Science | The Guardian

Analysis of wood from timber-framed buildings in Newfoundland shows Norse-built settlement 471 years before ColumbusHalf a millennium before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, the Vikings reached the “New World”, as the remains of timber buildings at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Canada’s Newfoundland testify.The Icelandic sagas – oral histories written down hundreds of years later – tell of a leader named Leif Erikson and a settlement called “Vinland”, assumed to be coastal North America. But while it is known that the Norse landed in Canada, exactly when they set up camp to become the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic, marking the moment when the globe was first known to have been encircled by humans, has remained imprecise. Continue reading...

Our comparatively good position has been eroded and now, heading into the winter, the data looks truly alarming

President hails ‘excellent’ test, as rocket gets high enough, but fails to put dummy payload into orbitSouth Korea’s first domestically produced space rocket reached its desired altitude but failed to deliver a dummy payload into orbit in its first test launch.The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, still described the test as an “excellent accomplishment” that takes the country a step further in its pursuit of a space launch programme. Continue reading...

Deadly side-effect of heat stress is threat to rising numbers of workers in hot climates, doctors warn

Analysis: soaring cases in schools are adding to the pool of the immune – which could soon see some community infections fall

Only 30 Menai whitebeam remain, all in a narrow strip of steep land in a nature reserve

For the past few months Insulate Britain have been blocking roads in an effort to pressure the government into sealing up the UK’s leaky, draughty housing-stock. So why are a group of eco-activists facing confrontations from angry drivers, and even risking injury, for insulation? Shivani Dave speaks to environment correspondent Matthew Taylor about Insulate Britain’s demands and explores the possible health benefits of properly insulated homes with Dr James Milner Continue reading...

Analysis: a winter plan has been set out but implementing it could be hampered by political squeamishness

Health secretary says ‘pandemic is not over’ but confirms UK will not implement its ‘plan B’ measures just now. This live blog has now closed – for global Covid updates, please follow this live blog

Trials show one of drugs cuts risk of hospitalisation or death for patients by half

Identical twins have more similar views on environmental issues than non-identical ones, research findsSome people are more environmentally conscious than others, and scientists say the reason could be in their genes.A study has found that identical twins have more similar views on conservation and environmentalism than non-identical twins. The researchers say this suggests there could be a link between people’s genetic makeup and their support for green policies. Continue reading...

Researchers in US say trial on dead person is a ‘significant step’ toward animal-to-human organ transplantsSurgeons have attached a pig’s kidney to a human and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants.Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but a sugar in their cells, which is foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. The kidney for this experiment came from a gene-edited animal, engineered to eliminate that sugar and avoid an immune system attack. Continue reading...

The climate emergency has been a wakeup call to everyone, and the ethologist and environmentalist is working as hard as ever to defeat it. She discusses horror, hope and heroism in her late 80sIn Jane Goodall’s new book, there is a vivid description of her “deep bond” with a beech tree in the garden of her childhood home in Bournemouth. She would climb into its branches to read, hauling books and her homework up in a basket, and persuaded her grandmother to bequeath her the tree, named just Beech, in her will. She called the tree, as alive to her as any person or animal, “one of my closest childhood friends”. “There’s Beech,” she says now, pointing to the handsome tree, its leaves glowing in the morning sun, from the front doorstep.The house, which first belonged to Goodall’s grandmother, is large and lovely, but modest, perhaps little changed from when Goodall lived here as a child; there are various animal feeding bowls in the living room, comfortingly cluttered, where we sit, with big windows that look out on to the garden. Her sister, Judy, and her family live here, and it’s home to Goodall when she’s not travelling the world, spreading her message of hope, and demanding action. Goodall was on her way to give a talk for Compassion in World Farming in Brussels last March, the taxi leaving the driveway, when Judy came rushing out to say it had been called off, and she has been grounded here since, mainly working from her attic bedroom. Continue reading...

Film crew say shooting was a ‘huge challenge’ and they had to learn to walk again after 12 days in orbitTheir movie props floated around, sleeping was difficult and they used Velcro to keep objects in place but Russia’s first film crew in space said they were delighted with the result and had “shot everything we planned”.Yulia Peresild, one of Russia’s most glamorous actors, and film director Klim Shipenko returned to Earth on Sunday after spending 12 days on the International Space Station (ISS) shooting the first movie in orbit, in an effort to beat the United States. Continue reading...

Continue reading...

