Science | The Guardian

Experimental antiviral pill Paxlovid is also effective against the Omicron variant, company announcesA pill manufactured by the prominent Covid-19 vaccine provider Pfizer is highly effective in protecting against severe disease from coronavirus, the company said on Tuesday.The experimental antiviral pill Paxlovid is also effective against the Omicron variant that is spreading rapidly across the world, the company announced, citing laboratory testing. Continue reading...

Analysis: Sajid Javid estimates there are 200,000 new cases a day – here’s why the experts suggest that number will soon multiply

Governments urged to use ‘peace dividend’ to help UN tackle pandemics, climate crisis and extreme povertyMore than 50 Nobel laureates have signed an open letter calling for all countries to cut their military spending by 2% a year for the next five years, and put half the saved money in a UN fund to combat pandemics, the climate crisis, and extreme poverty.Coordinated by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, the letter is supported by a large group of scientists and mathematicians including Sir Roger Penrose, and is published at a time when rising global tensions have led to a steady increase in arms budgets. Continue reading...

Object is among nearly 50,000 finds by hobbyists in 2020, according to Portable Antiquities Scheme report

Millions have died unnecessarily of Covid and millions more will in 2022 unless something changes. Justice must be doneMillions more people will die from Covid-19 in the coming year, and most will be unvaccinated. The vaccines that could save millions of lives are not reaching the poor majority of the world’s population. The contrast is stark: the current share of people fully vaccinated in high, upper-middle income, lower-middle income and low income countries is 69%, 68%, 30% and 3.5% respectively.The UK, Canada, Germany and other EU states have supported a deliberate policy to withhold vaccines from the poorest countries in the world, and defended an immoral and unethical economic system which places big pharma patents ahead of millions of lives. In this context, is the only option left to ask whether the states facilitating this might be prosecuted in the international criminal court, on the grounds of a crime against humanity? Continue reading...

Deputy prime minister offers reassurance over gatherings as government faces record rebellion

One guest is an antivaxxer, another is allergic to your cats, the turkey is still raw and your best friends are splitting up in the sitting room. Here is how to face down festive fiascosIt’s that time of year when you wake up sweating and can’t figure out why. Did you accidentally wear your thermals in bed? Do you have tuberculosis? No, dummy, it’s just that it’s almost Christmas, it’s your turn to play host, and the list of things that can go wrong on the 25th is long and wearying.Can I recommend, before we drill into this list, a quick wisdom stocktake? Last year was the worst Christmas imaginable: every plan was kiboshed at the very last minute; non-essential shops closed before we’d done our shopping; people who thought they were going back to their families ended up at home and hadn’t bought Baileys and crackers and whatnot; people who’d battled solitude for a year were stuck alone; people living on top of each other couldn’t catch a break; people expecting guests were buried under surplus pigs in blankets, and beyond our under-or over-decorated front doors, the outside world was fraught with risk and sorrow, as coronavirus declined to mark the birth of the Christ child with any respite from its march of terror. I’m not saying it couldn’t be as bad as that again – just that it couldn’t possibly be as surprisingly bad again. Continue reading...

As England moves to plan B, Boris Johnson has announced that all adults will be offered a booster vaccine by the end of December. But will that be enough to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed? Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s science editor, Ian Sample, about the spread of Omicron, and what we can do to prevent a tidal wave of casesArchive: The Guardian, The Sun Continue reading...

Certification encouraged vaccination in countries with low coverage, especially among young people

Data from 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons suggests they are not necessarily cleverer than general populationIt may not be rocket science, but researchers have found aerospace engineers and brain surgeons are not necessarily brighter than the general population.Researchers examined data from an international cohort of 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons who completed 12 tasks online using the Great British Intelligence Test (GBIT) from the Cognitron platform, as well as answering questions around their age, sex and levels of experience in their speciality. Continue reading...

It is no surprise that he is proving unfit to be prime minister, writes Paul Connew, while Kevin Donovan points out the PM’s hypocrisy with regard to the NHSIt is hard to disagree with John Harris’s devastating assessment of Boris Johnson (Boris Johnson’s crises boil down to one thing: contempt for the rest of us, 12 December). Except, perhaps, when he writes that Johnson is “so arrogant and thoughtless that he sometimes seems almost amoral”. Surely, his amorality is proven beyond all reasonable doubt?It was on display on Sunday night when, not for the first time, he contemptuously bypassed parliament with his pre-recorded, question-avoiding “national address” on television. It was Boris the wannabe president, not a primus inter pares prime minister. Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s problemsEarlier today I set you three questions from a Russian maths competition used to promote the International Congress of Mathematicians, which will be held in July next year in St Petersburg.1. Pet swap Continue reading...

