Campaigners led by schoolgirl get permission to site sculpture of palaeontologist on Dorset coast after four-year battleA statue to the 19th-century fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning, who was once “lost to history”, is finally set to be unveiled in 2022 in her home town of Lyme Regis after a schoolgirl’s four-year campaign.Campaigners, who have overcome bureaucratic red tape and raised more than £100,000 in crowdfunding, have been granted planning permission to site the bronze in “the perfect spot”, overlooking Black Ven cliffs on the Jurassic coast in Dorset, where she made her pioneering finds. Continue reading...
by Denis Campbell Health policy editor on (#5TMV6)
Female patients found to have 15% more chance of a bad outcome than if procedure was performed by a womanWomen who are operated on by a male surgeon are much more likely to die, experience complications and be readmitted to hospital than when a woman performs the procedure, research reveals.Women are 15% more liable to suffer a bad outcome, and 32% more likely to die, when a man rather than a woman carries out the surgery, according to a study of 1.3 million patients. Continue reading...
UK’s disregards and pardons scheme set to be expanded to ‘right wrongs of the past’Any conviction that was imposed on someone purely due to consensual homosexual activity under now-abolished laws will be included in a scheme aimed at “righting the wrongs of the past”, the UK home secretary is set to announce.Priti Patel said more people would have convictions for same-sex sexual activity wiped from their records, as she sought to expand the government’s disregards and pardons scheme from a narrow set of laws. Continue reading...
Activists say crackdown is driven by Xi Jinping, who has ‘declared a war on independent journalism’Chen Kun was living in Indonesia with his wife and daughter when he learned from his brother Mei’s boss that he had been “taken away for investigation” by Chinese police.He immediately suspected it was to do with his brother’s website, a citizen news project called Terminus 2049. Since 2018 Mei, his colleague Cai Wei, and Cai’s partner – surnamed Tang – had been archiving articles about issues including #MeToo and migrant rights, and reposting them whenever they were deleted from China’s strictly monitored and censored online platforms. It was April 2020, and for the last few months Terminus 2049 had been targeting stories about the Covid-19 outbreak and response. Continue reading...
by Presented by Madeleine Finlay with David Cox, prod on (#5TMCW)
New year resolutions often include eating more healthily, doing exercise and trying to shift some of the extra weight put on over Christmas. Yet research suggests the vast majority of people who do lose weight ultimately end up putting nearly all of it back on. So why is it so difficult? Madeleine Finlay speaks to health journalist and ex-neuroscientist David Cox on the science of metabolism, and what it means for our health
If not for clouds, the half-tonne fireball would have been easily visible in the day, maybe about 100 times the brightness of a full moonA meteor that caused an earthshaking boom over suburban Pittsburgh on New Year’s Day exploded in the atmosphere with an energy blast equivalent to an estimated 30 tonnes (27,200kg) of TNT, officials said.The National Weather Service in Pittsburgh initially responded, suggesting the most likely explanation was a “meteor explosion” as people took to social media in search of answers. Continue reading...
They say laughter is the best medicine – and trauma patients in Bristol are about to put the theory to the testName: Comedy.Age: The term comedy (from the Greek κωμῳδία, or kōmōidía) originated in ancient Greece, where poets would perform political satire in theatres in order to influence voters. Continue reading...
by Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis on (#5TKF9)
Wall Street and Peter Thiel are all investing in psychedelics. But Oxycotin showed the harm profit-hungry corporations can cause with ‘wonder drugs’The new Hulu series Dopesick is a dramatic reminder of the devastation that has been wrought by the opioid epidemic. Like the book on which it was based, and like other journalism about the Oxycontin crisis, the show makes it clear that members of the Sackler family, Purdue, unscrupulous doctors, and the FDA all played a part in causing the rampant overprescription of Oxycontin. Suddenly every kind of pain – not only physical but also psychological and social – seemed to have a single answer: Oxycontin. Opioids are one of the oldest drugs in the human pharmacopeia, but Oxycontin’s new patents made every person in pain a source of easy money for Purdue. This led to a wave of addiction and overdose. When regulators cracked down on legal pills, many people turned to the illicit drug market, putting them in even greater danger.Yet even as America reckons with the aftermath of the Oxycontin disaster, it’s embracing a new class of supposed wonder drugs. Like opioids, these “new” drugs are long-time favorites: psychedelics. Ironically, one of their supposedly miraculous qualities is their power in treating substance use disorders. The FDA – whose lax oversight and close ties to corporate lobbyists played such a crucial role in the Oxycontin debacle – has placed MDMA and psilocybin on expedited approval tracks for the treatment of PTSD and treatment-resistant depression. MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD is in advanced trials, and could receive FDA approval as soon as 2023.Ross Ellenhorn is a sociologist and psychotherapist and the founder and CEO of Ellenhorn. Dimitri Mugianis is a harm reductionist, activist, musician, poet, writer, and anarchist, with over two decades of experience as a psychedelic practitioner. Ellenhorn and Mugianis are the founders of Cardea Continue reading...
