China’s largest city and financial powerhouse is struggling to cope with the country’s worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic in Wuhan

Adults and children wear device that monitors glucose level and adjusts amount of insulin deliveredHundreds of adults and children with type 1 diabetes in England have been fitted with an artificial pancreas that experts say could become the “holy grail” for managing the disease, in a world-first trial on the NHS.The groundbreaking device uses an algorithm to determine the amount of insulin that should be administered and reads blood sugar levels to keep them steady. The NHS trial has so far found the technology more effective at managing diabetes than current devices and that it requires far less input from patients. Continue reading...

Research published by Lancet confirms jabs add protection for people who have had Covid, especially against severe diseaseCovid-19 vaccines provide significant extra protection for people who have already been infected, according to two new studies.The jabs have proven highly effective in protecting those who have never had Covid, but their effectiveness at preventing symptoms and severe outcomes in people who have previously been infected has, until recently, been less clear. Continue reading...

More than 20 years after milestone of first draft, missing sections of sequence have been completedMore than two decades after the draft human genome was celebrated as a scientific milestone, scientists have finally finished the job. The first complete, gap-free sequence of a human genome has been published in an advance expected to pave the way for new insights into health and what makes our species unique.Dr Karen Miga, a scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who co-led the international consortium behind the project, said: “These parts of the human genome that we haven’t been able to study for 20-plus years are important to our understanding of how the genome works, genetic diseases, and human diversity and evolution.” Continue reading...

Waning immunity, easing of restrictions and more transmissible variants are all to blame, experts sayWith Covid infection levels at a record high in parts of the UK, the virus is rife once more, with experts noting that one factor is the rise of a variant of Omicron known as BA.2. But what does this mean for reinfections? Continue reading...

The war in Ukraine, like other conflicts around the world, will mean millions of people going through horrific and traumatic events. Some may go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, experiencing psychological distress for months or even years afterwards. Ian Sample speaks to clinical psychologist Jennifer Wild about what happens in the body and brain when someone gets PTSD, why some people may be more susceptible to developing it than others, and how understanding the underlying psychology can help to build resilience and improve treatments for the futureArchive: ITV News, Channel 4 News Continue reading...

Light from Earendel has travelled for an estimated 12.9bn years to reach EarthThe most distant star ever seen has been captured by the Hubble space telescope in images that appear to give a remarkable glimpse into the ancient universe.Light from the star, named Earendel, has travelled an estimated 12.9bn years to reach the Earth – a huge leap from the previous most distant star, which dates to nine billion years. The observations were possible thanks to a rare cosmic alignment, meaning that Earendel may be the only individual star from this epoch that we will ever see. Continue reading...

Growing up outside cities appears to be good for development of navigational abilitiesPeople who grew up in the country have a better sense of direction and navigational skills than those raised in cities, a study has found.To find out how childhood environment influences navigation ability, scientists looked at how almost 400,000 people from 38 countries played a mobile video game designed for neuroscience research. Continue reading...

People are desperate to return to life as normal, but the rising number of infections is a reminder that this pandemic isn’t overWe’re living in two realities: one in which people have returned to living life as if Covid is over, and the other in which we are approaching record levels of infections, with an estimated 4.26m cases last week. Most of us know people who have Covid, work and education are being disrupted, and the NHS is under severe pressure again due to new patients and sick staff. Admissions with Covid are only 2% below the first Omicron peak two months ago and still rising. While about half are currently admitted primarily for other reasons, numbers are rising in primary Covid admissions too and admissions in over-65s are now 15% higher than their January 2022 peak.The pandemic has changed, but the idea that it is over is false. Omicron represents a major variant, taking over in the UK in a similar way to Delta last summer and Alpha last winter. The ubiquitous narrative that the pandemic is over exists because most people (including the government) now believe at least one of the three big myths of the Omicron age. We need to move past these myths to firstly anticipate the future, and secondly do something to prepare for it.Christina Pagel is director of UCL’s Clinical Operational Research Unit, which applies advanced analytical methods to problems in healthcare Continue reading...

