by Presented by Madeleine Finlay with Linda Geddes, p on (#5VMXB)
There have never been more products and services devoted to helping women through the menopause, from hormones and supplements to apps and even laser treatments. But is all this choice actually helpful? And what’s the evidence that any of them actually work?Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian science correspondent Linda Geddes about the great menopause gold rush – and how women can get the help they need.Archive: British Menopause Society / ITN Productions, ITV, goop, NBC News Continue reading...
It’s crucial we understand living with the virus isn’t the same thing as ignoring the virusWe have experienced many bumps in the road since 2020 and one would have to be extremely brave to predict what the pandemic may throw at us next.But, in terms of the endgame, many experts believe Covid will eventually become an endemic disease. Continue reading...
Jane Campion, Benedict Cumberbatch and Sandra Oh all say they have used a coach to harness the power of their dreams and say the results have been extraordinaryName: Dream work.Age: People have been dreaming since people have been people. This is more about the exploration of dreams. Continue reading...
Government adviser, who says museum ‘inspired me to pursue a career in science’, will take on role in 2023The government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, is to become the next chair of the Natural History Museum, a position he is understood to be taking on in addition to his current roles.Vallance has been a key figure in informing the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, most notably around understanding the risks and mitigation of the virus and prioritising vaccine development. He said he had loved the museum since he was a young boy. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Liquid biopsy blood tests being offered to patients who have exhausted other optionsThousands of NHS cancer patients who have exhausted all other options are being offered liquid biopsy blood tests to match them to personalised medicines.The groundbreaking genetic analysis gives patients a better chance of successfully trying new treatments. A pioneering scheme piloted at the Christie NHS foundation trust in Manchester proved so successful it is being rolled out across the UK, the Guardian can reveal. Continue reading...
Singing to a child is as important to the singers as the listeners – something parents should remember as we seek to quell our raging anxietyWhen my eldest daughter was just a few months old, I threw her in a carrier and took her on a train to visit my friend, the chorus of Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves looping in my head. I arrived, giddy and smug in the notion that my adorable new addition hadn’t disrupted my life one bit, placed her in the crib set up in my friend’s guestroom, put my hand on the doorknob – and that’s when she started to scream. Which she did for the entire night.Twelve hours. Fourteen hours? Could have been 18. I lost count. I’d never seen her so furious. I’d never seen her so continuously awake.Tender shepherd,Tender shepherd, Continue reading...
When the pandemic hit, David Ngwerume began creating pieces to inspire and raise awareness. Now, one of his pieces will feature in the Beijing biennaleWhen the pandemic first hit the world, Zimbabwean stone sculptor David Ngwerume took his hammer and chisel and started work on the first of a collection of Covid-inspired pieces.Almost two years and 14 sculptures later, one has made its way to China after being selected for the ninth Beijing International Art Biennale, an exhibition showcasing work from thousands of artists from more than 100 countries. Continue reading...
On a good night, up to 10 stars can be seen in cluster known as the seven sistersThis week’s challenge is a longstanding rite of passage for amateur astronomers. It is also a quick and easy way to gauge the quality of a night’s observing conditions whenever the constellation of Taurus, the bull, is visible.It involves counting the number of stars in the Pleiades. One of only a handful of star clusters visible to the naked eye, the Pleiades is particularly special because we can resolve some of the stars that makes it up. Another name for the cluster is the seven sisters – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can see seven stars. Continue reading...
New passion for reviving country’s monuments is returning Little Theatre of Epidavros to heart of communityFor nearly two millennia, the Little Theatre of Epidavros lay underground. Its engraved seats, concentric and tiered, belonged to a world of roots; in this case the roots of an olive grove owned by Christos Zafiris, a local farmer. “They say that had it not been for pigs digging at the soil, we might never have known of its existence,” says Prof Vassilis Lambrinoudakis. “Until the appearance of the stones in 1970, the theatre was a secret hidden under the earth for 18 centuries.”The classical archaeologist, renowned for his work at Athens University, has spent more than four decades ensuring the chance find would not go to waste. Excavations have not disappointed. Inscriptions discovered at the site, on the slopes of a peninsula overlooking the sea, have shed light on the history of those who may have commissioned the theatre. Evidence of multiple phases of construction, starting in the mid-fourthcentury BC, have further illuminated the ancient city of Epidavros that once surrounded the architectural gem. Continue reading...