Jeremy Lockwood spent lockdown identifying two specimens – and is a ‘bit obsessed’ in his search for moreSome of us binged on box sets, others grappled with the challenges of home school and zoned out of Zoom meetings: for many, life under lockdown felt glum. But for Jeremy Lockwood, a retired GP turned palaeontologist, 2021 was a standout year featuring two big dinosaur discoveries and laying plans to make the Isle of Wight famous for its prehistoric inhabitants once more. “It was an absolutely thrilling time for me,” Lockwood said.Lockwood, 64, who retired as a family doctor in the Midlands seven years ago, was behind the widely publicised discovery of a new species of iguanadontian dinosaur with a distinctively large nose and a second species, nicknamed “the horned crocodile-faced Hell Heron”. Continue reading...
Annual shower can produce more than 100 meteors an hourIf the clouds cooperate, you can start the year with a meteor shower. The Quadrantid meteor shower reaches its peak activity on or about 3 January each year. This year, the peak has been estimated to occur at about 10pm GMT, although this can vary by a day or so.The shower produces meteors in the sky any time between 28 December and 12 January. It is known for creating blue meteors with occasional fireballs and under ideal conditions can produce more than 100 meteors an hour. Continue reading...
Guardian Australia’s summertime round-up of written interest and joy selected by Alyx GormanGood morning, happy new year, and welcome to Five Great Reads, a weekday summer story round-up selected by me – Alyx Gorman – lifestyle editor of Guardian Australia.If you’re not getting this as an email, you could be by signing up in the box below. If you are getting this as an email, there will be no box. Perhaps you could pass this on to a friend who isn’t subscribed, but might like to, so they can tell you what the box looks like. Continue reading...
Kenyan conservationist found oldest near-complete human skeleton in 1984, dating from 1.5m years agoThe celebrated Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter Richard Leakey, whose groundbreaking discoveries helped prove that humankind evolved in Africa, has died aged 77.The president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, announced Leakey’s death with “deep sorrow”. Continue reading...
People have become ‘more insular and bonding-oriented’ amid Covid, and now many aren’t sure how to start rebuilding their social livesPruning is usually a technique applied to roses in winter, but more recently the gardening term has been cropping up whenever sociologists talk about our social lives. People have been pruning friends.Confined to our homes, or separated by borders, with too much time gifted to us in isolation, and new ways to communicate online, experts say we’ve unwittingly – or in some cases very deliberately – socially distanced ourselves out of a social life. Some say the silver lining is that we’ve been cured of Fomo, others say it heralds a widening of the already growing loneliness gap. So has everyone Marie Kondoed their mates, and what does this mean for the future of friendship? Continue reading...
From lunar missions to anti-asteroid defence systems, there are plenty of exciting scientific developments to look forward toThis year promises to be an important one for space exploration, with several major programmes reaching the launch pad over the next 12 months. The US is to return to the moon, undertaking a set of missions intended to establish a lunar colony there in a few years. China is expected to complete its Tiangong space station while Europe and Russia will attempt to land spacecraft on Mars, having failed at every previous attempt. India, South Korea and Japan are also scheduled to put a number of missions into space. Continue reading...
