Covid experts explain their personal approaches to festive gatherings in face of Omicron

From 1 January, fully vaccinated Queenslanders who are deemed close contacts will only have to quarantine for seven days

The best of this week’s wildlife pictures, including a two-day-old baby elephant, an invasive toad species and a bamboo shark Continue reading...

Employee at high-security facility tests positive in island’s first local infection in weeks

Japanese researchers use bird antibodies to detect virus under ultraviolet light

Bans failed to stop farmers torching fields each year but a new spray that turns stalks into fertiliser helps the soil and the airEvery autumn, Anil Kalyan, from Kutail village in India’s northern state of Haryana, would join tens of thousands of other paddy farmers to set fire to the leftover stalks after the rice harvest to clear the field for planting wheat.But this year, Kalyan opted for change. He signed his land up for a trial being held in Haryana and neighbouring Punjab as an alternative to the environmentally hazardous stubble burning that is commonplace across India and a major cause of Delhi’s notorious smog. Continue reading...

Largest space telescope ever is due to lift off from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana on 22 DecemberFollowing a small hiccup in launch preparation a few weeks ago, the James Webb space telescope is again making progress.Now scheduled to lift off from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on 22 December, technicians there have finished fuelling the telescope. Continue reading...

John Edmunds says variant is ‘very severe setback’ to controlling Covid pandemic and that plan B ‘absolutely not an overreaction’

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, climate disasters kill tens of millions of people – and that’s a scenario he portrays as relatively optimisticTo really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future – then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson.Robinson is one of the most brilliant writers of the genre. During Covid quarantine, I read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade. Continue reading...

They make brilliant companions, but do dogs really feel empathy for humans - and what is going through their minds when they play, panic or attack?Read more: the inner lives of cats: what our feline friends really thinkIt is humanity’s great frustration, to gaze into the eyes of a dog, feel so very close to the creature, and yet have no clue what it’s thinking. It’s like the first question you ask of a recently born baby, with all that aching, loving urgency: is that a first smile? Or yet more wind? Except that it’s like that for ever.I can never know what my staffie is thinking. Does Romeo realise that what he just did was funny, and did he do it on purpose? Is he laughing on the inside? Can he smile? Can he feel anxious about the future? Can he remember life as a puppy? Does he still get the horn, even though I had his knackers off some years ago? And, greater than all these things: does he love me? I mean, really love me, the way I love him? Continue reading...

Scientists say rule-breaking ‘could damage public compliance behaviours when they are more important than ever’The debacle over the No 10 Christmas party threatens to undermine efforts to control the Covid pandemic at a time when the Omicron variant is fuelling fears of an imminent and major wave of disease, say scientists.A so-called Cummings effect last year led to “negative and lasting consequences” on public trust following the lockdown-busting trips made by Boris Johnson’s aide, Dominic Cummings, researchers found. Continue reading...

On 22 December, if all goes to plan, the £7.5bn James Webb space telescope (JWST) will be blasted into space on top of a giant European Ariane 5 rocket. As it travels to its final destination – a point about a million miles away – it will begin to unfold its gold, honeycombed mirror; a vast light-catching bucket that could give us a view of the universe deeper and more sensitive than we’ve ever had before.JWST could also reveal clues about possible life-supporting planets inside our galaxy. One astronomer who will be eagerly deciphering those clues is Prof Beth Biller, who joined Guardian science editor Ian Sample this week.Archive: CNBC, Dr Becky, Launch Pad Astronomy Continue reading...

Latest figures come amid concern over spread of Omicron variant; Pfizer says third jab increased antibodies by factor of 25

Initial findings indicate stark reduction in protection against new Covid variant from two vaccine doses

Latest updates: Scotland Yard cites ‘absence of evidence’, as PM triggers plan B Covid restrictions

UK health security agency estimates number of infections to be 20 times higher than confirmed casesOmicron cases could exceed 1 million by the end of this month on the current trajectory, Sajid Javid has told MPs, describing the new variant as “an even more formidable foe”.In a statement delivered to the House of Commons, the health secretary said that there were 568 confirmed cases of the Omicron variant but that the estimated current number is “probably closer to 10,000”. Continue reading...

