Science | The Guardian

Eating, shaving, going to the loo… what was it all going to be like in space?For the first issue of the Observer Magazine of 1965, John Davy went on a tour of locations involved with the US moon-shot programme, ‘the most breathtaking venture in history’ (‘Target moon’, 3 January 1965).He found Lem (the Lunar Excursion Module) ‘squatting, shiny and new, in a hangar on Long Island… it looks precisely like something that has crept off the cover of a back number of Astounding.’ Continue reading...

Concern about economy leads city to try targeted approach with rolling restrictions of individual neighbourhoodsShanghai has recorded a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases, but officials have ruled out a full lockdown over the damage it would do to the economy.Millions of Chinese in affected areas have been subjected to city-wide lockdowns by an Omicron-led outbreak that has sent daily case counts creeping ever-higher, though they remain insignificant compared with other countries. Continue reading...

The future isn’t female, at least not for the invasive Aedes aegypti: the altered males are engineered to produce only male offspringGenetically modified male mosquitoes may soon be buzzing across areas of California, in an experiment to stop the spread of invasive species in a warming climate.Earlier this month, the EPA cleared the UK-based biotech company Oxitec to release a maximum of roughly 2.4bn of its genetically modified mosquitoes through 2024, expand its existing trial in Florida and start a new pilot project in California’s Central Valley, where mosquito numbers are on the rise. Continue reading...

The desert graveyard where the ancient Chinchorro decorated and buried their dead is now a Unesco World Heritage siteJannina Campos walks up a sandy hillside in Arica, a port city on the edge of the Atacama desert, the driest place on the planet.The slope is dotted with dozens of orange markers placed in December. Each indicates skeletal remains recently uncovered by unusually strong winds and increased rainfall. Continue reading...

Ernest Shackleton’s ship was finally found this month after 100 years suspended under the sea. His story speaks to our chaotic lives today …The stern of a ship looms out of the darkness. The outlines of the wooden rails are soft with algae, and one pale, ghostly anemone clings to the planks. As the camera moves closer, the shape of a star rises up from the gloom, and a word on the ship beneath the anemone’s white fronds becomes legible: Endurance.Ernest Shackleton’s ship was finally found by an expedition team from the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust on 5 March, having lain on the bed of an Antarctic sea in near-perfect condition for 107 years. I followed it all from my desk, light-headed with delight as I watched a video released by the expedition. And as I sat there I wondered, as I often have during the past year: why do I care so much about this?Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist based in London Continue reading...

With the EU and US voting to scrap hour changes, I’m very gratified to see the world finally catching up with my activismOn Sunday, clocks across the UK will go forward by an hour – except mine. Since October 2018, I have been living my life entirely by GMT. It may sound extreme (and inconvenient) but I do it because I believe that daylight savings time (DST) is an unnecessary bane on our society; a failed experiment long in need of terminating.For a start, changing the clocks is bad for our health. This is because we humans (and many other lifeforms on this planet) are synchronised with Earth’s natural orbit – we naturally wake up when the day begins and sleep when night falls. Changing our “social clock” creates a gulf between the time on our watches and the height of the sun in the sky. (This was made even worse during the second world war, when British double summer time was introduced, time-shifting the natural day by two hours instead of one.) In 2019, a group of experts in psychology, neurology and sleep cycles concluded that “if we want to improve human health … we should abandon DST”, after studies showed that, in the weeks after a clock change, sleep durations fall and heart attacks increase. There is a strong safety case, too: when DST was paused as an experiment in the 1960s, road traffic accidents in England and Wales fell by 11%. Continue reading...

In this week’s episode, Marina Hyde on the ingratitude police who feel Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe should be grateful (1m49s), Kadish Morris interviews FKA twigs (10m17s), Ed Cumming looks into why Aesop hand soap got so posh (21m01s), plus Stuart McGurk on the new age world of manifesting (38m53s) Continue reading...