Scribbling down our thoughts is a great way to make sense of things – and very satisfyingIn 1989, when I was 16, I moved into a pub with my parents and my younger brother, Matty. It was highly exciting. I took to barwork as I liked the chat, and also enjoyed the opportunities offered for eavesdropping. I was curious about the adult world and up until then had learned most of what I knew from books. Now I had all these real lives to study. I should write some of this down, I thought, and would scribble into my diary before bed.We couldn’t believe how busy it was that first Christmas, culminating on New Year’s Eve, when everyone piled out into the main street at midnight and exchanged drunken embraces and warm wishes for 1990. After the pub had emptied and the mammoth job of clearing up was done, we gathered with our staff for a few drinks and the chat turned to resolutions. All the women wanted to lose weight. A couple of people wanted to stop smoking. I announced very firmly that I wanted to write a novel. Continue reading...
Research shows that a positive attitude to ageing can lead to a longer, healthier life, while negative beliefs can have hugely detrimental effectsFor more than a decade, Paddy Jones has been wowing audiences across the world with her salsa dancing. She came to fame on the Spanish talent show Tú Sí Que Vales (You’re Worth It) in 2009 and has since found success in the UK, through Britain’s Got Talent; in Germany, on Das Supertalent; in Argentina, on the dancing show Bailando; and in Italy, where she performed at the Sanremo music festival in 2018 alongside the band Lo Stato Sociale.Jones also happens to be in her mid-80s, making her the world’s oldest acrobatic salsa dancer, according to Guinness World Records. Growing up in the UK, Jones had been a keen dancer and had performed professionally before she married her husband, David, at 22 and had four children. It was only in retirement that she began dancing again – to widespread acclaim. “I don’t plead my age because I don’t feel 80 or act it,” Jones told an interviewer in 2014. Continue reading...
The start of the coming year will be defined by the UK’s vaccination gap, but the issue is more complex than you thinkAmid rocketing Covid infection rates, rising hospitalisation numbers and test shortages, the opening weeks of 2022 are going to be defined by the UK’s vaccine gap.According to the latest official figures, 91% of people aged over 18 in the UK have had at least one Covid jab, 88% have received two and 64% have had their third. But the 9% who have yet to be vaccinated at all accounts for about five million people, whose preponderance among those now being hospitalised is clearly a huge problem. Continue reading...
Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still canWhen he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong.Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would. Continue reading...
by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters on (#5TJJ4)
Throughout 2021, two leading lights of the Royal Statistical Society Covid-19 Task Force drew on data for a weekly Observer column, and found themselves in the middle of Covid culture warsIndividual experiences and suffering are, of course, at the heart of the pandemic. But one way to understand what has happened is through putting those experiences together – and statistics are those personal stories writ large. And this pandemic has brought unprecedented demand to explain all the numbers that have been flying around.This has not been without its problems and we’ve had to learn some hard lessons, such as the journalistic skill of brevity. Since January 2021, we’ve been writing a weekly column in this paper about Covid numbers, covering everything from infections to deaths, vaccines to mental health, masks to lockdowns. Continue reading...
A new book outlines the mistakes and missteps that made UK pandemic worseThere was a distinctive moment, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, that neatly encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain’s early efforts to tackle the disease, says Mark Woolhouse. At a No 10 briefing in March 2020, cabinet minister Michael Gove warned the virus did not discriminate. “Everyone is at risk,” he announced.And nothing could be further from the truth, argues Professor Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. “I am afraid Gove’s statement was simply not true,” he says. “In fact, this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk from it than others. People over 75 are an astonishing 10,000 times more at risk than those who are under 15.” Continue reading...
Spacefaring adventurers, living and experimenting with new technology, could potentially spawn a post-human eraAfter years of delay, and massive cost over-runs, the James Webb space telescope (the JWST) was launched on Christmas Day. It will need to perform complex automated operations now it’s in space.The first and most challenging is happening this week: unfurling a heat shield the size of a tennis court. After this, its 6.5-metre mirror must be assembled from 18 pieces packed within the launching rocket’s nose-cone. There’s much that can go wrong and astronomers will remain anxious for the several months that will elapse before all necessary manoevres and tests are completed. Continue reading...
