Which type of mask should you be wearing? Earlier in the coronavirus pandemic, the public was encouraged to wear reusable cloth masks or surgical masks, while P2/N95 respirators were not recommended for community use. But the Omicron variant’s increased transmissibility has prompted the question: should you consider switching your reusable mask for a respirator instead?► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube
The first full moon of 2022 – named the Wolf moon by native north Americans because wolves can be heard howling at the moon more around this time of year due to hunger Continue reading...
Combined vaccine should be ready in time for winter infectious season in 2023, says drug firm’s chief executiveModerna is aiming to launch a single booster vaccination that will protect against both Covid-19 and flu within two years, its chief executive has said.Stéphane Bancel said that the combined vaccine – which will protect against Covid-19, influenza and RSV, a common respiratory virus – could be available before the winter infectious season in 2023. Continue reading...
Dogs can figure out some things that even chimps can’t. Our science correspondent puts her puppy retriever to the testIt’s a cold winter’s day, and I’m standing in a room watching my dog stare fixedly at two flower pots. I’m about to get an answer to a burning question: is my puppy a clever girl?Dogs have been our companions for millennia, domesticated sometime between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. And the bond endures: according to the latest figures from the Pet Food Manufacturers Association 33% of households in the UK have a dog. Continue reading...
First up will be Gemini, the twins, then Cancer, the crab, and finally Leo, the lionThis week, the full moon will cruise through three zodiacal constellations. First Gemini, the twins; then Cancer, the crab; and finally Leo, the lion.The chart shows the view at 2100 GMT on 17 January, looking east-south-east from London. The moon will be full and sitting just below the two brightest stars of Gemini: Castor and Pollux. The brighter of the two, and the star nearest to the moon, is the yellow-tinged Pollux, while the one above is the whiter but dimmer Castor. Continue reading...
One reader’s experience of the effects on family members of the conspiracy theories surrounding vaccinationsI read David Green’s letter on anti-vaxxers (12 January) and empathised with the letter written in response (13 January). The week before Christmas my dad died of Covid. The intensive care consultant couldn’t have been clearer that, in her opinion, if he had been vaccinated he would not have developed Covid pneumonia to the severity that he did.He died very frightened and asking his family to come and be with him, and we couldn’t. The experience traumatised my sister so badly that she was hospitalised with psychosis three days after his passing. The reason he wasn’t vaccinated is because his mind was poisoned with conspiracy theories and misinformation exacerbated by two years of lockdown and reduced social contact. While I am angry that he would not get vaccinated, I don’t think any good would ever come from criminalising his choice. Continue reading...
Graves dating back thousands of years are giving up their secrets, as new ways to pin down the sex of old bones are overturning long-held, biased beliefs about gender and loveIn the early summer of 2009, a team of archaeologists arrived at a construction site in a residential neighbourhood of Modena, Italy. Digging had started for a new building and in the process workers unearthed a cemetery, dating back 1,500 years. There were 11 graves, but it quickly became clear that one of them was not like the others. Instead of a single skeleton, Tomb 16 contained two and they were holding hands.“Here’s the demonstration of how love between a man and a woman can really be eternal,” wrote Gazzetta di Modena of the pair, instantly dubbed “the Lovers”. However, according to the original anthropological report, the sex of the Lovers was not obvious from the bones alone. At some point, someone tried to analyse their DNA, but “the data were so bad”, says Federico Lugli at the University of Bologna, that it looked like “just random noise”. Continue reading...
Two years of Covid have wreaked havoc with the nation’s mental health. What can be learned from the survivors of other traumas and is there a way of thinking ourselves to a happier, healthier place?It was October 2020 when I realised I was going to have to ask for help. I’ve always been anxious, but thanks to the pandemic, I developed debilitating health anxiety. A dire winter was coming and any respite we’d had over the summer felt like it was slipping away. I couldn’t get to sleep and when I finally did, I had nightmares. My stomach churned and my hands shook so badly I had to give up caffeine. I developed a chronic reflux cough and, on more than one occasion, got into such an irrational spiral about it being Covid that I had to book a PCR test just to be able to function.“One of the most diabolical things about this pandemic is the on and on-ness of it all,” says Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. “Humans can withstand a lot of turmoil and instability if they can recover.” Prior to Covid, Ripley studied people who survived tornadoes and terror attacks, emergencies for which the mental health consequences are much better understood than the long, slow-burn, seemingly endless one we find ourselves living through. Continue reading...