People may turn to Covid tests less regularly once charges come in from April. When is the optimal time to use one?For months many of us have used a single red line in a plastic cartridge as a kind of social traffic light – swaying whether go out or stay at home to protect others from Covid. But from 1 April, lateral flow tests (LFTs) for those not showing symptoms will cease to be free of charge in England, and from 18 April in Scotland, meaning people will want to use them as economically as possible (if they bother testing at all). Wales and Northern Ireland are implementing a phased approach to charging for tests.So, when is the optimal time to test if LFTs are limited and you want the greatest chance of knowing if you’re infected? Continue reading...

Nasa scientist says complete collapse of ice shelf as big as Rome during unusually high temperatures is ‘sign of what might be coming’

I’m not looking for a basic apology, I want the perfect apology – a mea culpa so good that everyone agrees I am an untouchable moral paragon

Researchers outline urgent steps to improve food security in the face of increasing natural disasters caused by the climate crisisThe climate crisis is threatening food stocks in sub-Saharan Africa, but a comprehensive approach to food, farming and resources could increase crop production by more than 500% in some countries in the region, according to new research by more than 200 experts.There is no single technological fix to the threat posed by the barrage of natural disasters striking the region, they said, but significant improvements could be achieved with new approaches, based on modelling done by the network of researchers in Malawi, Tanzania, South Africa and Zambia. Continue reading...

Trust between people – not in government or institutions – is key to limiting damage in a pandemic, our research shows

Calls for agency to communicate clearly and transparently after error, corrected last week, inadvertently added deaths to trackerA quiet change to how the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publicly reports Covid death details underscores the need for the agency to communicate clearly and transparently about rapidly evolving science, experts say.The past two years have created numerous communication challenges for the agency, which works with massive amounts of data from scores of different sources, including states and territories. Continue reading...

Report from Shoal on 2021’s newly described species shows ‘there are still hundreds and hundreds more freshwater fish scientists don’t know about yet’

Forensic scientist Angela Gallop has helped to crack many of the UK’s most notorious murder cases. But today she fears the whole field – and justice itself – is at riskEarly one morning in June 1982, a smartly dressed man was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in central London. The dead man was carrying two Patek Philippe watches, one on his wrist and one in his top jacket pocket, both of which had stopped. The pockets and seams of his suit trousers contained 5kg of bricks and rubble. He was also carrying a forged Italian passport and about £10,000 in cash. The next day, police in Rome confirmed the man’s identity. His name was Roberto Calvi and he was the chair of an Italian bank with close ties to the Vatican. Calvi had been missing for at least six days. He was due to appear in an Italian court the next week to appeal against a conviction for illegally transferring several billion lira out of the country. The press called him “God’s Banker”.Calvi’s death was recorded as a suicide, but his family believed he had been murdered, possibly by the mafia. In 1991, almost 10 years after Calvi’s body was found, the family hired Kroll, a private detective company, to carry out a new investigation into his death. To review the evidence, Kroll in turn hired a forensic scientist named Angela Gallop. In the previous five years, Gallop had gained a reputation as an expert prepared to go beyond the methods favoured by her peers – the straightforward DNA tests or fingerprint comparisons – in order to solve a crime. “She was meticulous, very open-minded, and her scientific methods were second to none. There weren’t many others doing it in quite the same way,” said Michael Mansfield, a barrister who often worked with her at the time. Continue reading...

Our understanding of the virus has changed so much. Yet some ‘experts’ doggedly cling to theories they proposed two years ago

Over the past two years, countries around the world have shut down their societies in last-ditch efforts to contain the pandemic. Some, like China, have enforced strict lockdowns as part of a zero Covid strategy. Others have ordered people to stay at home to flatten the curve of infections and buy precious time. But since they first began, what have we learned about how well lockdowns work?Ian Sample speaks to epidemiologist Prof Adam Kucharski about the effectiveness of different approaches, and the lessons we should take forward.Archive: DW News, BBC News, Global News, France 24 Continue reading...