He started in his 30s, has asthma, and can go more than a week without a cigarette – so why does this writer still not think it’s time to stop?I have asthma, and there’s a fairly major respiratory disease going around, as you may have heard, and also I am a smoker. A quick inventory of my coat pockets: inhaler, face mask, Marlboro Gold. I never fell into smoking as a teenager when everyone else seemed to think it was cool, but took it up in my 30s, as others might develop an interest in birdwatching, or CrossFit. Four or five a day, for the best part of a decade, and more at the weekends. This piece is anonymous because my mother cannot know. I don’t have the words to express how unbelievably stupid I feel about all this.There’s quite a lot going on here, and not all of it is solely of interest to me and my therapist. You might imagine that a continuing and lung-buggering international emergency which a study says is specifically more dangerous for smokers would mean there were fewer idiots like me. But in fact, stress and boredom are more than a match for serious health concerns: research published in August last year suggested that the number of young adults smoking in England went up by about a quarter during the first lockdown. There was a spike in the number of people across all ages giving up smoking in England during that same first lockdown period – but no sign of the plummeting rates you might rationally expect. Then again, nothing about this habit has ever been rational. Continue reading...
It’s only when you learn to accept who you are, flaws and all, that you can make real, worthwhile changeIt’s the time of year for reinventions – or, perhaps more accurately, preparing for reinventions. For buying the diet book, drawing up the new morning routine, bookmarking the therapists’ websites or purchasing the storage cabinets for the soon-to-be-perfectly-organised house. As with all attempts at personal transformation, at new year or otherwise, this is the fun part. You get to experience all the excitement of becoming an entirely different person, without having yet had to put in the effort – and without having failed. Like untrodden early morning snow, the vision of who you’ll become remains pristine. Usually, though, something inside you knows the truth: in a few days’ time, the whole thing will have turned into unpleasant grey slush.Personal reinventions fail partly for the obvious reasons: you set your goals too high; or your existing obligations at work or home get in the way; or you find (who could have imagined it?) that the unimpressive level of self-discipline you’ve demonstrated for your entire life until this moment can’t magically be tripled overnight. But there’s also a deeper problem with quests for wholesale transformation, which explains why they rarely work as intended – and why, as 2022 begins, embracing the existing version of yourself, with all its messiness and imperfections, might be the most transformative thing you’ve ever done. Continue reading...
Of substances tested, strongest effects were seen for clove extract, though sample size was smallA thumping headache, a tongue that feels like a carpet and a strong sense of queasiness and regret – it is a condition with which many will be all too familiar on New Year’s Day. But while it may seem tempting to reach for a hangover “cure”, researchers have chosen New Year’s Day to tell us that most will offer cold comfort.Scientists say they have evaluated studies looking at 23 different substances alleged to help prevent or treat a hangover, but found all of the “remedies” had low-quality evidence for how well they worked. Continue reading...
From government systems to family units to our own psyches, the pandemic brought revelation. What will we change?A retreating ocean is often the first sign of a tsunami. The water along the shoreline is dragged back dramatically, exposing parts of the shore and seabed that are normally underwater.It’s helpful to frame the first two years of the pandemic in similar terms to this ocean drawback. Detaching from our own specific circumstances, and our own specific pandemic pain, we have a unique opportunity to actually see the metaphorical seafloor of the world. Continue reading...
A look back at 12 months of key summits, devastating weather and alarming discoveriesThe year began with a counting up of the damage after the catastrophic extreme weather events of 2020, from fires to floods. Looking at the US alone, California more than doubled its previous annual wildfire record with more than 1.7m hectares (4.1m acres) burned and Nasa concluded that 2020 had been the joint hottest year on record. The US’s Noaa and the UK Met Office put it in close second to 2016.In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis and we can’t wait any longer. We see it with our own eyes, we feel it, we know it in our bones, and it’s time to act.Joe Biden Continue reading...
In December 2019 the WHO was told of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. These charts show how Covid-19 has spread across the world since then
Key to understanding the next part of the pandemic will be the number, and length, of hospitalisationsPublic holidays are notoriously difficult for epidemiologists – people may avoid or delay both testing and hospital visits, making for slightly unreliable numbers. But some things are still clear from the latest Covid data released by the government. Omicron is now responsible for more than 90% of all new infections in England (the other three nations haven’t published a full set of data yet), meaning that its particular effects are now driving the pandemic. And its rate of growth versus earlier this month appears to have slowed considerably.It is barely three weeks ago that Omicron infections were more than doubling every two days. If that rate of increase had continued we would be close to 1 million infections per day by now. Even the Christmas holiday cannot explain the difference between that estimate and the most recent reported infection numbers for England of 117,000. On the other hand, hopes from before Christmas that we may have seen the epidemic peak were almost certainly premature. Overall cases are still increasing, and we haven’t seen the worst daily report yet, but the lower rate of increase means a lower eventual peak than previously thought.Paul Hunter is a professor in medicine at the University of East AngliaThe headline of this article was amended on 30 December 2021 to reflect the fact that it was about England, rather than the UK Continue reading...