by Mark Brown North of England correspondent on (#5VK1B)
Carvings can be seen more clearly thanks to painstaking removal of sediment and water damageThere are carvings of dolphins, horses, boar, salmon, mermaids, a magnificently endowed leopard, George and the dragon, and a fox preaching to some chickens – a 500-year-old warning not to trust people in authority.The carvings, about 300 of them, at Carlisle Castle are the subject of a restoration project to save them from the elements and allow them to be seen more clearly than they have been for generations. Continue reading...
We’ve all been there: driven half mad by the colleague who micromanages, the boss who bullies, the co-worker asleep on the job… So how do we navigate the messy world of office politics?Twenty years ago, the American psychologist Tessa West began arriving early to the department store at which she worked, so she could avoid the salespeople she spent most of her time with. Really, she was hoping to escape just one colleague – someone with whom she disagreed about shop-floor etiquette. (Her: don’t steal clients. The co-worker: why not?) In the early mornings, West could be sure they wouldn’t run into each other, saving her from stress and anxiety, which can lead to ill health. “It’s not that I thought anything bad was going to happen,” she recalls, via Zoom. “It was the not-knowing what would happen,” and “the increase in heart-rate” that comes with that uncertainty. Soon the situation became so preoccupying that West quit, not so much resolving the conflict as bypassing it altogether. “Did it work? Sure. But how much energy did that take up? A lot.”West, who is now 40, is a professor of psychology at New York University, where she runs the West Interpersonal Perception Lab, a research unit that studies, broadly, how we deal with each other, and how those interactions affect our mental and physiological states. “I spent the first 10 years of my career doing basic science on how people communicate,” she says, which included “a lot of time in labs evoking horrible experiences to see what people do.” (One study involved West sitting participants in a chair and “being mean” to them, to measure their stress responses.) Before long, she noticed that a lot of what she was observing could be captured in the workplace: how individuals influence groups, how status affects persuasion and morale, how anxiety affects everyday relations. And the more she researched, the more she realised that, like her younger self, very few of us know how to resolve everyday conflict at work. Continue reading...
If you see the majestic stones on Salisbury Plain as an emblem of England, think again. A major new British Museum exhibition connects them to many points and cultures across Europe through 1,500 years of immigrationAmong the many treasures in the British Museum’s forthcoming Stonehenge exhibition is a collection of carved and polished spherical stones, each about the size of a cricket ball. The stones are 5,000 years old and have mostly been found singly in Scotland. The most famous of the 400 or so discoveries is a beautiful polished black sphere from Towie, Aberdeenshire, with three bulbous surfaces, tactile as a miniature Henry Moore. The sphere is carved with precise geometric whorls and spirals. In common with the much weightier neolithic monuments that the Stonehenge exhibition celebrates, the longer you look at the stones, the more mysterious they seem: what and why and how?If the answers to those questions remain unknowable, one thing that the balls – and the culture that prized them – make clear is their creators were people of enormous curiosity and skill, prepared to invest untold hours in making a perfect object, because they could. They were connoisseurs of stone. Continue reading...
Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, the cures in question, have proven to be ineffective in preventing or treating Covid-19Republican state lawmakers across the United States have proposed – and in some cases passed – legislation that they say keeps the government from interfering with doctors who want to prescribe ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to help prevent and treat Covid-19.But those treatments have not proven effective at preventing or treating Covid and infectious disease experts see the bills as examples of right-wing lawmakers politicizing medicine – a trend that is increasing as the pandemic wears on in America in to its third year amid an increasingly fraught political atmosphere. Continue reading...