Mark Vande Hei rides back with Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov after 355 days at International Space Station, a US recordA Nasa astronaut caught a Russian ride back to Earth on Wednesday after a US record 355 days at the International Space Station, returning with two cosmonauts to a world torn apart by war.Mark Vande Hei landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan alongside the Russian Space Agency’s Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, who also spent the past year in space. Continue reading...

I remain concerned about both Covid and our frequently non-evidence-based responses to it, says Prof John IoannidisIn an otherwise reflective essay by Prof Devi Sridhar (Why can’t some scientists just admit they were wrong about Covid?, 24 March), I was surprised to learn that I held views I do not hold. Early in 2020, I wrote a piece asking for more data, but this certainly did not “mock” those who were worried about Covid-19. I was worried myself.I remain concerned about both Covid-19 and our frequently non-evidence-based responses to it. I have published dozens of peer-reviewed Covid-19-related papers (collected here under “Projects”). Like all science, I expect those papers must have many weaknesses. I always look for questioning scholars, like Prof Sridhar, to improve on them. However, I fear that isolating single sentences out of context, distorting the meaning of others and using misleading slogans (eg “Covid-as-flu”) can’t promote scientific precision or help society. Continue reading...

Richard Linklater combines his affinities for rotoscoping and depicting the quiet magic of childhood in a wonderful paean to late-60s idealismRichard Linklater is looking back from outer space at childhood’s blue remembered hills in this intensely enjoyable and sweet family movie for Netflix. It’s a rotoscope animation digitally based on live action; in its way, it is every bit as cultish and hallucinatory as the ones that Linklater has made before, like Waking Life from 2001 and A Scanner Darkly from 2006.A 10-year-old boy called Stan (voiced by Milo Coy and then by Jack Black as Stan’s adult self, narrating the action) is growing up in a Houston suburb in the late 60s in a big family with a dad employed in a lowly admin job at Nasa. Stan is obsessed (like everyone) with the Apollo 11 moon mission, and has a vivid fantasy or hallucination that he has been picked by Nasa agents to be a test astronaut for a top-secret dummy-run moon landing, codenamed Apollo 10½, for which the authorities accidentally built the lunar test module too small. So they need a kid of the highest calibre to pilot the thing down to the moon’s surface and bring it back home safely to reassure Neil, Buzz and Michael that they’ll be OK. Continue reading...

Over $80m in government funding has been generated – one of the greatest investments per capita in the worldWhen I started my PhD on excision surgery in endometriosis 25 years ago, the average time it took to diagnose endometriosis in Australia was more than 12 years. With greater awareness in the community – often led by the patients – this has reduced to about 6.5 years.While this is still too long, we are definitely making progress thanks to well-organised patient organisations tirelessly lobbying government. Continue reading...

Night-time thefts from vehicles almost halved where lights were turned off between midnight and 5amWhether lighting is a deterrent to burglars or simply helps them see what they are doing has been a matter of hot debate. Now research suggests that when it comes to reducing theft from cars, it might be best to leave criminals in the dark.Researchers found the level of night-time thefts from cars almost halved when street lighting was turned off between midnight and 5am, compared with staying on all night. Continue reading...

Existence of volcanoes makes idea that dwarf planet is inert ball of ice look increasingly improbableStrung out in the icy reaches of our solar system, two peaks that tower over the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto have perplexed planetary scientists for years. Some speculated it could be an ice volcano, spewing out not lava but vast quantities of icy slush – yet no cauldron-like caldera could be seen.Now a full analysis of images and topographical data suggests it is not one ice volcano but a merger of many – some up to 7,000 metres tall and about 10-150km across. Their discovery has reignited another debate: what could be keeping Pluto warm enough to support volcanic activity? Continue reading...

Institute for Digital Archaeology says it intends to serve injunction against museum imminentlyThe British Museum is facing legal action from one of the UK’s leading heritage preservation organisations over its refusal to allow the 3D scanning of a piece in its Parthenon marbles collection.The Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) said it would serve an injunction against the museum imminently, raising the stakes in the dispute between the two. Continue reading...

