Science | The Guardian

As a kid, Concetta Antico was always ‘a bit out of the box’, but it took decades for her to discover just how differently she was seeing the world

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...

Findings raise possibility Covid may cause microscopic damage not detected by normal tests

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...

As the Covid pandemic has unfolded, the choice of face coverings has mushroomed

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

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...

The self-isolation period for positive cases is being cut and the limit on visitors lifted from next week

Vaccine expert says focus should shift away from booster programme and be directed to first doses

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...

Pembrolizumab has revolutionised treatments of cancers, including melanoma, and makes HIV vulnerable to attack

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...

Telescope pictures show the Milky Way with a bright dot marking the location of the object ‘in our galactic back yard’

Observational study finds double-jabbed people 41% less likely to report Covid symptoms 12 weeks after a positive test

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...

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...

London and Paris among cities with highest number of avoided deaths thanks to lower pollution in first lockdown

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...

Low levels of certain antibodies found to be more common in those who go on to develop long Covid

Risk analysis tests for IVF embryos are being marketed in US and likely to become more widely availableExperts have warned against the “unproven” and “unethical” use of genetic tests to predict the risk of complex diseases in embryos created through IVF.Though not currently available in the UK, such tests are being marketed in the US and their availability is likely to increase as the technology develops, representatives from the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) said. Continue reading...

Earlier this month, in a medical first, surgeons from the University of Maryland transplanted a genetically altered pig heart into a living person. Doctors believed it was their only chance to save the life of David Bennett, a 57-year-old patient who was considered too ill for a human organ replacement. With hundreds of thousands of people worldwide in need of new organs, are animals set to be the future of transplantation?Ian Sample talks to bioethicist Prof Arthur Caplan about how the operation was made possible, and what could be next

$10bn observatory manoeuvred into position at four times the orbit of the moon, with first images expected in JuneThe world’s largest and most powerful space telescope has reached its final destination – an observation post one million miles away from Earth.Nasa’s $10bn James Webb space telescope launched on Christmas Day last year from French Guiana on a quest to behold the dawn of the universe. Due to its sheer size, Webb had to launch folded inside the Ariane 5, a European rocket. Continue reading...

The solution to today’s pro-o-o-o-o-oblemEarlier today I posted the following video, in which I asked Google Assistant to calculate the factorial of 100.The factorial of 100 is the multiplication 100 x 99 x 98 x … x 3 x 2 x 1 in which 100 is multiplied by every whole number below it. Continue reading...

Researchers say ‘wheeze honks’ are identity signals, with reactions ranging from calls to spraying dung linked to level of familiarityA call from a stranger may elicit myriad responses – panic, confusion, maybe even excitement – but it turns out that hippos have a rather more corporeal reaction: they spray dung.Researchers studying hippopotamuses in Mozambique have revealed that the creatures not only react to the vocalisations of other hippos, but that the calls act as an identity signal. In other words, they allow hippos to tell the difference between a familiar individual and a stranger. Continue reading...

Fiona Bruce has encouraged unvaccinated people to join the TV show’s debate. I have misgivings about this attempt to bridge a growing divideAt the start of 2020, I was working on a piece about Question Time, and how it had transformed over time from being an ambling, rather niche discussion show into politics’ answer to Jeremy Kyle, with an audience of incredibly angry people trash-talking imaginary immigrants living in mansions with their 14 imaginary children. Oh, the spiral!Some lefty would invent the term “gammons”, and then the Twitterati would have an even more vicious spin-off row about whether that word was itself more racist than the original racism. It was all quite hard to unpick. So, with what I now know to be a terrifying naivety, I remember thinking, when the pandemic hit: “Thank God; we’ll surely be right as dodgers in a month or two, but for those few weeks nobody will be wanting dispatches from this peculiar front of the culture war.” Continue reading...

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says Covid pandemic has proven that health is ‘an international issue’The head of the World Health Organization has warned member countries that the UN’s global health body is being “set up to fail” without a “paradigm shift” in the way that it is funded and supported.In stark language delivered to the WHO’s executive board, the organisation’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 5.5 million lives, had underlined the need to strengthen health systems as well as pandemic preparedness plans. Continue reading...

There will be no ‘victory’ or ‘armistice day’ – the reality of how pandemics end is far more complicated than thatThe Covid pandemic has entered a perplexing phase, challenging our beliefs about what the best responses are and how we should behave. Is Omicron now “just like the flu”, meaning we can relax – or does that overlook the continuing crisis in hospitals, the record hospitalisation rates for children, the continuing deadly danger for elderly and clinically vulnerable people, and the lengthening shadow of long Covid? Is it time, as the government has decided in England, to throw away our masks and perhaps to abandon self-isolation rules, or is that recklessly optimistic (if not just politically expedient for the prime minister)?Our pandemic narratives are splintering. Once, aside from a handful of noisy libertarians who insisted that lockdowns and mask mandates were violations of civil liberty, most people accepted that restrictions were necessary to prevent the health system from imploding and to reduce the risks for vulnerable people. Now, even some experts who previously advised caution and criticised lax and tardy government strategy, such as the public health expert Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University, have suggested that the virus has been largely “defanged” and that it’s time to “move forward” with our lives. Others react to such suggestions with horror, pointing out that this isn’t an option open to all. There’s much talk of the virus having become “endemic” – but that notion of a “persistent, low or moderate level of disease”, generally in a specific geographical region, is a long way from the exponential rise, and now fall, that we have just seen nationwide. It’s likely that it’s where we’ll end up eventually. But the eagerness to reach for the term now reflects an increasing sense that, one way or another, we will have to learn to live with the virus, as the health secretary, Sajid Javid, said last week.Philip Ball is a science writer. His books include The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China Continue reading...

