Science | The Guardian

Health Security Agency suspends operations at privately run lab in Wolverhampton

International advisers say it is unfair people who’ve taken part in clinical trials need more jabs to go abroad

Six-year voyage to Trojans could reveal vital information on history of solar systemNasa is gearing up to launch the Lucy mission on Saturday for a voyage that could revolutionise our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system.A space probe will fly atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Continue reading...

Experts warn findings do not prove cholesterol-lowering drugs can reduce death ratesMillions of people who take statins may be less likely to die from Covid, research suggests.The cholesterol-lowering drugs are one of the world’s most popular medications. They can also reduce inflammation in blood vessels, which has prompted questions over whether they could help with outcomes in coronavirus patients. Continue reading...

Space travel | Books | Duels in filmAmazing though William Shatner’s short journey into near space was, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an astronaut (William Shatner in tears after historic space flight: ‘I’m so filled with emotion, 13 October). You’ll be calling us letter writers journalists next.

Drug’s potential as Covid treatment, since dispelled, affected availability for people with proven medical need

‘I’ve never been so scared in my life,’ says Ruth Hamilton after meteorite shower above a western Canadian regionA woman in Canada awoke in shock earlier this week when a rock crashed through the ceiling of her home and landed on her bed, narrowly missing her but spraying grit and other debris on her face, as her dog barked frantically.Police were called and the culprit was initially suspected to be a construction site nearby, where work must have sent the fist-sized projectile onto the woman’s pillow. But when the construction workers said they had not set any blasts – but had just seen an explosion in the sky – the consensus quickly became that the rock was a meteorite, the Canadian Press reported. Continue reading...

Last week the World Health Organization approved the world’s first malaria vaccine. It’s been hailed as a historic breakthrough that could save tens of thousands of lives each year. But researchers have been trying to create one for more than a century – so why has it taken so long? Anand Jagatia speaks to Dr Latif Ndeketa and Prof Chris Drakeley about how the new RTS,S vaccine works and why it’s been so difficult to produceArchive: WHO, ITV News Continue reading...

The Duke of Cambridge has criticised the space race and space tourism, saying the world’s greatest minds need to focus on fixing the Earth instead. In an interview with Newscast on BBC Sounds before his Earthshot prize awards, Prince William also warned about a rise in ‘climate anxiety’ among younger generations. His comments come the day after William Shatner, 90, made history by becoming the oldest person in space

Duke of Cambridge says world’s greatest minds need to focus on trying to fix the Earth insteadThe Duke of Cambridge has criticised the space race and space tourism, saying the world’s greatest minds need to focus on trying to fix the Earth instead.Prince William’s comments, in an interview with Newscast on BBC Sounds, will be aired the day after William Shatner made history by becoming the oldest person in space. Continue reading...

Only one in five people sought medical attention but half reported anxiety, depression and sleep loss

Study shows protection against Covid starts to wane several months after full vaccinationScientists have urged eligible people to have Covid booster shots after a major survey in England found evidence of “breakthrough infections” more than three months after full vaccination.Researchers at Imperial College London analysed more than 100,000 swabs from a random sample of the population and found that Covid infection rates were three to four times higher among unvaccinated people than those who had received two shots. Continue reading...

Austrian Alps salt miners had a ‘balanced diet’, with an analysis of bronze and iron age excrement finding the earliest evidence of cheese ripening in EuropeIt’s no secret that beer and blue cheese go hand in hand – but a new study reveals how deep their roots run in Europe, where workers at a salt mine in Austria were gorging on both up to 2,700 years ago.Scientists made the discovery by analysing samples of human excrement found at the heart of the Hallstatt mine in the Austrian Alps. Continue reading...

Research tying Māori activity 700 years ago to Antarctic changes sparks debate in New Zealand over Indigenous inclusion in scienceDeep in the ice of a remote Antarctic peninsula, a group of researchers found evidence that fires started by early Māori wreaked changes in the atmosphere detectable 7,000km away. In New Zealand, the research sparked a heated controversy of its own – over Indigenous inclusion in scientific enterprise, and what scientists owe the people whose history becomes a subject of their research.The research, published this month, examined ice cores from the Antarctic peninsula. Scientists found high concentrations of black carbon, dating back 700 years. Atmospheric modelling narrowed the possible sources to New Zealand, Patagonia or Tasmania – but only in New Zealand did charcoal records match the timeframe. The deposits coincided with Māori arrival in New Zealand, and showed downstream effects of Māori using fire to clear the land. Continue reading...