Paleontologists celebrate ‘happy ending’ as Abu Dhabi museum is revealed as owner, after fearing implications of sale to secret buyerOn 6 October 2020, a mysterious buyer paid a record-breaking $31.8m for the famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan.The rare, mostly complete skeleton of the dinosaur quickly vanished from the public eye. Paleontologists were left worried that the auction sale to a secret buyer would drive up the cost of rare skeletons, price out smaller museums and deny researchers – and the public – access to them. Continue reading...

A review of 26 studies finds benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss

The brig – whose crew was rescued – is linked to prominent Black mariner who hired nearly all Black and Native sailors for his shipsScientists have announced the discovery of a 207-year-old whaling ship that sank in the Gulf of Mexico, revealing evidence about descendants of African enslaved people and Native Americans who served as essential crew members.The 64-foot long, two-masted wooden ship was built in 1815 in Westport, Massachusetts, and was used to hunt whales from the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean sea and the Gulf of Mexico, but sank during a storm on 26 May 1836, the New York Times reported. Continue reading...

Peruvian historian and US archaeologist say the pre-Columbian town was called Huayna Picchu by the Inca peopleMachu Picchu is one of the world’s best-known archaeological sites, a wonder of pre-Columbian architecture that has been closely studied for decades and a tourist attraction that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.But a new academic paper argues that since its rediscovery more than a century ago, the site has been known by the wrong name. Continue reading...

With free universal testing winding down, health service advises tests mostly needed for people at high riskThe provision of free Covid-19 tests is being scaled back in England as people scramble to get them while they are still available.People trying to order lateral flow tests are discouraged from ordering packs when they try to access them online. Continue reading...

Prof Danny Altmann, immunologist at Imperial College London, says UK’s approach fails to take the impact of infections seriouslyLong Covid could create a generation affected by disability, with people forced out of their homes and work, and some even driven to suicide, a leading expert has warned.In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Prof Danny Altmann – an immunologist at Imperial College London – said that the UK’s current approach to Covid fails to take the impact of infections sufficiently seriously, adding that more needs to be done to aid diagnosis and treatment of long Covid. Continue reading...

Analysis: With experts concerned over rising case rates, where are we also with deaths, hospital admissions, long Covid and the economy?On 23 March 2020, the day on which the prime minister announced the first UK lockdown, just over 1,000 people had died of a new and frightening coronavirus. Two years later, that figure now stands at above 188,000.The UK endured several more lockdowns over the next two years as new variants emerged and cases soared, causing unprecedented disruption. Continue reading...

To stop another, more severe, pandemic, those misleading stories like thinking the virus would burn itself out can’t be forgottenAll big experiences in our lives have two realities. There is what really happened. And there is the narrative, the story we tell ourselves and each other about what happened. Of the two, psychologists say it’s the narrative that matters most. Creating coherent stories about events allows us to make sense of them. It is the narrative that determines our reactions, and what we do next.Two years after the World Health Organization (WHO) finally used the word “pandemic” in its own story about the deadly new virus from Wuhan, narratives have multiplied and changed around the big questions. How bad is it? What should we do about it? When will it be over? The stories we embraced have sometimes been correct, but others have sown division, even caused needless deaths. Those stories aren’t finished – and neither is the pandemic. Continue reading...

Two years after the first UK coronavirus lockdown, Laura Spinney reflects on what the years after the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic looked like, and what we might expect in a post-Covid eraOn 23 March 2020 – two years ago today – the first Covid lockdown was announced in the UK, upending life for everybody. It marked the start of a new era– one that has not entirely come to an end.Science writer Laura Spinney says pandemics don’t conclude neatly, and that the after-effects can be seen for years to come. While researching her book Pale Rider, a history of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, she read countless pandemic diaries. She tells Hannah Moore that those accounts, as well as public records, paint a rich picture of how that pandemic changed society – and we can already see how Covid-19 has reshaped our world. Continue reading...