Obscure, generations-old theorems have been transformative in tech, and there are still plenty out there to be usedIn 1998, a computer science PhD student called Larry Page submitted a patent for internet search based on an obscure piece of mathematics. The method, known today as PageRank, allowed the most relevant webpages to be found much more rapidly and accurately than ever before. The patent, initially owned by Stanford, was sold in 2005 for shares that are today worth more than $1bn. Page’s company, Google, has a net worth of well over $1tr.It wasn’t Page, or Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin, who created the mathematics described in the patent. The equation they used is at least 100 years old, building on properties of matrices (mathematical structures akin to a spreadsheet of numbers). Similar methods were used by Chinese mathematicians more than two millennia ago. Page and Brin’s insight was to realise that by calculating what is known as the stationary distribution of a matrix describing connections on the world wide web, they could find the most popular sites more rapidly.David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and author of The Ten Equations that Rule the World: And How You Can Use Them Too Continue reading...

Are you smarter than Google Assistant?UPDATE: Read the solution here.“Hey Google, what’s the factorial of 100?”There are several clips doing the rounds of what happens when you ask Google Assistant this question. The response is both hilarious and terrifying. Continue reading...

MPs urge support for workers after data shows extent of ongoing illness in first 18 months of pandemic

'Highly predatory’ animals emerge from hibernation and move to areas with reindeer and moose calves, finds studyBrown bears switch habitats in the spring so they can hunt reindeer and moose calves, research suggests.After emerging from hibernation, the animals embark on an active hunting strategy to take full advantage of the calving period. Continue reading...

Guardian Australia’s summer wrap of brilliant writing and juicy journalism selected by our lifestyle editor, Alyx Gorman

Early findings in Swedish study show range of chronic olfactory problems in people infected in 2020

Pioneering physicist whose study of elastomers opened up new technology for creating artificial musclesWe are all familiar with elastic bands and other soft, rubbery materials, but familiarity should not diminish our surprise at their properties. What other solids can be stretched many times their original length without breaking, then returned perfectly to their original shape?The theoretical physicist Mark Warner, who has died aged 69 of cancer, not only explained the behaviour of existing soft materials but also predicted the existence and properties of entirely new classes of them – not just once but several times. He imagined the consequences of combining the long, chainlike molecules that make up “elastomers”, such as rubber, with the smaller, rodlike molecules that are found in all liquid-crystal displays, for example on smartphones. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsIf you are an alcoholic or addict of some kind and you get amnesia, would you remain an alcoholic? Jane Ricard, AutunPost your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com. A selection will be published on Sunday. Continue reading...

Epidemiologist optimistic that UK deaths and hospitalisations will fall thanks to high immunity levels

After serious illness, busy lives mean a proper convalescence is now a rarity. But a full and proper recovery takes time. GP and writer Gavin Francis reveals why a sick note can be a ‘powerful prescription’While training to become a GP, Gavin Francis became ill with a severe sinus problem. In acute pain and exhausted as he waited for an operation, he chose to reduce his hours to three days a week. “I persuaded myself that there was no point risking burnout for the sake of sticking to a schedule,” he writes in his new book, Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence. “I qualified all the same, albeit a couple of months late.”This strikes me as an unusually proactive “physician heal thyself” attitude for a junior doctor. But Francis’s whole approach to practising medicine feels unusual. Growing up in Fife with a passion for science, he chose to study medicine because “I wanted to have a job that would give me a kind of trade; all the men in my family seemed to have a trade of one sort or another.” Then there’s the fact that on qualification, after a year as a junior house officer, he headed off to explore the wildest parts of the world for a decade, visiting the Arctic, motorbiking across Asia to New Zealand, and working for the British Antarctic Survey. Continue reading...

From petrol and perfume to Parkinson’s disease, super-smellers can detect scents others are oblivious to. For Krati Garg, the ability’s both power and painA few years ago Dr Krati Garg, an oral surgeon in Melbourne, was in theatre about to commence work on a patient when she told the anaesthetist she could smell sevoflurane.Sevoflurane is the anaesthetic gas used to put – and keep – patients asleep during surgery. Ingested via a tube that is placed down the throat, in large quantities its bitter smell can be noticeable, but trace amounts are largely indiscernible. Continue reading...