SpaceX founder says planned 42,000-strong network will not dominate slots or radio frequenciesElon Musk has rejected criticisms that his company is taking up too much room in space, saying his tens of thousands of planned satellites would be able to coexist with many others.As well as building up Tesla into the world’s most valuable carmaker by pioneering electric cars, Musk has shaken up the space industry by founding SpaceX, a private rocket company that is also seeking to become a major telecommunications entity through a network of tens of thousands of low-orbiting “Starlink” satellites. Continue reading...
I can endure anger, pain and frustration without the need to scream. But I realised that that could, in fact, be a problem. So I travelled to the countryside to try yellingIn the summer of 2020, the London-based psychotherapist Zoë Aston hit the headlines with a scream-therapy campaign she had devised for the Icelandic tourism board. On a website called Looks Like You Need Iceland, visitors were invited to record a scream which would then be blasted out for you in the vast, frozen wilderness. “And when you’re ready,” the blurb ran, “come let it out for real. You’ll feel better, we promise.” All of which assumes a scream-readiness with which I am patently unfamiliar.I am famous in my family for never shouting when I drop a glass or cut myself in the kitchen. The bigger the mess, the quieter I get. The angrier I get, the quieter I get, too. I have never screamed or shouted anyone down. A while back, the thought occurred to me that this might be a problem. What if, one day, I needed to yell? What if I, or someone else, needed the kind of urgent attention a scream is designed to attract?
by Presented by Ian Sample and produced by Madeleine on (#5TFRG)
From electrons behaving as both particles and waves to a cat in a box that’s both dead and alive, the consequences of quantum physics are decidedly weird. So strange, that over a century since its conception, scientists are still arguing about the best way to understand the theory.In the second of two episodes, Ian Sample sits down with the physicist Carlo Rovelli to discuss his ideas for explaining quantum physics, and how it affects our understanding of the world Continue reading...
‘Hell herons’, metallic beetles, tiny shrimp – scientists have been busy describing unusual creatures despite Covid restrictionsSix new dinosaurs, an Indian beetle named after Larry the cat, and dozens of crustaceans critical to the planet’s carbon cycle were among 552 new species identified by scientists at the Natural History Museum this year.In 2021, researchers described previously unknown species across the tree of life, from a pair of giant carnivorous dinosaurs known as spinosaurs – nicknamed the “riverbank hunter” and “hell heron” – to five new snakes that include the Joseph’s racer, which was identified with the help of a 185-year-old painting. Continue reading...
In time for new year resolutions, a cultural historian chooses some of the best guides to making a better life, dating back to some of our earliest literatureIt is easy to dismiss self-help books and those who read them. But not only do we need serious self-help, we must also take self-help more seriously. Valued at $11bn (£8bn) worldwide, self-help is a major global industry. It both reflects and generates many of our prevailing ideas about the self and about the cultures in which we live. The self-help industry not only seeks to shape the way in which we think, feel and behave, but also provides many of the core metaphors on which we rely to talk about our inner lives. Many of those metaphors, not least that of the mind as a computer that might require reprogramming, are at best unhelpful.Critics of self-help believe that its current popularity is part of an all-pervasive neoliberal imperative to maximise efficiency. They see it as a sinister plot to direct all responsibility for our wellbeing back upon ourselves. Self-help, they feel, casts all our problems as personal, and our failures as owing to a lack of willpower and resilience, when they are in fact caused by the politics of capitalism. But while this may be true of some self-help, the idea of self-improvement has a long and rich history, extending back to ancient wisdom traditions. The wish to improve ourselves is bound up with our need for self-knowledge, for mastery and for transformation. It is a timeless desire and an essential part of what makes us human. Continue reading...
Science | The Guardian