Reports grow of repeat infection as experts warn prevalence among school pupils puts older people at risk

Trawl of 90,000 studies finds consensus, leading to call for Facebook and Twitter to curb disinformationThe scientific consensus that humans are altering the climate has passed 99.9%, according to research that strengthens the case for global action at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow.The degree of scientific certainty about the impact of greenhouse gases is now similar to the level of agreement on evolution and plate tectonics, the authors say, based on a survey of nearly 90,000 climate-related studies. This means there is practically no doubt among experts that burning fossil fuels, such as oil, gas, coal, peat and trees, is heating the planet and causing more extreme weather. Continue reading...

UK Health Security Agency monitoring AY.4.2 as daily cases at highest level since late July

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsI’ve been grappling for decades about how you’d get a “negative

Unique events that led to civilisation mean its demise could ‘eliminate meaning in galaxy for ever’Humans might be the only intelligent beings in our galaxy, so destroying our civilisation could be a galactic disaster, Prof Brian Cox has warned leaders in the run-up to Cop26.Speaking at the launch of his new BBC Two series Universe, the physicist and presenter said that having spoken to the scientists around the world advising the show, he thought that humans and sentient life on Earth “might be a remarkable, naturally occurring phenomenon” and that was something that “world leaders might need to know”.Universe starts on BBC2 on 27 October Continue reading...

Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organised their societies – and hint at possibilities for our ownIn some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.Let’s take just one example. Back in the 1980s, there was a great deal of buzz about a “mitochondrial Eve”, the putative common ancestor of our entire species. Granted, no one was claiming to have actually found the physical remains of such an ancestor, but DNA sequencing demonstrated that such an Eve must have existed, perhaps as recently as 120,000 years ago. And while no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the Great Rift Valley in east Africa seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. While scientists continued debating the ins and outs, popular magazines were soon carrying stories about a modern counterpart to the Garden of Eden, the original incubator of humanity, the savanna-womb that gave life to us all. Continue reading...

Last week, testing at a private Covid lab in Wolverhampton was halted, after the UK Health Security Agency found tens of thousands of people may have been falsely given a negative PCR result. But since the start of September, scientists had been alerted to strange patterns in the testing data which suggested something was out of the ordinary. Anand Jagatia speaks to Dr Kit Yates, a mathematical biologist, about why it took so long for these errors to be traced back to the lab, and what the consequences could be

Dr Jo Fayram hopes the apathy of the British public will not last; Professors Joe Sim and Steve Tombs condemn the government’s lamentable failures; Professor Patricia Deps reports on Brazil’s Covid inquiry; and Margaret Farnworth highlights a super-spreader football matchLast week the government’s response to Covid was criticised in a report by two Commons committees for apparently pursuing herd immunity by infection at the start of the pandemic. Continuing high Covid rates indicate that nothing has changed except the public’s ability to react. According to experts (Why Britons are tolerating sky-high Covid rates – and why this may not last, 15 October), a reason for this is the “normalisation” of Covid infection and deaths by the government. In reality, there is nothing normal about this “normalisation”.The UK is known as “plague island” in Europe. Surely it’s time we realised that the use of protective measures against Covid are working well across the Channel, while the UK government’s lack of action continues to lead to unnecessary illness, suffering and death. Let’s hope that the experts quoted in your article are right and that the apathy of the British public will not last.

Metre-long relic, encrusted with marine organisms, is believed to be about 900 years oldA sword believed to have belonged to a crusader who sailed to the Holy Land almost a millennium ago has been recovered from the Mediterranean seabed thanks to an eagle-eyed amateur diver, the Israel Antiquities Authority has said.Though encrusted with marine organisms, the metre-long blade, hilt and handle were distinctive enough to notice after undercurrents apparently shifted sands that had concealed it. Continue reading...

Disarmament ambassador casts doubt on ability to defend against technology after reports of testThe United States is “very concerned” about China’s development of hypersonic technology, the US disarmament ambassador, Robert Wood, has said, after reports that Beijing had recently launched a hypersonic missile with a nuclear capacity.“We are very concerned by what China has been doing on the hypersonic front,” Robert Wood told reporters in Geneva. Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s puzzlesEarlier today I set you two puzzles based on Hamiltonian paths in a square grid. A Hamiltonian path is one which visits every cell exactly once. (If you want a print out of the puzzles, click here.)1. The Hamiltonian path Continue reading...

Vaccine produced by French company uses inactivated Sars-CoV-2 virus and can be stored in fridge

Mental chicaneryUPDATE: the solutions are now up.No, not that Hamilton. I meant William Rowan Hamilton, the nineteenth century Irish mathematician.And not that sort of grid. I meant a square grid, like a chessboard or a Sudoku. Continue reading...