Boris Johnson ‘sorry to lose’ spokesperson for climate summit who was seen in footage joking about party during lockdown

In an era of mobile phones, we rarely lose our way - which means we miss out on the joy and relief of finding it againA travel company called Black Tomato, in return for a significant sum of money, will drop you in the middle of you know not where, and leave you there. The product is called Get Lost and is surely more evidence that we’ve, well, lost our way.Which isn’t to say that it’s a daft idea. As a matter of fact, it quite appeals to me. I’m used to feeling psychologically lost – that wouldn’t be much of a holiday – but I’m very rarely physically, geographically lost. And annoying, and even frightening, as it can be, I miss this sensation. I believe it is good for the soul. “Oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go,” is a line in a Beatles song. How about: “Oh, that magic feeling, where the bloody hell am I?” Continue reading...

Near 1,900-year-old skeleton discovered with nail through heel bone during excavation in FenstantonFound at the site of a future housing development in Cambridgeshire, the near 1,900-year-old skeleton at first did not seem particularly remarkable.Aged 25 to 35 at the time of death, the man had been buried with his arms across his chest in a grave with a wooden structure, possibly a bier, at one of five cemeteries around a newly discovered Roman settlement at Fenstanton, between Roman Cambridge and Godmanchester. Continue reading...

There are fears the decision will reverse the gains made by a successful vaccination campaign

Harm included cell death and occurred at levels of plastic eaten by people via their foodMicroplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory at the levels known to be eaten by people via their food, a study has found.The harm included cell death and allergic reactions and the research is the first to show this happens at levels relevant to human exposure. However, the health impact to the human body is uncertain because it is not known how long microplastics remain in the body before being excreted. Continue reading...

Shelled creatures roamed oceans millions of years ago by jet propulsion, suggests innovative 3D imagingAnalysis of an extraordinary fossil discovered in a Gloucestershire gravel pit has given fresh insight into how an ancient sea creature swam through oceans and defended itself from predators millions of years ago.Innovative imaging techniques have allowed scientists to build up a 3D picture of the inner workings of the ammonite, best known by the shell-shaped fossils found on beaches and sea cliffs. Continue reading...

It’s important to know how boosters work, but they must not impede the push towards worldwide vaccinationFirst there was Alpha, then Beta, Gamma and Delta. Now, thanks to the tremendous efforts of scientists in sub-Saharan Africa, the world is getting to grips with the Omicron variant. This new variant of Covid-19 has a number of mutations that distinguish it from previous ones, raising concerns among scientists that the vaccines we are currently using may not remain as effective against it. In response, the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has recommended that all over-18s in Britain should be able to get a Covid booster shot, as long as three months have elapsed since their last vaccine.The logic behind boosters is that ensuring the UK population has a high level of immunity will reduce the number of people requiring hospitalisation or dying as a result of the spread of Omicron. This is based on the hope that it is unlikely the vaccines we are currently using will be totally ineffective against the new variant, but it is too early to be definitive about this.Dr Charlotte Summers is a professor of intensive care medicine at the University of Cambridge Continue reading...

Sajid Javid pulls out of interviews amid anger over footage of aides joking about party during lockdown

Yusaku Maezawa fulfils childhood ambition with 12-day trip to International Space StationA Japanese billionaire has fulfilled his childhood dream of travelling to space, as one of two passengers onboard a Russian rocket that blasted off towards the International Space Station.Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of Zozo, a successful online fashion business, and his production assistant, Yozo Hirano, on Wednesday became the first space tourists to travel to the ISS for more than a decade. Continue reading...

