifyThis week the small, admittedly faint constellation of Lacerta, the lizard, is perfectly placed for northern hemisphere viewers to identify. This grouping does not date to antiquity but was defined by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1687, who originally proposed the name Stellio after the Mediterranean lizard species Laudakia stellio.The constellation is located between the brighter ones of Cygnus, the swan, Cassiopeia and Andromeda. Cassiopeia in particular can help locate it because both constellations share a “W” shape. In the case of Cassiopeia, the shape represents a queen sitting in her throne, whereas for Lacerta, the shape is made by the constellation’s brightest stars. Brightest in this context means only of the fourth magnitude. Continue reading...

Storyteller, nosy neighbour, bad therapist… a friendly ghost must be all these things‘I promise I’m not a sociopath,” I tell them. “But I will be asking a lot of questions that might seem deeply strange or outrageously rude. I’ll want to know what colour the walls were in the consultant’s office when you got the results, I’ll ask what the weather was on the day of the funeral, I’ll want to know about the hotel breakfast on your honeymoon. But it’s because we’re not telling a quick story on a chatshow, we’re writing a book.”When I meet potential subjects with a view to ghostwriting their story, I always begin with “the talk”, so they understand I have no malevolent intentions. I’ve been doing the job for more than a decade now, and it bears little resemblance to most people’s assumptions. Continue reading...

The winning essay in the Max Perutz science writing award 2022, published below, was written by Emily Cornish, a clinical research fellow and PhD candidate at University College LondonThe Medical Research Council (MRC) Max Perutz science writing award is open to MRC-funded PhD students, who are invited to write about why their area of research matters. This year’s 10 shortlisted topics included immune therapies for cancer, Scotland’s drug-related death rate and the neglected tropical disease schistosomiasis. The high quality of the entries made judging hard. Ultimately, the panel, made up of the Observer’s Ian Tucker, Roger Highfield of the Science Museum, the journalist Samira Ahmed, the science communication lecturer Andy Ridgeway, the MRC’s Jennifer Anderson and the award-winning young science writer Zara Hussan, agreed that the £1,500 prize should go to Emily Cornish, a Phd candidate at University College London’s EGA Institute for Women’s Health, for her essay about recurrent pregnancy loss. “I am so thrilled to have won this inspirational prize,” says Emily. Continue reading...

Many of us find grappling with unfamiliar demands anxiety-provoking. Try these steps to ease yourself in

In a boost to a fledgling industry, UK-built mini-satellites will soon be able to begin their journey into orbit on home groundIn a few weeks, Britain will become a space power. A Virgin Orbit jumbo jet will take off from an airport in Cornwall, carrying a rocket strapped below one wing. As the plane flies 35,000ft above the Atlantic, it will drop its cargo, the rocket engine will be ignited, and a payload of small satellites will be hurled into Earth orbit.The LauncherOne mission – scheduled for mid-November – is intended to be the first of many launches from centres around the UK. Continue reading...

Satellite photo shows what appears to be a happy face pattern on the sun with dark patches called ‘coronal holes’A Nasa satellite captured an image of what appeared to be a happy face pattern on the sun earlier this week, prompting the US space agency to say the sun was seen “smiling”.The agency released the image on Wednesday on Twitter, writing: “Today, Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the sun ‘smiling.’ Seen in ultraviolet light, these dark patches on the sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space.” Continue reading...

Device less than 1mm in diameter is designed to be inserted in body and produce images of tissue with ‘unprecedented speed’A tiny microscope that can be manoeuvred through small spaces inside the body during surgery could speed up breast cancer treatment, according to the scientists who created it.Experts from Imperial College London have developed an endo-microscope that is less than 1mm in diameter – about the width of 25 human hairs – and is designed to be inserted into the body to provide views of tissue and organs. Continue reading...

Researchers examining data going back to 1990s find global south has borne brunt despite causing least emissionsHeatwaves brought on by human-caused climate breakdown have cost the global economy about $16tn since the 1990s, according to a study.The research calculates the financial impact of extreme heat on infrastructure, agriculture, productivity, human health and other areas. Continue reading...

Technology allows sperm to be frozen longer than legal 50-year limit but poses medical and ethical questionsA change of law has paved the way for more babies to be born from sperm frozen up to 50 years ago, but experts say there is no scientific reason why sperm hundreds of years old cannot be used.This week, a boy was born using sperm frozen in 1996, collected when his father was diagnosed, aged 21, with Hodgkin lymphoma, in case his treatment caused infertility.