Pfizer says its recently approved Paxlovid drug has almost 90% success in preventing severe illness if taken soon after infectionThe recent decision by regulators to approve the antiviral agent Paxlovid for use in the UK adds a formidable new weapon to the arsenal of treatments for Covid-19. Pfizer says the drug has almost 90% success in preventing severe illness in vulnerable adults if taken soon after infection occurs. Paxlovid is one of a growing repertoire of antiviral medicines – which also includes Merck’s agent Molnurpiravir – that can be given to people who have contracted the disease. Crucially, antivirals – which disrupt a virus’s ability to replicate inside an infected cell – provide hope that infected vulnerable individuals, including the very elderly and those with compromised immune systems, can be kept out of hospital.It has taken two years of research for the first antivirals to be approved, with drugs becoming available more than a year after the first Covid vaccines were given in the UK. So why has it taken so long, comparatively, for effective antivirals to be developed? And what role will they play in the UK, which now has broad vaccine protection against Covid? Continue reading...
Study finds ancient hunter-gatherers traded eggshell beads over vast areaScientists have uncovered the world’s oldest social network, a web of connections that flourished 50,000 years ago and stretched for thousands of miles across Africa.But unlike its modern electronic equivalent, this ancient web of social bonds used a far more prosaic medium. It relied on the sharing and trading of beads made of ostrich eggshells – one of humanity’s oldest forms of personal adornment. Continue reading...
Cases seem to be subsiding in states with high vaccination rates, but observers are reluctant to make firm predictionsIn February 2021, Dr Craig Spencer wrote in a Medium post that he was as “eager as anyone to see the end of this pandemic. Thankfully, that may be in sight”.“Covid cases and hospitalizations are dropping,” wrote Spencer, director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. “Vaccines are getting into arms. So, what happens next?” Continue reading...
Police employ them and scientists study them, but what is life like for the rare few who can never forget a face? Super-recogniser Yenny Seo didn’t think it was anything specialAs a child, Yenny Seo often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Likewise, when they watched a movie together, Seo would often recognise “extras” who’d appeared fleetingly in other films.Her mother never thought this was “anything special”, Seo says, and simply assumed she had a particularly observant daughter. Continue reading...
When Tanya Frank joined a group of ‘joyriders’, she rediscovered her love of cycling and found a caring communityI always thought that joyriding meant nicking cars and taking them for a spin, often when drunk. It was what some of the wayward lads did on the Chingford Hall council estate where I grew up. So, I was surprised when the Waltham Forest newsletter reported a different kind of joyriding: a cycling group that is free, for women, and that loans bikes to the members who need them. It has grown since its inception, but JoyRiders started right here in my borough where we have an infrastructure of 27km of cycle paths, known as Mini Holland.London was edging out of the last lockdown and one of the most isolating years we have ever experienced when I discovered the group. I had returned to my roots after living in California in the hope that this country might be kinder to my youngest son. He had bounced around in the mental health system in the USA for almost a decade, where the “cure” had been worse than the diagnosis. But the pandemic hampered my plan. When my son was admitted to a psychiatric hospital yet again, only here instead of in America, I knew I needed a better road map to find my way through the pain. Continue reading...
Dr Maria Bottazzi says their vaccine, called Corbevax, is unique because they do not intend to patent itA new Covid-19 vaccine is being developed by Texas scientists using a decades-old conventional method that will make the production and distribution cheaper and more accessible for countries most affected by the pandemic and where new variants are likely to originate due to low inoculation rates.The team, led by Drs Peter Hotez and Maria Bottazzi from the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, has been developing vaccine prototypes for Sars and Mers since 2011, which they reconstructed to create the new Covid vaccine, dubbed Corbevax, or “the world’s Covid-19 vaccine”. Continue reading...
The Hyderabad-based company says the vaccine will provide ‘sustainable access to low- and middle-income countries’The Indian biotechnology and biopharmaceutical company Biological E has produced the country’s first locally developed Covid-19 vaccine in partnership with the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine.The Hyderabad-based company has already produced 150m doses of the vaccine, called Corbevax, and will produce 100m doses each month beginning in February. It is expected that 1bn doses will be produced by the end of 2022 – just shy of India’s nearly 1.4-billion population. Continue reading...