Prof Neil Ferguson says coronavirus variant likely to be dominant strain in the UK before Christmas

They do what they want, all the time – and can teach us a lot about how to live in the present, be content and learn from our experienceI wanted to know the exact amount of time I spend ruminating on the inner lives of my cats, so I did what most people do in times of doubt, and consulted Google. According to my search history, in the two years since I became a cat owner I have Googled variations of “cat love me – how do I tell?” and “is my cat happy” 17 times. I have also inadvertently subscribed to cat-related updates from the knowledge website Quora, which emails me a daily digest. (Sample: Can Cats Be Angry or Disappointed With Their Owner?)How do I love my cats? Let me count the ways. The clean snap of three-year-old Larry’s jaw as he contemplates me with detached curiosity is my favourite sound in the world. I love the tenor and cadence of my six-month-old kitten Kedi’s miaows as he follows me around the house. (High-pitched indignant squeaks means he wants food; lower-pitched chirrups suggest he would like to play.) I love the weight of Larry on my feet at night and the scratchy caress of Kedi’s tongue on my eyelid in the morning. Continue reading...

A year has passed since the UK became the first western country to license a vaccine against Covid

Watchdog refuses FoI request from Good Law Project to give details of audit

From whoops to purrs, snaps to grunts, and foghorns to laughs, a cacophony of bizarre fish songs have shown that a coral reef in Indonesia has returned rapidly to health.

Rise in infections attributed to young people who have yet to be fully vaccinated and older citizens who have not received boosters

Adam McKay’s laboured satire challenges political indifference to looming comet catastrophe but misses out on the comedyHaving long complained that movies aren’t engaging with the most vital issue of our time – the climate crisis – it’s perhaps churlish of me not to be glad when one comes along that does exactly that. But Adam McKay’s laboured, self-conscious and unrelaxed satire Don’t Look Up is like a 145-minute Saturday Night Live sketch with neither the brilliant comedy of Succession, which McKay co-produces, nor the seriousness that the subject might otherwise require. It is as if the sheer unthinkability of the crisis can only be contained and represented in self-aware slapstick mode.With knockabout hints of Dr Strangelove, Network and Wag the Dog, Don’t Look Up is about two astronomers discovering that a Mount Everest-sized comet is due in six months’ time to hit planet Earth and wipe out all human life. The scientists urgently present their findings to the White House, but find that the political and media classes can’t or won’t grasp what they are saying: too stupefied with consumerism, short-termism and social-media gossip, and insidiously paralysed by the interests of big tech. Leonardo DiCaprio plays nerdy, bearded astronomer Dr Randall Mindy, nervous of human interaction and addicted to Xanax. Jennifer Lawrence is his smart, emotionally spiky grad student Kate Dibiasky. Meryl Streep is the panto-villain president, Jonah Hill her son and chief-of-staff, and Mark Rylance is the creepy Brit tech mogul Sir Peter Isherwell. Continue reading...

Technology a ‘gamechanger’ for forensic science but raises privacy and racial profiling issues

Variant lacks feature that allows probable cases to be distinguished among positive PCR tests

Curator puts monument in context of era, with loaned objects including 3,600-year-old Nebra sky discA bronze disc inlaid with gold symbols and two gold cone-shaped hats decorated with solar motifs are among objects from the Stonehenge era that will go on show for the first time in the UK at a landmark exhibition at the British Museum.The objects are among more than 250 being loaned to the nation’s flagship museum by institutions in six European countries and across the UK. In total, more than 430 objects will be on display at the British Museum’s first ever big exhibition on the story of Stonehenge, which opens in February. Continue reading...

The travel photography blog Capture the Atlas has published its annual northern lights photographer of the year collection with stunning images from 25 photographers. Coinciding with the northern lights season at the end of the year, it aims to share the beauty of this natural phenomenon Continue reading...

Yusaku Maezawa to become first space tourist sent to space station by Russia in more than a decadeThe Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has said he can barely contain his excitement on the eve of blasting off to the International Space Station in a prelude to a more ambitious trip around the moon with Elon Musk’s SpaceX planned in 2023.The 46-year-old fashion magnate and art collector has been training at a space centre outside Moscow before becoming the first space tourist to travel to the ISS in more than a decade. Continue reading...