Analysis: with cold symptoms, it is better to wait for a PCR result rather than risk spreading the virus

Mathematicians get ready to partyUPDATE: The solutions can be read here.The largest and most important event in the mathematical calendar will take place next July in St Petersburg. The International Congress of Mathematicians is a quadrennial gathering at which many of the subject’s most prominent thinkers give lectures and the winners of maths’ most prestigious prize, the Fields Medal, are announced.As part of the build-up to the event – which is expected to attract about 5,000 mathematicians from all over the world – the organisers earlier this year ran an online maths competition for students and the general public. Below are the first three questions from this test. Continue reading...

The Geminids are expected to be most visible between 3am and 4am across the country

Analysis: top-up vaccines make key changes to our antibody defences, reducing the threat from Omicron

Call comes amid concerns that spread of Covid Omicron variant could disrupt education in new year

Readers are unconvinced that the government’s plan B measures will be enough to curb Covid cases and deathsWell said, Rachel Clarke (Talk of a No 10 Christmas party is an insult to the thousands who have died of Covid, 8 December). Her wholly justifiable anger, based on her frontline experience of caring for her patients, encapsulates, I suspect, the fury and frustrations of many.Once he has completed his investigations into “partygate”, the cabinet secretary might usefully place a copy of Ms Clarke’s article alongside the agenda for future cabinet meetings, if only to remind participants that government is a serious business with serious consequences, ideally conducted by serious professionals rather than the current bunch of self-serving, irresponsible amateurs.

I worried so much about not seeing my son, who lives in Canada, during Covid, but then I realised that he was fine – and being very well looked afterGetting to Canada from the UK in August 2020 was a faff, as you might expect mid-pandemic. There was lots of stress – tests and isolation, rules, regulations and forms. I was doing the preparations at my mum’s. She could see I was getting upset and insisted on taking over, assuming I was being pathetic. Within five minutes, she had lost it as well. Emotions were high in the days before I flew. This wasn’t just a holiday, but my chance – amid such uncertainty and sadness – to spend precious time with Julian, my only son.He’s the best and most significant thing that has ever happened to me. He was also very much an unexpected surprise. I had a short relationship with his mum; we parted ways on great terms. Then one day out of the blue I got a call from North Korea, where she was working. She was pregnant. I was based in England, and she lived in Canada. We were both medical emergency aid workers at the time and had met while responding to a cyclone in Burma. It was always going to be complicated, but we decided to make it work. Continue reading...

Top UK medical adviser says growing number of people going to emergency departments diagnosed with Omicron

Phone signals, soil samples, tattoo ink, fly larvae… We all know that microscopic traces can play a crucial role in solving crimes. But who are the forensic experts who can read the clues?Before I started out in forensics 20 years ago, I served in the military. I was a communications engineer in the army, radios were my domain. After I left, someone suggested I turn to digital forensics. I was a bit of a sceptic at first, but I just didn’t understand what could be done. In my time, I’ve worked in both the private and public sector; within the police and as an independent expert. Continue reading...

The week ahead will be pivotal as we track the spread of the new variant and discover its potential legacyThe emergence and rapid spread of the Omicron Sars-CoV-2 variant feels like a flashback to last year’s grim festive season when much of the world went into lockdown to avert the worst of the Alpha variant wave. But though the sense of eerie, impending doom feels familiar, the epidemiological and political situations are different from one year ago.The Omicron wave represents a key turning point in the pandemic. But no plausible outcome looks particularly auspicious – it feels largely like a lose-lose deal. If if turns out to be roughly as severe as previous pandemic waves, it might normalise harsh mitigation measures and render the prospect of a return to post-pandemic normality fairly remote. If it turned out to be milder than feared, this could spell the end of lockdowns with Covid-19 on its way into endemicity. The cost would be a loss of trust in political and public health authorities, which may make it difficult to deal with future threats. Continue reading...