Whatever Twitter was doing when it banned the Oxford epidemiologist Carl Heneghan, it wasn’t protecting the world from disinformationCarl Heneghan is an epidemiologist first and foremost, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford, probably many other things – good citizen, well-liked family member – and then, way down the list, a person on Twitter. In other words he doesn’t create social media storms for fun, nor does he have any track record of contrarianism. So how does such a person get banned, as Heneghan was briefly last week, from a social media platform that, famously, has trouble keeping abreast of racial slurs and death threats?Heneghan published a study that suggested the number of people who had died from Covid may have been exaggerated. His final conclusion was that we still had no idea how many people have died because UK health statistics agencies use inconsistent definitions. This was enough to mark him out, albeit briefly, as a Covid denier, which in turn put him in the same camp as anti-vaxxers. Continue reading...

Ahpra says it is ‘aware of allegations in the media’ about McCrory’s compliance with the undertaking on his registrationAustralia’s medical regulator has said it is investigating the AFL’s former concussion adviser and world-renowned concussion expert, neurologist Dr Paul McCrory.McCrory resigned as chair of the Concussion in Sport Group on 5 March after being accused of plagiarising stories in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, with the journal removing one of his editorials from 2005 for alleged “unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright” of the work of Prof Steve Haake. Continue reading...

Major report finds increased risk of conditions including cancer, kidney disease and neurological illnessesPeople with type 2 diabetes have a higher risk of 57 other health conditions, including cancer, kidney disease and neurological illnesses, according to the most comprehensive study of its kind.Millions of people worldwide have the condition, which is linked to being overweight or inactive, or having a family history of type 2 diabetes. It is well known that the condition increases the risk of ill health. Now researchers at the University of Cambridge have been able to show the true scale of the risk type 2 diabetes presents. Continue reading...

As human activities like agricultural production, mining and pollution continue to drive the so-called sixth mass extinction, government negotiators from around the world are currently meeting in Geneva to try to protect the planet’s biodiversity. At stake is an ambitious Paris-style agreement for nature, the final version of which will be negotiated at the COP15 summit in Kunming, China, in August. Madeleine Finlay speaks to reporter Patrick Greenfield from Geneva about what’s being discussed, how the talks are progressing, and whether time is running out to halt the destruction of life on EarthArchive: CNN, DW News, CGTN Global Watch Continue reading...

Pharmacogenomic testing could save the NHS money in the long term and reduce the risks of side-effectsGenetic testing to predict how individuals will respond to common medicines should be implemented without delay to reduce the risk of side-effects and ensure that everyone is given the right drug at the right dose, experts have said.About 6.5% of UK hospital admissions are caused by adverse drug reactions, while most prescription medicines only work on 30% to 50% of people. A significant part of this is due to genetics: almost 99% of people carry at least one genetic variation that affects their response to certain drugs, including commonly prescribed painkillers, heart disease drugs and antidepressants. By the age of 70, about 90% of people are taking at least one of these medications. Continue reading...

Spot will be used to identify safety and structural issues including tunnels dug by relic thievesA four-legged robot called Spot has been deployed to wander around the ruins of ancient Pompeii, identifying structural and safety issues while delving underground to inspect tunnels dug by relic thieves.The dog-like robot is the latest in a series of technologies used as part of a broader project to better manage the archaeological park since 2013, when Unesco threatened to add Pompeii to a list of world heritage sites in peril unless Italian authorities improved its preservation. Continue reading...

Psychologists find biggest effects in girls aged 11-13, while boys’ most vulnerable age seems to be 14-15Social media may affect the wellbeing of girls and boys at different ages, according to research that raises the prospect of windows of vulnerability in adolescence.Psychologists found that girls who increased their time on social media between the ages of 11 and 13 were less satisfied with their lives one year later, with the same trend playing out in boys aged 14 to 15. Continue reading...