The geneticist offers a short, sharp, illuminating overview of the science, politics, uses and abuses of human gene editingAdam Rutherford begins this sharp and timely study of the science that dare not speak its name with an account of the professor who, in 2018, attempted to genetically modify the embryos of twin daughters, removing them from a woman’s womb and then reimplanting them. “China’s Frankenstein”, He Jiankui, had planned to give the children genetic immunity from HIV/Aids, a disease from which their father suffered. Though his efforts seem to have failed – the girls may not have that immunity and he was jailed for three years and fined three million yuan – the case provides one stark answer to Rutherford’s opening question: “If you have children, you will surely want them to live well. You hope that they are free from disease, and that they fulfil their potential … what are you willing to do to ensure this?”Ever since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in response to the new sciences of physiology and galvanism, that question has haunted human imaginations. After Darwin and before the Third Reich, eugenics was a science that was embraced, as Rutherford notes, by “suffragists, feminists, philosophers and more than a dozen Nobel prizewinners … [and] was a beacon of light for many countries striving to be better, healthier and stronger”. Continue reading...
For the first 25 years of my life everyone called me Mandy – and it felt completely wrongMy name is Camilla, so why, for the first 25 years of my life, did everyone call me Mandy? My Jamaican mother loathed the name Camilla. She said my Nigerian father chose the name, but she thought Camilla sounded too damn serious and upper-class. And she was right. Growing up in Luton in the 70s and 80s, there weren’t too many Camillas knocking about the council estates of Bedfordshire. My friends’ names were plain and simple. They were called Debbie, Tracey, Jean. They were easy on the ear. Or their names were culturally appropriate – Jyoti, Shabana, Patience. But Camilla? It might have been the name written on my birth certificate, but my mother had other ideas. She had a plan. And it was hatched in the months after my birth – a new name.But there were caveats. Unlike Camilla, the new name had to be popular, jolly and understated, with preferably two syllables. So, she drew up a list of potentials: Donna, Paula, Charmaine, Joanne. Then bingo, she came up with the name: Mandy. Not Amanda, but Mandy. Plain. Simple. Easy on the ear, Mandy. Camilla wasn’t changed by deed poll, instead, my unofficial “new name” seeped into everyday life. Mandy seamlessly embedded itself on to the register at primary and secondary school, university and around the water cooler. The name Camilla became a relic of the past, a family joke, dragged out at Christmas like eggnog. Continue reading...
Entrants asked to tackle trash, faecal matter, foam packaging and exhaled carbon dioxide by 15 MarchNasa wants help in proposing sustainable living techniques for a trip to Mars. On 18 January it launched the Waste to Base materials challenge: sustainable reprocessing in space on the crowdsourcing website HeroX. The challenge runs until 15 March, by which time entrants will have to submit their solution for how to turn waste materials into useful items for the mission.The four waste products Nasa is most keen for entrants to tackle are general trash, faecal matter, foam packaging and exhaled carbon dioxide. Nasa suggests that useful products could be propellants or feedstock for 3D printers. Continue reading...
Thanks to the vaccines, we no longer need harsh restrictions – but we should still act with caution and considerationIt’s been two months since the first cases of Omicron were identified in the UK. In the weeks after it emerged, modelling scenarios presented to Sage suggested we were facing a situation even worse than last winter, with potentially tens of thousands of hospital admissions and thousands of deaths a day. Thankfully, as we now know, these scenarios did not materialise.The numbers of admissions and deaths peaked below the level expected in even the best-case scenarios. Pressure on hospitals remained very high, but in most cases, the situation was better than feared. The editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, this week described scientists’ response to Omicron as “a case study in error”. He attributed this to an “over-reliance on mathematical modelling and too little emphasis on the experience of health workers on the frontlines of care”, with insufficient attention paid to the views of South African doctors. Continue reading...
Owners spending thousands on surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments when euthanasia may be more humaneFrom open-heart surgery on a snake to putting your dog through chemotherapy, there have never been so many options to treat unwell pets. But vets are warning that too many owners are spending huge amounts of money on keeping their pets alive, even when it’s not always the most humane option.Channel 4’s Supervet and news stories such as Goldie the pufferfish’s tooth surgery are making pet owners aware of the increasingly advanced and complex surgical and medical procedures that pets can undergo. Continue reading...