Analysis: UK faces grim winter if vaccines offer poor overall protection, but if the virus has weak powers to evade immunity, hospital cases can be containedTwo competing forces will determine Omicron’s impact on the nation over the next few weeks. The power of booster jabs to give last-minute protection against Covid-19 will be pitted against the new variant’s ability to elude existing immunity. The outcome will decide whether our festive season is going to be muted or miserable.If enough arms are jabbed with booster vaccines, while Omicron turns out to have poor powers to evade immunity, then there is hope hospital cases will be contained and the NHS will be protected. Severe restrictions in the new year – including the prospect of lockdowns – could be avoided. Continue reading...

In a society riven by ‘gotchas’ and self-righteousness, let’s be more ready to recognise our own failings and less hasty to judge others’There’s a communal prayer of penitence that is often used in Church of England services. In it, worshippers confess that they have sinned against their fellow humans “in thought, and word, and deed; through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault”. Concise yet powerful, it recognises the different ways we can harm each other. Sins of omission and of carelessness are no less damaging, or requiring of forgiveness, than those born of malice.We live in a period when our personal contributions to systemic injustice, many of them unintentional, are becoming increasingly obvious. Our new age of enlightenment has illuminated any number of dark corners that society has long failed (or refused) to notice. Cricket, the sport I love, has just endured a particularly punishing month of reckoning. First, Azeem Rafiq’s public testimony against his former county, Yorkshire, forced the English game to admit that its anti-racism stance wasn’t worth the T-shirts it was printed on. Then, right before the Ashes, Australia’s then-captain admitted sending sexually explicit messages to a colleague. In both cases, players, coaches and commentators found themselves suddenly jobless, while the sport’s administrators have scrambled, with little dignity, to contain the fallout. Continue reading...

Researchers say new rules may be needed to cut deaths, but there are concerns that ‘fed-up’ people will ignore government

New British research backs theory that parched planet’s water all came from extraterrestrial sourceIt covers three quarters of the surface of the Earth and gives our planet its distinctive blue complexion when viewed from outer space. But the source of the liquid water that sustains our seas and which has nourished life on our world for eons is a subject of major scientific debate.Some researchers argue that water in some form has been present on our world ever since it coalesced out of swirling clouds of dust and gas 4.5 billion years ago. Earth has always been provided with a reservoir, in short. Continue reading...

Focus on the exciting potential of T-cell immunity is spurring the sector on to create a new generation of jabsThe speed at which scientists worked to develop the first Covid jabs was unprecedented. Just nine months after the UK went into lockdown, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan officially became the first person in the world outside a trial to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. But the virus is mutating, and the emergence of the Omicron variant last month is already focusing attention on the next generation of jabs.So what do we know about the new Covid-19 vaccines? One change is with delivery mechanisms, such as San Francisco firm Vaxart’s vaccine-in-a-pill, and Scancell’s spring-powered injectors that pierce the skin without a needle. But the biggest development is in T-cell technology. Produced by the bone marrow, T-cells are white blood cells that form a key part of the immune system. While current vaccines mainly generate antibodies that stick to the virus and stop it infecting the body, the new vaccines prime T-cells to find and destroy infected cells, thus preventing viral replication and disease. (The current vaccines also produce a T-cell response, but to a lesser extent.) Continue reading...

Laura Shepard Churchley, whose father, Alan Shepard, made history in 1961 as the first American to travel into space, was among the crew of sixThe eldest daughter of pioneering US astronaut Alan Shepard took a joyride to the edge of space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket on Saturday, 60 years after her late father’s famed suborbital Nasa flight at the dawn of the Space Age.Laura Shepard Churchley, 74, who was a schoolgirl when her father first streaked into space, was one of six passengers buckled into the cabin of Blue Origin‘s New Shepard spacecraft as it lifted off from a launch site outside the west Texas town of Van Horn. Continue reading...

Scientists are racing to assess the spread of the virus in wild and domestic animals, and the threat it could pose to usA year ago humanity embarked on a project to vaccinate every person against Covid-19. But in recent months a shadow vaccination campaign has also been taking place. From giraffes to snow leopards, gorillas to sea lions, zoos around the world have been inoculating their animals with an experimental Covid vaccine as an insurance policy against what they fear could be a similarly fatal illness for certain mammals.Meanwhile, veterinary scientists have been scrambling to understand the scale of Covid-19 infection in our furry household companions, and what the consequences could be for their health – and our own. Continue reading...

Analysis: experts say weakened immune systems may give rise to new Covid variants – so HIV prevention could be key to stopping coronavirus

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