Jair Bolsonaro’s comments called ‘stupid and selfish’ in country where 600,000 people have died of Covid

Actor William Shatner soared aboard a Blue Origin rocketship on a suborbital trip on Wednesday to become, at the age 90, the oldest person ever in space - an experience he called profound - as US billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos's company carried out its second tourist flight

New technique temporarily allows drugs to cross blood brain barrier to treat tumoursA technique has been developed that could revolutionise the treatment of brain cancers and neurodegenerative diseases by temporarily allowing drugs and other substances to cross the blood brain barrier – a structure that separates the brain’s blood vessels from the rest of its tissues.A trial in four women whose breast cancer had spread to the brain showed that magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) could safely deliver the antibody therapy Herceptin into their brain tissue, causing the tumours to shrink. Continue reading...

Star Trek actor, 90, says ‘I hope I never recover from this’ after becoming oldest human in space on Jeff Bezos rocket New ShepardThe Star Trek actor William Shatner declared himself “overwhelmed” at becoming the oldest human in space, at the age of 90, during a brief but successful second crewed flight on Wednesday of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship from the west Texas desert.The Canadian, who for four decades played Captain James Kirk, the fearless commander of the USS Enterprise, broke down in tears at the landing site as he described to the private space company’s founder, the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, the profundity of his almost 11-minute leap to the stars. Continue reading...

Poll of 321 scientists found 15% received death threats after speaking publicly on the pandemic

The entire premise of Star Trek was utopian: it pushed the limits of diversity, progressivism and inclusion on television and the science fiction genreThe 90-year-old actor William Shatner, best known for his leading role as Captain James Tiberius Kirk of Star Trek: The Original Series, is headed to space, for real this time. Shatner will be launched off this Wednesday by on-again-off-again richest man in the world Jeff Bezos’s private aerospace company Blue Origin.The entire premise of Star Trek was utopian: it pushed the limits of diversity, progressivism and inclusion on television and the science fiction genre. That Shatner would be affiliated with Bezos feels like a contradiction. And yet, colonialism and capitalism are too embedded within the culture of the United States for even sacred projects like space travel or Star Trek to remain unsullied. Continue reading...

India, Egypt and Cuba among first states to develop and make their own vaccines as Covax falls behindDeveloping countries are increasingly turning to homegrown Covid vaccinations as the UN-backed Covax programme falls behind.While western countries roll out booster jabs to their own populations, Covax, which was set up by UN agencies, governments and donors to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, has said it will miss its target to distribute 2bn doses globally by the end of this year. Continue reading...

Critics see the ‘awful business’ of private space tourism as having little technological or exploration valueAs Star Trek’s iconic Captain James T Kirk, he voyaged the universe for the good of humanity. The nonagenarian actor William Shatner’s brief, real-life thrill ride off the planet today, however, is much less about advancing the species as promoting the fortunes of Blue Origin, the private space company owned by the Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos that’s taking him there.Booking arguably the most famous fictional space traveler in history to front only the second crewed flight of Bezos’s New Shepard rocket system has secured a vast slew of positive publicity that not even the huge wealth of the world’s richest man could otherwise have purchased. Continue reading...

Scientists are studying whether talazoparib could help treat those with incurable breast cancerScientists have launched a new trial that could offer hope to those with incurable breast cancer.They are studying whether an existing drug, talazoparib, also known by the brandname Talzenna, may offer a new treatment to people with incurable breast cancer that has spread to the brain. Continue reading...

The Australian Space Agency has launched an ad promoting a new deal with Nasa to send an Australian-built rover to the moon. Australia will be involved in supporting a mission to collect lunar soil and examine how its oxygen could support human life in space► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube

Senior figures say failure to prevent second wave was inexcusable given what was known about the virus

Analysis: inquiry into UK’s response to Covid crisis shows Sage guidance should be put in public domain as soon as possible

Scientists urge urgent investigation to ensure that people are not being given false negative results

Expertise in mining sector expected to aid development of rover which will collect lunar soil to help establish human presence on moonAustralia has signed a deal with Nasa to send an Australian-built rover to the moon, supporting a mission to collect lunar soil and examine how its oxygen could support human life in space.The $50m project will be supported by the federal government’s Moon to Mars program, with the rover to be launched as early as 2026, provided it meets a range of Nasa’s conditions during development. Continue reading...

UK study suggests therapy for dryness, itching and pain should be used with caution, say expertsAn expensive laser treatment purporting to help women with postmenopausal vaginal symptoms such as dryness, itching and pain when having sex may be no better than a placebo, research suggests.According to the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), vaginal laser therapy involves inserting a laser device into the vagina to heat the vaginal wall and create tiny holes or “micro-traumas”. It has been claimed this stimulates the production of collagen, helping to alleviate postmenopausal vaginal symptoms. Continue reading...