While you believe your extended family had the right to know about the gene passed on by your late father, that information wasn’t yours to shareMy dad died two years ago, exposing a sea of secrets and lies. He’d had a degenerative condition, but was totally in denial – and while it was a known excuse for his moods and lack of interest in his family, he did little in his lifestyle to mitigate its effects.After he died, we discovered there was a dominant gene he could have passed to his children. My brother and I have been tested – my sister does not want to be – and my brother was found to be positive. Continue reading...
The last recorded sighting of a leafhopper from the same genus as Phlogis kibalensis was in 1969A new species of insect has been found in the Ugandan rainforest that belongs to a group of insects so rare that its closest known relative was last seen more than 50 years ago.The species of leafhopper, named Phlogis kibalensis, was discovered by a British scientist doing field work in a national park in western Uganda. Continue reading...
Footage from March 2019 shows killer whales hunting the planet’s largest creature.This is the first time time killer whales, also known as orcas, have been recorded hunting the blue whale in coordinated and brutal attacks
by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent on (#5VG57)
Planet likely to be spared from catastrophic end if 10km-wide Earthbound asteroid was spotted, analysis findsAs a planet-killing asteroid hurtles towards Earth in the film Don’t Look Up, scientists Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio scramble to get the world to take the threat seriously.For many, the Netflix hit was an allegory of the world’s inaction on climate change, but now a pair of physicists have taken a more literal view of the question at the heart of the drama: if a 10km-wide asteroid is six months away from impact, is it possible to avert a planet-ending catastrophe? Continue reading...
by Presented and produced by Madeleine Finlay with Ri on (#5VFAE)
They may be one of the world’s favourite supplements but, according to a recent study, more than one in 10 fish oil capsules are rancid. Most of the oil comes from Peruvian anchovetas, a type of anchovy, which is also used to feed pigs, poultry and farmed fish. And despite catching more than 4m tonnes a year of Peruvian anchovetas to cater to the global demand, large industry players want to scale this up even further.Madeleine Finlay speaks to environment journalist Richa Syal about why so many fish oil pills are rancid, and hears from journalist Dan Collyns in Chimbote, Peru, about how the industry is affecting the local environment and its residentsArchive: The Doctors, ICIJ, Frontline PBS Continue reading...
by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent on (#5VEWZ)
Nearly complete limb develops over 18 months, raising exciting possibilities for human patientsA frog has regrown a lost leg after being treated with a cocktail of drugs in a significant advance for regenerative medicine.The African clawed frog, which is naturally unable to regenerate its limbs, was treated with the drugs for just 24 hours and this prompted an 18-month period of regrowth of a functional leg. The demonstration raises the prospect that in the future drugs could be used to switch on similar untapped abilities for regeneration in human patients to restore tissues or organs lost to disease or injury. Continue reading...
Analysis finds many areas growing the crops may not be suitable by 2050, while others could benefitSome regions that produce coffee, cashews and avocados may not be able to support the growing of these crops within decades as a result of global heating, a study has found.Researchers combined climate change projections and soil factors to model how suitable various regions will be for growing crops in 2050. The analysis found that all major coffee-producing regions face a decline in suitability, including Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia and Colombia. Continue reading...
Exclusive: British Veterinary Association says some owners are prioritising novelty over health of petsA litter of hairless French bulldogs has been branded a worrying example of “extreme breeding” by the British Veterinary Association, which has voiced concerns that some owners are prioritising novelty over the health of their pet.The dogs are believed to have been bred in Scotland and to be the result of crosses between French bulldogs, Pugs and Chinese crested dogs. They are thought to be the first litter of hairless French bulldogs in the UK. Continue reading...