Ammonia from animal waste and fertilisers used to grow feed create air pollution and poorer suffer mostWe think of industry and traffic as the main sources of air pollution and overlook farming and food production.A new study from the Chinese University of Hong Kong examined the impacts from changing diets and increased meat production in China since the 1980s. Initially, the changes in agricultural production meant more food and better quality food. Undernourishment was reduced and people benefited from fresher fruit and vegetables, and improved animal products. However, continued increases in meat consumption, more processed food and less whole grains have offset these initial gains. Continue reading...
by Written by Gavin Francis, read by Graeme Rooney an on (#5V0D2)
As I embark on a third year of general practice under Covid, I am more conscious than ever that recovery is different for every illness and every patient. By Gavin Francis Continue reading...
Scientists who were part of original 1996 study stand by their observations claiming new findings are ‘disappointing’A four billion-year-old meteorite from Mars that caused a splash here on Earth decades ago contains no evidence of ancient, primitive Martian life after all, scientists have said.In 1996, a Nasa-led team announced that organic compounds in the rock appeared to have been left by living creatures. Other scientists were skeptical and researchers chipped away at that premise over the decades, most recently by a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Andrew Steele. Continue reading...
Researchers exploring Antarctica’s seabed have discovered a thriving, unprecedented colony of icefish 'about a third of the size of London'. 'We expected to see the normal Antarctic seafloor … [but] during the first four hours of our dive, we saw nothing but fish nests,' said Autun Purser, of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and lead author of the study published in Current Biology.
We mustn’t punish those who are fearful of getting the Covid vaccine, writes the mother of an autistic man who suffers from crippling anxietyI was disappointed by Dave Green’s letter (12 January) regarding the penalties he suggests for those who are unvaccinated. I can empathise with his words as a previous cancer patient myself, and also as a frontline nurse, but I disagree with his judgment on “anti-vaxxers”. Those who have chosen not to have the vaccine do not all share the same mindset, and it is worth bearing this in mind before they are all excommunicated from society.My adult son is autistic and is unvaccinated by choice. His belief system may differ from most people’s, but as he is housebound due to crippling anxiety, hopefully he will not be much of a risk to himself or others. Let’s be civilised enough not to alienate him further. Of course, he might have chosen to forgo the Covid vaccine without the complexities of an autism diagnosis, but we cannot punish those who are fearful or those who wish to preserve their self-determination. Continue reading...
Researchers make unprecedented discovery of 60m active nests while collecting data in Weddell SeaResearchers exploring Antarctica’s seabed have discovered a thriving, unprecedented colony of icefish “about a third of the size of London”.The surprise discovery of about 60 million active nests was made by a team of biologists while collecting routine data at 1.5-2.5 metres above the seafloor of Antarctica’s southern Weddell Sea. Before this discovery, the largest found colony contained only 60 nests. Continue reading...
Many people are at their peak of infectiousness at the very time that Sajid Javid has said they can now mix freely in societyThere have been many changes to isolation rules in England but the science of how Covid-19 spreads has remained the same. During the first waves of the pandemic, people were required to isolate for 10 days after testing positive. This was subsequently changed to seven days, so long as the person had a negative lateral flow test on days six and seven. Although data is still being collected on the impact of this change, the isolation period has been cut again: today, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, announced that people with Covid will only need to isolate for five days, so long as they show two negative lateral flow tests by day six.I’m deeply concerned about this. There is little scientific evidence to justify these reduced measures. Yes, some would argue that Omicron is mild compared to other variants, and does not result in massive hospitalisations. But a comprehensive review of research into 5,340 infected people around the world showed that the times at which these people were shedding the most virus, and were therefore most infectious to others, was between days three to six. The amount of virus each person shedded tailed off at days seven to nine. By day 10, no viable virus could be recovered from their respiratory tracts.Sally Cutler is professor in medical microbiology at the University of East London Continue reading...
by Harriet Sherwood Arts and culture correspondent on (#5TZ0N)
Preservation of figure carved from single piece of wood is incredible, say archaeologistsAn extremely rare, carved wooden figure from the early Roman era has been unearthed in a waterlogged ditch in Buckinghamshire, the latest extraordinary find in the UK’s biggest ever archaeological dig along the 150-mile HS2 rail route.The 67cm-tall figure is carved from a single piece of wood. Archaeologists said its preservation was “incredible” given its age and material, but the lack of oxygen in the ditch helped prevent rotting over many centuries. Continue reading...