It is a clear indictment of Boris Johnson’s administration and its scientific advisers. How jolly he’s still riding high in the pollsYou will note that good news bear Boris Johnson has given the old swerve-a-roo to the release of the Covid select committee report. Doubtless the prime minister would like to respond in full to this tragic indictment of the UK’s catastrophic response to the pandemic, but he is sadly prevented from doing so by being on his holibobs in Marbs. I hear the paella’s great, if that helps?Anyway: the report. Given that one of its milder conclusions is “pandemics like Covid-19 will become more common”, it feels like something to which we should pay attention. Then again if our overlords actually cared about “lessons being learned” from mass avoidable tragedy, we would have had a speedy inquiry into what went wrong in the first wave in summer 2020, as plenty of people were demanding at the time, which might have prevented tens of thousands more dying in the second wave. Hey ho. A real public inquiry is apparently scheduled for spring 2022. I haven’t got a date for the inquiry into the winter that we’re about to have, but will keep you posted.Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Stephen Barclay says decisions taken ‘to move quickly’ despite inquiry criticising handling of pandemic

The world’s harvests are coming under increasing pressure from extreme weather events, disease and deteriorating soil health – problems that are set to get worse in the next few decades. Could one solution be to genetically edit our food to make it more resilient? With the UK’s recent announcement that it will ease the rules for growing gene-edited crops in England, Madeleine Finlay investigates what it will mean for scientists researching the technology, and why it could become a critical tool for the future of our food Continue reading...

Only 59 Nobel prizes – or 6.2% of the total – have gone to women since their inception in 1901Swedish scientist and head of the academy that awards Nobel prizes has ruled out the notion of gender or ethnicity quotas in the selection of laureates for the prestigious award.Göran Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, accepted that there are “so few women” in the running but conceded the prize would ultimately go to those who are “found the most worthy”. Continue reading...

Star Trek actor, 90, says arthritis makes entry and exit of berth in Blue Origin capsule for Wednesday’s journey difficultThe toughest part of going into space with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company, the Star Trek actor William Shatner said, will be getting in and out of his chair in the New Shepard spacecraft.Shatner, 90, will become the oldest person to go into space when he blasts off as part of a four-person crew on Wednesday, a day later than planned thanks to wind conditions at the launchpad in west Texas. Continue reading...

Australian scientists part of team using Low Frequency Array to detect signals indicating planets beyond our solar system

Exclusive: combination of drugs causes tumours to vanish in some terminally ill patients, study findsA new cancer treatment can wipe out tumours in terminally ill head and neck cancer patients, scientists have discovered.In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, according to researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust. Continue reading...

Largest study of its kind also finds vaccines appear to protect against worst effects of Delta variant

Weather permitting, it will be a good way to gauge how the moon moves and changes phaseJupiter and Saturn are shining brightly in the southern sky. They are conspicuous because they are currently situated in a somewhat barren part of the night sky but this week the pair are joined by the moon on successive evenings.The chart shows the view looking due south from London at 2100 BST on 14 October. The moon will be in a waxing gibbous phase with about 68% of its visible surface illuminated. The night before, Earth’s natural satellite will be closer to Saturn, and the night after it will be pairing with Jupiter. Continue reading...

Professional Scientists Australia chief points to problem of short-term contracts, as one in five say they intend to leave the profession

Research in Scotland shows animals freeze near the electromagnetic field with implications for metabolism and migrationUnderwater power cables mesmerise brown crabs and cause biological changes that could affect their migration habits, scientists have discovered.The cables for offshore renewable energy emit an electromagnetic field that attracts the crabs and causes them to stay where they are. Continue reading...

Shatner, best known for playing Captain Kirk in Star Trek, will be part of a four-person crew aboard the suborbital NS-18 missionThe Star Trek actor William Shatner must wait another day to boldly go into space for real, after the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company pushed this week’s launch target of its New Shepard vehicle to Wednesday.“Due to forecasted winds on Tuesday 12 October, Blue Origin’s mission operations team has made the decision to delay the launch of NS-18 and is now targeting Wednesday 13 October,” the company said in a statement. Continue reading...