PM Jacinda Ardern, who oversaw some of the toughest restrictions in the world, says rules will relax after Omicron peak in early April

Sean Kenny on how the virus can affect your sense of self for years. Plus Jennifer Jenkins on the foolishness of ending free lateral flow testsDr Xand van Tulleken (Falling ill made me realise the true wonder of the NHS, 19 March) says he will repeat to his patients the advice that an A&E doctor gave him: “You mustn’t let being ill make you think differently about yourself. You’re still the same person, just one bit of you isn’t working very well.”I am suffering from long Covid, and if any doctor said this to me I’d be hurt and offended. Part of the agony of long Covid is that you really are not the person you were before. You lose a lot: work, leisure, maybe the ability to walk for a length of time. You may lose friends and relatives who cannot cope with the diagnosis and its implications. You’re undergoing a profound change that will no doubt impact on your sense of self for years. Anyone who says “don’t think differently about yourself” in this situation is a Panglossian fantasist. Continue reading...

Regional director says several countries including the UK lifted restrictions ‘brutally’Several European countries lifted their coronavirus restrictions too soon, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said, and as a result are now witnessing sharp rises in infections probably linked to the new, more transmissible BA2 subvariant.Hans Kluge, director of the WHO’s Europe region, said countries including Germany, France, Italy and Britain had lifted their Covid curbs “brutally – from too much to too few”. Infections are rising in 18 out of the region’s 53 countries, he said. Continue reading...

New technology allows patients to communicate but at slow paceA completely locked-in patient is able to type out words and short sentences to his family, including what he would like to eat, after being implanted with a device that enables him to control a keyboard with his mind.The findings, published in Nature Communications, overturn previous assumptions about the communicative abilities of people who have lost all voluntary muscle control, including movement of the eyes or mouth, as well as giving a unique insight into what it’s like to be in a “locked in” state. Continue reading...

Analysis of vocal expression of emotions is being increasingly used as a tool to assess pigs’ welfare, study findsA new study seeks to answer a key question: what does it mean when a pig oinks, squeals or grunts?In the study published earlier this month, researchers from the University of Copenhagen, ETH Zurich and the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment recorded 7,414 sounds from 411 pigs in different scenarios. Continue reading...

Data shows 202,000 pupils off sick on 17 March, raising fears of classroom disruptions before summer examsThe number of children in state schools in England who were absent last week because of Covid has more than tripled in a fortnight, confirming headteachers’ warnings of growing disruption in classrooms as pupils prepare for summer exams.Figures published by the Department for Education (DfE) on Tuesday showed 202,000 pupils were off school on 17 March because of the virus – a dramatic jump from 58,000 two weeks earlier when attendance was described as returning to “something approaching normal”. Continue reading...

Collaborative investigation shows ships regularly discharge ‘bilge’ water illegally instead of treating it, with toxic effect on marine lifeUp to 3,000 cases of oil dumped by commercial ships may be happening every year in European waters, according to a new investigation, which found the scale of illegal “bilge dumping” is likely to be far higher than publicly acknowledged.Bilge water is a mix of liquids from the engine room of a ship along with other potentially toxic substances including lubricants, cleaning solvents and metals such as lead and arsenic, which collects at the bottom of the vessel. Continue reading...

Findings are based on analysis of care given to almost 2.6 million adults across UK from 2003 to 2018The number of people in the UK using drugs to combat anxiety is soaring, driven by major increases among women and young adults, new research shows.Women are more than twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with anxiety and prescribed medication including antidepressants to relieve its symptoms, the study found. Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s spatial puzzlesEarlier today I set you six puzzles that use a square piece of paper, in the light of new research saying that the best way to improve maths performance is to train ‘spatial reasoning’ using physical objects.1. The triangle fold Continue reading...