The surge has led to passengers stranded on ships, staff shortages and tour cancelations in addition to ports turning ships awayA surge in Covid infections on cruise ships is causing mayhem across the industry, leaving passengers stranded aboard ships, exacerbating staff shortages and prompting the CDC to warn US passengers against all cruise travel.The CDC director said this week that Covid cases have increased 30-fold in just two weeks. Every one of the nearly 100 cruise ships currently carrying passengers in US waters has reported enough Covid-19 cases to merit investigation by the CDC, according to the agency’s website. Continue reading...
by Presented by Madeleine Finlay, produced by Anand J on (#5TYZR)
Last week, the tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes – once described as ‘the next Steve Jobs’ – was convicted of fraud, and could face decades in prison. Her now collapsed company, Theranos, promised to revolutionise medicine with a machine that could run hundreds of health tests on just a pinprick of blood. Those claims have since been exposed as false – but could they ever have been true?Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s wealth correspondent, Rupert Neate, about Silicon Valley’s trial of the century, and pathologist Dr Benjamin Mazer about why Theranos’s vision seemed impossible from the startArchive: ABC News, TedMed, CBS Mornings, NBC News, CNBC Continue reading...
The revolutionary new scope could provide a glimpse of the cosmos dating back billions of years, but first some painstaking adjustments are neededNasa has embarked on the months-long, painstaking process of bringing its newly launched James Webb space telescope into focus, a task due for completion in time for the revolutionary eye in the sky to begin peering into the cosmos by early summer.Mission control engineers at Nasa’s Goddard space flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, began by sending their initial commands to tiny motors called actuators that slowly position and fine-tune the telescope’s principal mirror. Continue reading...
Study confirms anecdotal evidence that lockdowns protected children against non-Covid illnessesHospital admissions for common childhood infections in England dropped by as much as 94% during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the first major study of its kind.Doctors have previously reported anecdotally how Covid measures such as lockdowns inadvertently led to children being better protected against other illnesses. Continue reading...
Writers from Julian Barnes to Oliver Sacks and Petina Gappah find some profound truths in what gets lost to memoryI have always been fascinated by the human memory – its capacity, its acuity, its connections to emotions and our basic senses. Somehow the blob of gray gunk in my skull manages to recall everything from the statute of frauds I memorised in law school to the lyrics of pretty much any new wave single released in the 1980s. It’s the reason one whiff of Ralph Lauren Polo cologne takes me right back to a gropey nightmare in the cab of a pickup truck with the high school quarterback.But despite memory’s remarkable breadth and depth, we also know that it is fallible. Fragile. Even manipulable. Cognitive research has proved, for example, that eyewitness memory is far more confident and far less accurate than we instinctively believe. If we can’t believe our own memories, how can we trust ourselves? Memory is also reversible, and what we have forgotten is often as telling as what we recall. Continue reading...
The medical community must find answers for those suffering from long Covid. They are running out of time and hopeMy wife, Heidi, took her own life after a 13-month battle with long Covid that started as a mostly asymptomatic coronavirus infection. Long Covid took her from one of the healthiest, most vibrant people I’ve ever known to a person so debilitated that she could not bear another day on this planet.I came home one day last May to find that she’d decided to end her pain. As our 13-year-old son waited outside for the paramedics, I tried desperately to revive her. I did a good enough job that by the time we got her to the hospital they could restart her heart, but she was brain dead on arrival. The emergency room doctor assumed that she died from depression. When I told him, “She wasn’t depressed, it was long Covid,” he looked at me with bewilderment and asked, “What’s long Covid?” Continue reading...
Scientists and politicians have focused on the short-term impact of the virus – but we can no longer leave chronic patients to struggleDespite apprehension about high Covid-19 rates, my family Christmas in Yorkshire was wonderful. Unfortunately, the week after was marred by headache, fever and malaise. And a PCR test confirmed the worst – I had Covid-19 for the second time. My second encounter has been dominated by severe fatigue and reduced concentration, which though improving, have not yet resolved more than two weeks later. Worryingly, what I know about long Covid suggests that this could persist for several months – or longer.The World Health Organization defines long Covid as ongoing symptoms “three months from the onset of Covid-19”. In December, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that more than 1.3 million people in the UK had symptoms for four weeks or more after Covid-19, of whom 892,000 people (70%) had symptoms that persisted for at least 12 weeks, and 506,000 (40%) for at least one year. Dr Melissa Heightman, who leads the University College London hospital specialist long Covid clinic says that breathlessness, fatigue, cough, myalgia, chest pain, headache, “brain fog” and palpitations are most commonly reported. But many other symptoms may be present.Amitava Banerjee is professor of clinical data science and honorary consultant cardiologist at University College London and is leading the Stimulate-ICP study to investigate long Covid Continue reading...