This pandemic film delivers emotional punch, but the documentary’s desire for a global message blunts its impact“I can’t breathe” went mainstream as a rallying cry during the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, just as respiratory difficulties of a different kind were beginning to exact an increasingly frightening toll across the world. This panoramic and often moving Netflix documentary about Covid-19 courageously tries to draw a straight line between the pandemic and the underlying social inequalities it flushed out everywhere. But as it spans nine different stories in eight countries, it ends up too diffuse to make telling political points and ends up uncomfortably close to the kind of globetrotting montages Roland Emmerich disaster flicks wheel out to show shared planetary ordeals.Convergence certainly has a knack for emotive sweep, and there’s no doubting the courage and self-sacrifice on display in many quarters here, from a Wuhan volunteer ferrying medical workers around the ground-zero city in early 2020, to the reformed São Paulo criminal pulling comatose slum-dwellers out of the favelas. Her segment, and that of the Miami doctor trying to ensure Florida’s homeless are protected, are where the outrage burns fiercest. They bring home, in the awful, stricken faces of the asphyxiated, how the virus has further cut into the structural vulnerabilities that appear with depressing consistency in different societies. Continue reading...

Polar Zero exhibition in Glasgow features sculpture encasing air extracted from start of Industrial RevolutionAn ampoule of Antarctic air from the year 1765 forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition that reveals the hidden histories contained in polar ice to visitors attending the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow.The artist Wayne Binitie has spent the past five years undertaking an extraordinary collaboration with scientists of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who drill, analyse and preserve cylinders of ice from deep in the ice sheet that record past climate change. Continue reading...

Ease your child’s start at university with tasty low-budget recipes that are easy to makeLast week, I experienced something I’d been dreading since my daughters came into the world: my first-born leaving home for the first time. I’ve experienced such a mix of emotions. Of course, I’m incredibly proud of Reet for doing so well in her exams and getting into the university of her choice, but I’m also sad that I’ll see her less often, nervous about how she’ll feel and worried about how she will cope.Having children leave the family home is a rite of passage for all parents, whether they are starting a university degree, moving in with a partner, or leaving their home town for a job. It’s put things into perspective for me, too, making me realise just how my parents must have felt when I “flew the nest”. Continue reading...

The study of the epigenome came with claims that trauma could be inherited, but now researchers are more excited about its potential to measure the risk of diseaseA little over a decade ago, a clutch of scientific studies was published that seemed to show that survivors of atrocities or disasters such as the Holocaust and the Dutch famine of 1944-45 had passed on the biological scars of those traumatic experiences to their children.The studies caused a sensation, earning their own BBC Horizon documentary and the cover of Time (I also wrote about them, for New Scientist) – and no wonder. The mind-blowing implications were that DNA wasn’t the only mode of biological inheritance, and that traits acquired by a person in their lifetime could be heritable. Since we receive our full complement of genes at conception and it remains essentially unchanged until our death, this information was thought to be transmitted via chemical tags on genes called “epigenetic marks” that dial those genes’ output up or down. The phenomenon, known as transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, caught the public imagination, in part because it seemed to release us from the tyranny of DNA. Genetic determinism was dead. Continue reading...

After last week’s publication of the national space strategy, photojournalist Jonny Weeks explores how the south-west is primed for the first launch of a satellite-bearing rocket from UK soil“When we first started, people would laugh at us,” says Melissa Thorpe as she guides a group of visitors around an exhibition in a vast hangar at Newquay airport. “But now look, we’re only a matter of months from launch.”Sweeping around a tall black curtain, she reveals a 21-metre space rocket glimmering under red spot lights. Children’s eyes widen and the adults in the group are agog.A model of the 747 aeroplane, nicknamed Cosmic Girl, which will carry the Launcher One rocket beneath one of its wings. Continue reading...

Both flu and Covid-19 will circulate this winter, warns head of UK Health Security Agency

Did they receive care and compassion from loved ones or did they die alone, fearful of getting infected in hospital?From the start of the pandemic to 24 September 2021, deaths at home in England and Wales have been 37% higher than the 2015-2019 average, according to the Office for National Statistics.For every three people who used to die at home, four now do. That’s more than 71,000 “excess” deaths, only 8,500 of which involved Covid. Even as mortality elsewhere fell back to past levels, dying in private homes has persistently remained above average. A natural question arises: are these “extra” deaths or a shift from other locations? Continue reading...

Study shows UK has lost more biodiversity than any G7 country, and is in worst global 10%Almost half of Britain’s natural biodiversity has disappeared over the centuries, with farming and urban spread triggered by the industrial and agricultural revolutions being blamed as major factors for this loss.That is the shock finding of a study by scientists at London’s Natural History Museum, which has revealed that the UK is one of the worst-rated nations in the world for the extent to which its ecosystems have retained their natural animals and plants. Continue reading...

To make sense of coronavirus data, the Observer asked David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters of the Royal Statistical Society Covid taskforce to write a column. That column has now inspired a book. Here are some of its insights