Using astroseismology, researchers have calculated that the bright blue giant Beta Crucis is 11m years oldOne of the more striking constellations of the southern hemisphere’s sky, the Southern Cross, can claim a new accolade – its bright blue giant Beta Crucis star has been revealed as a heavy-weight champion.An international team of scientists have discovered that Beta Crucis, also known as Mimosa, is 14.5 times heavier than Earth’s sun and is just 11m years old, making it the heaviest of the thousands of stars to have their age determined by astroseismology. Continue reading...

Etruscan bronze attachments in Sotheby’s sale and and Bonhams’ Sardinian lamp said to match items in convicted dealers’ archivesThe auction houses Sotheby’s and Bonhams are facing a call to withdraw two antiquities from sale in London today from an archaeologist who raised “serious suspicions” that the items came from illicit excavations.Lot 68 in the Sotheby’s sale is a pair of decorative Etruscan bronze attachments, dating from circa early fifth century BC, expected to fetch between £50,000 and £70,000. Lot 83 in the Bonhams sale is a Sardinian bronze boat-shaped lamp, circa eighth century BC, estimated between £2,000 and £3,000. Continue reading...

The mother-of-two carefully shielded until the government said it was safe to see friends and family. She had no idea how her existing conditions could affect herThe feeling of relief was immense as 58-year-old Michele Brown returned home from the vaccine centre. Her husband, Terry, 61, had taken time off from his job as a supervisor at a heavy machinery factory to drive her to her second Covid-19 vaccination at a Gateshead community centre. In the car, Michele told her partner of 40 years that she felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. “She said: ‘At least we’ve got that done,’” Terry remembers. “‘We’ll be OK.’”It was 28 April 2021. Michele, who had rheumatoid arthritis, an underactive thyroid and diabetes, had spent the last year and a half shielding indoors, on government advice. She was careful. She had a Covid station set up on the breakfast counter: lateral flow tests, bottles of antibacterial gel and disposable face masks. When family came to visit, a mask-wearing Michele would banish them to the furthest corner of the living room. “We couldn’t kiss her,” remembers her daughter, Kim Brown, 41, who lives in Durham. “She would say: ‘You might have the coronies! I don’t want no coronies. You’re not giving me that crap.’” Continue reading...

Over 40 countries have now confirmed the presence of Omicron. And, in the UK, scientists have been increasingly expressing their concern about the new variant. Some have speculated there could be more than 1,000 cases here already, and that it could become the dominant variant within weeks.To get an update on what we know about the Omicron variant, and how quickly it might be spreading, Madeleine Finlay speaks to Nicola Davis, the Guardian’s science correspondentArchive: 7News Australia, CBS, BBC Continue reading...

Finding is good news for lower-income countries that have not yet completed their primary vaccination campaigns

US scientists say users of sildenafil – the generic name for Viagra – are 69% less likely to develop the form of dementia than non-usersViagra could be a useful treatment against Alzheimer’s disease, according to a US study.Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of age-related dementia, affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Despite mounting numbers of cases, however, there is currently no effective treatment. Continue reading...

Engineer and entrepreneur who founded Oxford Instruments and made the UK’s first MRI body scannerIn 1959 Martin Wood asked his boss at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford University, if he could to start a company making specialist magnets for research. At that time the concept of a spinout was unheard of in that university, but the easy-going Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti offered every support. He asked only that Martin, the physics department’s resident engineer, remain in the lab for another 10 years. Working out of a shed in his back garden, Martin, who has died aged 94, laid the foundations of the global business Oxford Instruments, his wife, Audrey, taking on the administration.Martin’s role in the Clarendon Laboratory was to manage the high magnetic fields facility, designing and making powerful electromagnets that Kurti and his colleagues used to investigate materials at very low temperatures. The generators to power the magnets ran only at night, as they required a substantial fraction of the local power station’s output. As former students left to continue their work elsewhere, they would ask Martin to make magnets for their new labs. Starting a company was the realisation of his long-held ambition to create a productive and rewarding working environment. Continue reading...