Waitrose stocks Sunions, developed by decades of cross-breeding less pungent strains of onionChopping onions is a recurring kitchen nightmare that often reduces home cooks to tears, but red eyes could be a thing of the past as “tearless” onions go on sale in the UK for the first time.Next week Waitrose will start selling Sunions in its stores, a “brown, tearless and sweet” onion variety that is being billed as a “gamechanger” for red-eyed chefs. The onions, which are being marketed using the strapline “not a single tear”, have taken more than 30 years to perfect. Continue reading...
Analysis: As doctors monitor world’s first human recipient of pig heart, safety and ethical concerns remainThe world’s first transplant of a genetically altered pig heart into an ailing human is a landmark for medical science, but the operation, and the approach more broadly, raise substantial safety and ethical concerns.Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center spent eight hours on Friday evening transplanting the heart from the pig into 57-year-old David Bennett, who had been in hospital for more than a month with terminal heart failure. Continue reading...
Last year the oceans absorbed heat equivalent to seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating each second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a yearI was fortunate to play a small part in a new study, just published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which shows that the Earth broke yet another heat record last year. Twenty-three scientists from around the world teamed up to analyze thousands of temperature measurements taken throughout the world’s oceans. The measurements, taken at least 2,000 meters (about 6,500ft) deep and spread across the globe, paint a clear picture: the Earth is warming, humans are the culprit, and the warming will continue indefinitely until we collectively take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.We used measurements from the oceans because they are absorbing the vast majority of the heat associated with global warming. In fact, more than 90% of global warming heat ends up in the oceans. I like to say that “global warming is really ocean warming”. If you want to know how fast climate change is happening, the answer is in the oceans. Continue reading...
The pandemic has left our best-laid plans in disarray, but we can still have spur-of-the-moment adventuresBack in the wild old days, my best buddy and I used to call going out “looking for trouble”. We weren’t hoping for a punch-up or a little light robbery, but a spontaneous adventure involving music, strangers or just the city at night. All that spur-of-the-moment fun has taken quite a beating since the pandemic began, for many millions of us. First came the lockdowns, social distancing and closed venues, then the cautious reopening when even a trip to the pub or an art gallery had to be booked weeks in advance. And now, just when it seemed the world was finally getting back to normal, Omicron has come wielding its everything’s-off-again sledgehammer, crushing all those dreams of nights out, holidays and raucous parties. Not only does it seem foolish to plan anything, but after two years of frustration and self-restraint, it’s hard to summon up the enthusiasm to do anything off the cuff.And that’s quite a loss. While we often think anticipation is half the fun, in 2016 researchers from two US universities found that people enjoyed activities more when they were impromptu. Scheduling a coffee break or a movie, for instance, made them feel “less free-flowing and more work-like”, wrote the authors. As Jane Austen put it 200 years ago in Emma: “Why not seize the pleasure at once? – How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!” Continue reading...
by Harriet Sherwood Arts and culture correspondent on (#5TWG7)
Findings surpass experts’ expectations after buildings, wells, coins and wide road discoveredA wealthy Roman trading town, whose inhabitants adorned themselves with jewellery and ate from fine pottery, has been discovered half a metre below the surface of a remote field in Northamptonshire.A 10-metre-wide Roman road, domestic and industrial buildings, more than 300 coins and at least four wells have been unearthed at the site, where 80 archaeologists have been working for the past 12 months. Continue reading...
by Presented by Ian Sample and produced by Madeleine on (#5TWEP)
It’s been called the most important glacier in the world. The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is the size of Florida, and contains enough water to raise sea levels by over half a metre. Over the past 30 years it has been melting at an increasing pace, and currently contributes 4% of annual global sea level rise. Ian Sample speaks to marine geophysicist Dr Rob Larter about a new research mission to the Thwaites glacier, the role of Boaty McBoatface and what it’s like to see a region melt away before your eyes Continue reading...
Patient is doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery, doctors say, though it’s too soon to know if it is a successIn a medical first, doctors in Maryland have transplanted a genetically modified pig’s heart into a human patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life.Doctors at the University of Maryland medical center said Monday that the patient was doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery, though it is too soon to know if the operation has been a success. Continue reading...
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