Covid-19 is a sharp reminder that our species could do with a bit of humility about its place in the natural orderCoronavirus has stopped us in our tracks and forced us to rethink our position as the rulers of the world. You could say it has done us a favour. An invisible enemy has challenged our treatment of the non-human world and the planet we share.For about 2,000 years most humans have imagined themselves to be the Earth’s “apex predators” – smarter, faster and more deadly than any other creature with which we share the planet. An article in a 2018 special issue of Scientific American praised our species for “the richness of our subjective experience” and “better cognitive skills and bigger brains” – although elephants have bigger brains and no one has worked out how to measure the “subjective experience” of non-human animals.Barbara Ehrenreich is the founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project Continue reading...
by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent on (#5VEGP)
Experts say object is a match for predicted class of neutron star with ultra-powerful magnetic fieldAstronomers have discovered a mysterious object emitting a radio wave beam that pulsed every 20 minutes.The team behind the discovery believe the object could be a new class of slowly rotating neutron star with an ultra-powerful magnetic field. The repeating signals were detected during the first three months of 2018, but then disappeared, suggesting they were linked to a dramatic, one-off event, such as a starquake. Continue reading...
Modelling may not be as accurate as a crystal ball, but it remains the best tool we have to predict the futureOfficial modelling efforts have been subjected to barrages of criticism throughout the pandemic, from across the political spectrum. No doubt some of that criticism has appeared justified – the result of highly publicised projections that never came to pass. In July 2021, for instance, the newly installed health secretary, Sajid Javid, warned that cases could soon rise above 100,000 a day. His figure was based on modelling from the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, known as SPI-M.One influential SPI-M member, Prof Neil Ferguson, went further and suggested that, following the “freedom day” relaxation of restrictions on 19 July, the 100,000 figure was “almost inevitable” and that 200,000 cases a day was possible. Cases topped out at an average of about 50,000 a day just before “freedom day”, before falling and plateauing between 25,000 and 45,000 for the next four months.Kit Yates is director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death Continue reading...
Her early life was blighted by the condition, until a TV documentary changed everything. Now, she works for the UK’s leading support groupKitty Wallace remembers very clearly the first time she felt there was something horribly wrong with her face.She was eight years old, in her downstairs bathroom with a friend as they washed their hands before dinner. “I just remember looking at our reflection and thinking how different I looked to her,” she says. “At that moment, I had this very strong feeling that my face was offensive or disfigured compared with hers, and then a sudden realisation that this must be as obvious to everyone else as it was to me.” Continue reading...
Report highlights ethical and practical issues surrounding the rapid advancement of the fieldBefore your child is born, you have their genome tweaked to boost their stature, build and intelligence. When they head to school, the teacher streams them according to their genetic makeup. And when working life begins, an employer checks their DNA to ensure they are healthy, agreeable and sufficiently extrovert for the role.It may sound like the worst science fiction. But a new government report warns that genomics is advancing so fast that such scenarios are plausibly on the horizon, with often few laws and regulations to prevent them. Continue reading...
The actor has been diagnosed with dementia but campaigners believe the legal arrangement is not in her best interestIn the wake of Britney Spears’ emancipation from her long-term conservatorship, some of Britney’s fans have turned their attention to the Star Trek actor Nichelle Nichols. Last week a dozen protesters, a mixture of Free Britney activists and fans of Nichols, demonstrated outside the Stanley Mosk courthouse in Los Angeles, chanting “Free Nichelle!”Nichols has been living under a conservatorship since 2018. Her son Kyle Johnson successfully petitioned to be his mother’s conservator after her former manager, Gilbert Bell, was accused of abusing Nichols financially. Protesters believe that Nichols is of sound mind and wants to be released from the arrangement. Continue reading...
Falcon 9 booster, launched from Florida in 2015 to deploy Deep Space Climate Observatory, has followed ‘chaotic’ orbit sinceA SpaceX rocket is on a collision course with the moon after spending almost seven years hurtling through space, experts say.The booster was originally launched from Florida in February 2015 as part of an interplanetary mission to send a space weather satellite on a million-mile journey. Continue reading...
NHS may struggle with future numbers, researchers warn, due to large pool of undiagnosed peopleAlmost 300,000 people in the UK have aortic valve stenosis, a potentially deadly heart condition, according to the first major study to estimate its prevalence.The NHS would struggle to cope with the sheer number of people needing treatment for this over the next few years, with the number set to rise further, the researchers warned. Continue reading...
Omicron has played out in a series of strange stages in Australia. Here’s what to expect when the wave hitsDear New Zealand,Kia ora! Continue reading...
Science | The Guardian