The places that chose to pursue elimination suffered less overall. Unfortunately, few had the determination to do soIt was the alt-history, the policy that didn’t get enacted. No-Covid, zero-Covid or elimination aimed to stamp out community transmission of Covid-19 in a given area, rather than just reduce it to “manageable” levels. Most of the world eschewed it, and it got bad press from the start. Only autocratic regimes could pull it off, one mantra went. Countries like China and ah, New Zealand and, oops, that notorious police state Davis in California.There was something of the self-fulfilling prophecy about this. Many people thought No-Covid was impossible, but the handful of places that embraced it proved them wrong. Now that some of those places are themselves shifting to a reduction or mitigation strategy, countries that opted for mitigation from the beginning are enjoying a “we told you so” moment. But No-Covid’s early champions had to shift in part because other countries let the virus rip. Even if their strategy didn’t remain the optimal one, it bought them time to prepare others. It’s important that we remember that when the next pandemic sidles along.Laura Spinney is a science journalist and the author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

The outgoing director of Africa Centres for Disease Control has seen Ebola, Aids and now Covid – and warns complacency is dangerousThe past five years have been “like going from one fire to the next, with barely any time to catch your breath”, says John Nkengasong, the outgoing head of the body charged with responding to health emergencies in Africa.A relentless term as the first director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) saw Nkengasong manage the response to Ebola and Lassa fever outbreaks. But nothing compared to the formidable test brought by Covid-19. Continue reading...

The evidence suggests performance could be less predictable and effective in the future – though there are promising developments

Community testing ends in England on 1 April and will be scaled back across UK as infections riseCome the end of March, the lights will dim on the UK’s Covid epidemic. Despite infection levels rising, cases will plummet, as free lateral flow and PCR tests are stopped for the majority of people in England, with other countries in the UK also set to reduce free testing in the coming weeks and months.But while the government has argued it is time to manage Covid as we do other infectious diseases such as flu, scientists have warned ending community testing could put vulnerable people at risk and undermine efforts to understand the virus. Continue reading...

The more comfortable we feel talking about suicide and self-harm, the easier it will be to detect when someone is in distress

There have been calls for those hospitalised with the coronavirus to be routinely test for influenza after new research revealed an increased mortality rate for those with both conditions

A work by the award-winning artist forms part of an exhibition about the pandemic at the Science Museum in LondonA pot made in lockdown by the British artist Grayson Perry is unveiled this week, as it takes its place as an exhibit in the Science Museum in London.The large decorated vase will stand next to other symbolic items that illustrate the historic impact of the pandemic, including a selection of the vials used in the first mass Covid-19 vaccinations, some of the signs used in the government’s daily public pandemic briefings and a few examples of early homemade face coverings. Continue reading...

Just before she moved away, my increasingly forgetful mum remembered exactly how to get to grips with an old craft“Things to ask Kate”. I spot the scrap of paper with this heading, on the kitchen table. My 84-year-old mum is dishing up lunch, talking animatedly about “the bloody government doing bugger all” about Ukrainian refugees. “It is so awful,” I reply, picking up the envelope and handing it to her. “Are there some things you want help with, Mum?” “Oh yes,” she replies, standing up again. “Where have I put my glasses?” I glance at the cooker to check the rings are all off and pick up the newspaper cutting she handed me when I arrived that she wants me to read. “Do you know,” she says, “I was writing an email at 5am and all of a sudden it just vanished. Vanished.” She turns to look at me, opening her eyes and hands wide to signal the void it’s fallen into. “I’ll have a look and see if I can find it,” I say, wondering whether to ask if she checked the drafts folder.Falling into a void is perhaps my mother’s greatest fear. Forgetful and sometimes wandering, she finds the world increasingly confusing, the spectre of dementia hanging over her old age. “That bloody thing,” she complains frequently, pointing to her iPad, “it drives me mad.” Lost emails are often on the list, along with occurrences such as The Crown going back to the beginning and showing her episodes she’s already seen, and variations on what “two dashes and a dot with a wiggly thing above it” means. She often asks where she can buy such-and-such – the ubiquitousness of Amazon having escaped her – how to pay bills or give to a cause she’s read about. The answer is nearly always online. Online. Online. Online. Sometimes I show her, knowing she almost certainly won’t remember. Mostly I do it for her. Continue reading...

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