Defence minister argues boundary between competition and conflict ‘increasingly blurred’ after Russia destroyed satellite leaving ‘lethal debris’

Primates come up with new ‘kiss-squeak’ alarm calls that spread quickly through communities, research saysWhether it is the rapidly shifting patois of teenagers or curious words found long-buried in the local argot of a rural community, our vocabularies are shaped by our social environs. Now, it seems, such influences might also be at play among orangutans.Researchers studying the “kiss-squeak” alarm calls of wild communities of the apes in Borneo and Sumatra have found that rather than such sounds being innate and hardwired, as was long thought, orangutans are able to come up with new versions of the calls, varying in pitch and duration. Continue reading...

Satellite firm to partner with Elon Musk’s company after being forced to abandon launch plans in RussiaOneWeb, the satellite company part-owned by the British state, is turning to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for help after it was barred from using Russian rockets to launch its latest orbiters.Under the arrangement, the communications firm will partner with SpaceX for its first launches later this year, adding to the 428 micro-satellites it already has in low-earth orbit. Continue reading...

Ditch the screen, grab some paperUPDATE: The solutions to the puzzles can be read here.Today’s puzzles require you to roll up your sleeves and wrestle with a square piece of paper.Because this is the best way to become brilliant at a maths. Or so concludes a recent study by developmental psychologists at Surrey, Toronto and Maryland universities. Continue reading...

Open letter from 500 academics likens fossil-energy funding of climate solutions to tobacco industry disinformationUniversities must stop accepting funding from fossil fuel companies to conduct climate research, even if the research is aimed at developing green and low-carbon technology, an influential group of distinguished academics has said.Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, the Nasa data scientist Peter Kalmus, and prominent US climate scientist Michael Mann are among close to 500 academics from the US and the UK who have written an open letter addressed to all university leaders in the two countries, calling on them to reject all funding from fossil fuel companies. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Experts say the $150m project, due to be de-orbited next year, provides vital data on forests and the carbon stored in themForest experts and scientists are asking Nasa to extend the life of a “key” climate and biodiversity sensor due to be destroyed in the Earth’s atmosphere early next year.The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (Gedi) mission – pronounced like Jedi in Star Wars – was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the International Space Station (ISS) in December 2018, and has provided the first 3D map of the world’s forests. Continue reading...

Antarctic areas reach 40C above normal at same time as north pole regions hit 30C above usual levelsStartling heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles are causing alarm among climate scientists, who have warned the “unprecedented” events could signal faster and abrupt climate breakdown.Temperatures in Antarctica reached record levels at the weekend, an astonishing 40C above normal in places. Continue reading...

After mishaps and misinformation, jab will build ‘global wall of immunity’, says director of Oxford Vaccine GroupExactly two years ago Prof Sir Andrew Pollard was starting to panic. “We were just waking up to the reality of Covid-19 and that we would need vaccines for our very survival,” the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group told the Guardian last week. He joined forces with a colleague, Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert, and together they launched one of the greatest medical missions in modern history. Their seemingly impossible task – to design, develop and deliver a vaccine from scratch to slow the advance of a lethal pandemic – was completed in less than 12 months, to the relief of millions.Today though, the coronavirus landscape – and the status of their jab, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 – looks very different. In the UK, half the population have had their vaccine, restrictions have ended, and while cases and hospitalisations are rising in the UK, a dramatic uptick in deaths is not expected. The jab has saved more than a million lives, according to estimates, but its reputation has been battered by a toxic mix of misinformation, miscommunication and mishaps. Two years after Pollard, Gilbert and their teams first began making the miracle jab now known as Vaxzevria or Covishield, it has been sidelined in the UK and Europe, and snubbed in the US. Continue reading...

Cosmonaut says colours represent his university, after earlier saying they were chosen because they had a lot of yellow material

Can hopes become reality just through the power of positive thinking? Yes, say the latest new age gurus and their – suggestible – audiencesThe problem, it turns out, when writing a story about manifesting – the noughties new-age trend now making a pandemic-inspired Gen Z comeback – is that everyone you meet will proclaim they’ve manifested you. It’s a feature, I suppose, rather than a bug: when you believe that desires can be made real by concentration alone, as those in the manifesting game do, and when that desire is for a journalist to cover the manifesting company you recently set up, then, well, who I am to say that they didn’t?The practice of manifesting is hardly new – it dates back to both the New Thought movement of the 19th century and, more recently, a resurgence in the noughties thanks to the 2006 self-help book The Secret, which sold 30m copies, and Oprah Winfrey, who is a fan. Continue reading...