I’m stuck in a hotel for 10 days, under a system that is disorganised and shockingly expensiveI am writing this on day zero, having arrived at my government-designated quarantine hotel after 24 hours of travel. I need to isolate in my room for 10 days and 11 nights. It is, to put it mildly, a bit of a dump: a tired, chipped Formica table, sagging curtains, freezing cold. For this, I paid £2,285.So what is that like? Sitting in this room, I just want to burst into tears. My despair is exacerbated by the knowledge that my suitcase was filled with sleeveless summer clothes suitable for the South African summer, not Birmingham in the bleak midwinter. I phone reception, who tell me that they have only just put the heating on; I should be patient, they say. The room will be warm in 20 minutes. Half an hour later my teeth are still chattering so I phone again, demanding a heater. Another phone call and, half an hour later, a heater is produced. I am forced to perch it on the table because the power socket on the floor is broken.Carla Stout is a music teacher who lives near Staines Continue reading...

Omicron’s emergence is no surprise, as richer countries’ broken promises lead to low vaccination rates – and virus mutationThe world is hostage to what’s been called “a cycle of panic and neglect”. The Omicron variant, while we wait for clarification on its many unknowns, has sparked the latest bout of that panic. But it is a panic born directly of selfish insularity: as wealthy nations have amassed enough surplus vaccines to inoculate their entire populations many times over, in low-income countries just a small percentage have received even a single dose.Even with the ambitious booster programmes, there are still plenty of unused doses sitting in the warehouses of western nations. So there’s no need to make a choice between vaccinating low-income countries or offering boosters in wealthy nations: we can still do both. New analysis from the data company Airfinity finds that, even with booster policies taken into account, in the G7 and EU there will still be close to 1.4bn surplus doses by the end of March 2022. It’s bordering on criminal that these are not being urgently airlifted to countries in need. Continue reading...

We must curb the power of Silicon Valley and protect those who speak up about the harms of AIA year ago I found out, from one of my direct reports, that I had apparently resigned. I had just been fired from Google in one of the most disrespectful ways I could imagine.Thanks to organizing done by former and current Google employees and many others, Google did not succeed in smearing my work or reputation, although they tried. My firing made headlines because of the worker organizing that has been building up in the tech world, often due to the labor of people who are already marginalized, many of whose names we do not know. Since I was fired last December, there have been many developments in tech worker organizing and whistleblowing. The most publicized of these was Frances Haugen’s testimony in Congress; echoing what Sophie Zhang, a data scientist fired from Facebook, had previously said, Haugen argued that the company prioritizes growth over all else, even when it knows the deadly consequences of doing so.Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). She was formerly co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team Continue reading...

From ventilation to lateral flow testing, let’s try to minimise the risk of catching Covid

Nigerian high commissioner hits out as arrivals into UK face quarantine in effort to contain Omicron variant

Genetic data will soon be accessible like never before. The implications for our health are hugeWhile at the till in a clothes shop, Ruby received a call. She recognised the woman’s voice as the genetic counsellor she had recently seen, and asked if she could try again in five minutes. Ruby paid for her clothes, went to her car, and waited alone. Something about the counsellor’s voice gave away what was coming.The woman called back and said Ruby’s genetic test results had come in. She did indeed carry the mutation they had been looking for. Ruby had inherited a faulty gene from her father, the one that had caused his death aged 36 from a connective tissue disorder that affected his heart. It didn’t seem the right situation in which to receive such news but, then again, how else could it happen? The phone call lasted just a few minutes. The counsellor asked if Ruby had any questions, but she couldn’t think of anything. She rang off, called her husband and cried. The main thing she was upset about was the thought of her children being at risk. Continue reading...