Two applications were made to amend poisons legislation so that the pill would not need ongoing prescriptions from doctor

At least eight types of bird flu, all of which can kill humans, are circulating around the world’s factory farms – and they could be worse than Covid-19One day last December, 101,000 chickens at a gigantic farm near the city of Astrakhan in southern Russia started to collapse and die. Tests by the state research centre showed that a relatively new strain of lethal avian flu known as H5N8 was circulating, and within days 900,000 birds at the Vladimirskaya plant were hurriedly slaughtered to prevent an epidemic.Avian flu is the world’s other ongoing pandemic and H5N8 is just one strain that has torn through thousands of chicken, duck and turkey flocks across nearly 50 countries including Britain in recent years and shows no sign of stopping. Continue reading...

Copernicus never saw it, so the story goes, but here’s your chance to chase the elusive planetThis coming week, there is a chance to spot the elusive inner planet Mercury in the morning sky. It will be tricky as the solar system’s smallest planet will only appear low in the dawn sky before the sunrise washes it away.The chart shows the view looking east from London at 0700 BST on 25 October. The sky will already be twilit and Mercury will be at its greatest distance from the sun. Continue reading...

A Russian actor and a film director have returned to Earth after spending 12 days on the International Space Station, shooting scenes for The Challenge, the first movie filmed in orbit. Actor Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko joined cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky in a Soyuz capsule that landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe. The film, if completed on time, will beat a Hollywood production announced by Tom Cruise, Nasa and SpaceX

75% rise in referrals for first suspected episode of psychosis between April 2019 and April 2021

Scientists treating depression and a range of other mental illnesses have been running controlled trials using MDMA and psychedelic drugs such as LSD, and the results have been encouraging.Dr Robin Carhart Harris, head the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, discusses his work showing how psilocybin (or magic mushrooms) can be used to assist psychotherapy for difficult-to-treat depression.Dr Rachel Yehuda, director of the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at Mount Sinai school of medicine in New York, discusses her success in trials using MDMA as a treatment for PTSD Continue reading...

Modelling shows increased risk of outbreaks if a mutation similar to the transmissibility of Delta were to circulate with international arrivals

One day a year our daughter does as she pleases and it’s always great fun… and a good education for us allWe call it her “in-charge day”. A day when our nine-year-old daughter Flora is in charge, and we are, effectively, hers to command. A day when all the traditional hierarchies between parent and child are reversed, when she can fulfil her fantasies, refuse to do anything she doesn’t want to and experience a taste of power, authority and absolute freedom.OK, not absolute freedom. There are some ground rules. She can’t do anything we deem to be unsafe or illegal. She can’t ask us to buy anything “too expensive” (we keep this part deliberately vague). And, this year, we realised we needed to add one more sentence of small print to our contract: she cannot purchase any new pets. Continue reading...

The first child born using the technique arrived last year. But can it really help reduce diseases in a new generation, or is it ‘techno-eugenics’?The birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978 provoked a media frenzy. In comparison, a little girl named Aurea born by IVF in May 2020 went almost unnoticed. Yet she represents a significant first in assisted reproduction too, for the embryo from which she grew was selected from others based on polygenic screening before implantation, to optimise her health prospects.For both scientific and ethical reasons, this new type of genetic screening is highly controversial. The nonprofit California-based organisation the Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) has called its use here “a considerable reach by the assisted-reproduction industry in the direction of techno-eugenics”. Continue reading...

Expectant mothers tell helpline that midwives are advising them against vaccines despite threat posed by virus• Coronavirus – latest updates• See all our coronavirus coveragePregnant women are being advised by some health professionals not to have the Covid vaccine despite an edict from the NHS that they should encourage them to get the jab. One in six of the most critically ill Covid patients requiring life-saving care are unvaccinated pregnant women, figures released last week show.Yet messages sent to the Vaccines and Pregnancy helpline, launched on 20 August to help pregnant women navigate information about the vaccine, suggest that some midwives are advising against the jab. Continue reading...

Actor and director land safely in Kazakhstan after spending 12 days on the International Space Station shooting the first movie in orbitA Russian actor and a film director have returned to Earth after spending 12 days on the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first movie in orbit.Yulia Peresild and Klim Shipenko landed as scheduled on Kazakhstan’s steppe early on Sunday, according to footage broadcast live by the Russian space agency. Continue reading...

A 3,500-year-old image tablet of a ‘miserable male ghost’ gives up its secretIts outlines are faint, only discernible at an angle, but the world’s oldest drawing of a ghost has been discovered in the darkened vaults of the British Museum.A lonely bearded spirit being led into the afterlife and eternal bliss by a lover has been identified on an ancient Babylonian clay tablet created about 3,500 years ago. Continue reading...