EBV is a puzzling pathogen that lies dormant in most of us. But its link to MS – detailed in a landmark new study – and some cancers has led to the development of new vaccinesIn the 1970s, Hank Balfour, a virologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, was studying the long-term survival prospects of kidney transplant patients when he noticed that a small proportion of them went on to develop a rare form of cancer known as post-transplant proliferative disorder.He was particularly intrigued when he discovered that almost all of these patients had been infected with a virus called Epstein-Barr or EBV, a curious pathogen that has captivated and puzzled virus-hunters for decades. Continue reading...

Singing in harmony with others is a joyful thing, even in difficult timesThere is something about singing in public that solicits everyone’s attention instantly and demands a reaction. It makes its own weather system wherever it happens. Even singing that is wildly off-tempo and off-key, like drunken karaoke, can’t be ignored. And when the singing is beautiful, it declares the singer’s emotional state and replicates it in the listener, gluing them together briefly in a moment of shared attention.We have seen and heard this in videos that have emerged from Ukraine in the past few weeks and gone viral. MPs lustily singing the Ukrainian national anthem as they returned to parliament. Parents singing folk songs to their children in underground stations to keep their spirits up. A young girl silencing the other occupants of a Kyiv bunker with a rendition of Let it Go from Frozen. Singing stops us in our tracks in a way that speech rarely can. Continue reading...

On the second anniversary of the first lockdown, experts including Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar, outline what needs to be done to cope with pandemicsStopping the spread of Covid-19 through public health measures remains vital to curbing the pandemic, one of Britain’s most senior scientific figures has warned.On the eve of the second anniversary of the lockdown that began the UK’s Covid response, Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, called for investment in next-generation vaccines and better access to vaccinations for poorer countries. Continue reading...

The language we use to talk about death has become increasingly sanitised. It’s time for a more healthy approachAs a forensic pathologist, the dead of all ages, shapes and sizes have been the focus of my career. Numerous times a day, for the past 40 years, I have looked closely and directly at death, knowing that, for many – probably most – of the people I examine, the start of their final day had been completely normal. Death had come swiftly and unexpectedly. So, as I dress each morning, I often wonder where I will be at the end of my day. At home? Or in a mortuary, being slid into a fridge on a shiny tray?In medical circles, we had been expecting a global pandemic for several decades. The HIV/Aids pandemic of the 80s was a sombre milestone, resulting in about 36 million deaths worldwide, but I never anticipated that the first pandemic of the 21st century would develop from a virus in China. I had expected it to come from a lethal reorganisation of the DNA of the influenza virus – as happened in 1918, when “Spanish” flu killed at least 50 million people worldwide, and in the subsequent, less lethal, influenza pandemics: 2 million died in the 1957 flu pandemic and 1 million each in 1968 and 1977. The last notable flu pandemic was swine flu, in 2009, which resulted in about 500,000 deaths. A serious influenza pandemic is about 50 years overdue. Continue reading...

Birdwatchers, church-goers and TV addicts are considered dull, according to new research. But this is stereotyping - let’s embrace the mundaneA new study has supposedly pinpointed the most boring people alive: birdwatchers, accountants, data analysts and everyone who works in insurance. (What, no trainspotters? A major oversight.) The University of Essex research lists the most boring hobbies as going to church, watching TV and “animal observation”. All these things were judged to be worse even than stamp-collecting.Of course, when you undertake this kind of research, you also have to find the opposite types. So the study lists actors, scientists, journalists (and in particular “science journalists”) as the “least boring” professions. The research, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, was conducted by Wijnand van Tilburg, Eric Igou and Mehr Panjwani, all possessing refreshingly unboring names and presumably blessed with many science journalist friends. Continue reading...