Covid has turned us into pandemic experts, all too ready to gainsay scientists and distorting our reasoning, but psychology can help us understand how our prejudices are formedAs I wasted an hour’s worth of petrol trying to find more petrol last month, Justin Webb poked at the chief secretary to the Treasury, Simon Clarke, on the Today programme, seeking a reason why much of the country is running on fumes and why HGV drivers are currently more elusive than dark matter. Clarke explained that the problem is “driven in part by workforce demographics” – no doubt – and is “worsened by Covid restrictions”. Agreed. “And worsened by Brexit,” Webb helpfully chipped in. “That’s just a fact.”But no, Clarke was having none of it. “Well, no. It’s not a fact.” Continue reading...

Life’s too short for bad literature, so let’s follow the writer’s exampleDo you ditch a book if it does not immediately grab your attention or do you trudge through it joylessly, weighed down by some invisible obligation to complete it, no matter how arduous the task? The writer Mark Billingham got stuck into this endless debate at the Cheltenham literature festival last week, admitting that he gives up on five out of 10 books that he starts, because “life’s too short” and “there are so many great books out there”. If genre fiction, in particular, doesn’t grab you after 20 pages, he said, “then, for God’s sake, throw it across the room angrily”.The thought of it! It is so bold, so cavalier. There are two books in particular that I went on to adore, after several abandoned attempts to read them. It quite literally took me years to get into both Wolf Hall and The Luminaries and it was only a combination of very lazy, pool-based holidays and dogged perseverance that finally got me to stick with them. I am very glad I did. They rewarded patience and in a culture of instant gratification this seems increasingly rare. Continue reading...

Ignorance about the basic biology of vulvas is still shockingly high – yet there are huge health benefits, physical and emotional, to be won with better understandingIf you have a vulva between your legs, could you identify the seven separate structures in a mirror? If your partner has a vulva, can you identify theirs?For over half the population, the vulva is a significant part of their body; an exit and an entrance, a site of pleasure and, often, pain, that speaks to core human function and need. In 2021, it can feel as if we’re on the cliff-edge of emancipation from the history of oppression and ick surrounding female genitalia. The booming sex toy market, a growing awareness of hormonal cycles and the messy reality of periods, a sharper focus on female pleasure and evolving conversations about menopause all point to real progress. Yet there remains a well of misunderstanding in society about what’s down there (clitoris, labia majora, labia minora, urethral opening, vaginal opening, perineum and anus, by the way), with tangible consequences. Continue reading...

The Beatles drummer, Ringo Starr, was among those asked to add their messages to a Lucy mission plaque. The spacecraft has set off on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids, mostly around Jupiter's orbit. The mission was named after the 3.2m-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia nearly a half a century. Dr Donald Johanson discovered the remains while the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was playing, passing on the name to his discovery Continue reading...

Spacecraft with name inspired by a skeleton and the Beatles, and with lab-grown gems, starts 12-year questA Nasa spacecraft named Lucy has rocketed into the sky with diamonds on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids.Seven of the mysterious space rocks are among swarms of asteroids sharing Jupiter’s orbit, thought to be the pristine leftovers of planetary formation. Continue reading...

The company employs the world’s top engineers and has access to unlimited money but is plagued by safety concerns and toxic workplace cultureThe billionaire space race is only a race by name. In actuality, there is SpaceX – and everyone else.Only the company founded by Elon Musk nearly two decades ago has sent an orbital rocket booster into space and landed it safely again. Only SpaceX has landed a rocket the size of a 15-storey building on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. Only SpaceX has carried both Nasa astronauts and private citizens to the International Space Station. Only SpaceX is producing thousands of its own table-sized communication satellites every year. Only SpaceX has the almost weekly launch cadence necessary to single-handedly double the number of operational satellites in orbit in less than two years. Only SpaceX is launching prototypes of the largest and most powerful rocket ever made, a behemoth called Starship that is destined to carry humans to the moon. Continue reading...

The Shenzhou-13 vessel docked at its space station to kick off a record-setting six-month stayThree astronauts successfully docked with China’s new space station, state media said, on what is set to be Beijing’s longest crewed mission to date and the latest landmark in its drive to become a major space power.The three blasted off shortly after midnight on Saturday (1600 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwestern China’s Gobi desert, state-run news agency Xinhua said, with the team expected to spend six months at the Tiangong space station. Continue reading...

Archaeologists find remains of fugitive during first dig at site near Pompeii in almost three decadesThe partially mutilated remains of a man buried by the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius at Herculaneum, the ancient Roman town close to Pompeii, have been discovered in what Italy’s culture minister described as a “sensational” find.Archaeologists said the man, believed to have been aged between 40 and 45, was killed just steps away from the sea as he tried to flee the eruption. Continue reading...

Analysis: as Covid cases reach 40,000 a day, scientists think normalisation is partly to blame for the lack of public reaction

An estimated 43,000 people may have been given false negative results. Here are the key issues