Science | The Guardian

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

To study the stuff of the universe, you have to block it out, and that is exactly what a bold project in regional Victoria is trying to do

From willow bark to mosquitoes, nature has been a source of vital medications for centuries. But species die-off caused by human activity is putting this at riskWhat will biodiversity loss mean for drug discovery?

Dr Peter Goadsby’s pioneering work has changed our understanding of migraines. Eva Wiseman, who has endured them since she was a child, hears how he found his way to the source of the pain – and what can be done about itI started yawning, and that was it. That was the sign a migraine was beginning, that I was rolling slowly down that padded cliff. It was inevitable that this would happen half an hour before my interview with neurologist Dr Peter Goadsby, the man forcing the world to take migraines seriously, inevitable but not ideal, so I sipped my water and watched as he scrolled through his Zoom backgrounds. Beach scene? Too casual. Meeting room with framed certificates? Too formal. Home study, with heaving bookcase? Just right.How much do I know about migraine, Dr Goadsby asked politely, and I took a moment to consider. On one hand, too much. I have one now, I said. I’ve had them regularly since I was a child, an early memory being the evening I found I could no longer read a book and thought, oh well, nice while it lasted. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed as having had a series of strokes when I developed a blind spot in my right eye and later found that blind spot to be a “persistent aura”, the scintillating light that typically arrives at the beginning of a migraine, but in my case, never left. I have become so accustomed to breathing through headaches that I was reassured when I first felt labour pains – I knew this agony, I had survived it monthly. But on the other hand, I know very little. Something to do with blood vessels? Chocolate? Continue reading...

Government urged to take action as one in 14 secondary school children in England infected last week

A vocal minority tout their supplements as alternatives, donate large sums of money to anti-vaccine organizations and sell anti-vaccine ads on Facebook and Instagram, the AP discoveredThe flashy postcard, covered with images of syringes, beckoned people to attend Vax-Con ’21 to learn “the uncensored truth” about Covid-19 vaccines.Participants traveled from around the country to a Wisconsin Dells resort for a sold-out convention that was, in fact, a sea of misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines and the pandemic. Continue reading...

Service NSW says pilot still has weeks to run in order to test connectivity and security between the app and the Australian Immunisation Register

Estimated 76m extra cases of anxiety and 53m extra cases of depression during pandemic, say researchers

Details are deficient, scientific analysis contentious and expert voices missing in Markson’s thesis about ‘what really happened’ in China, which establishes a crime scene around the Wuhan Institute of VirologyWith 4.55 million deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic so far, the hunt for its origins has turned into something akin to an inquest on a mass scale. Are we dealing essentially with a terrible accident, negligence or even something more sinister?The Australian journalist Sharri Markson’s conclusions fall somewhere close to the latter. She has established a crime scene around the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China, with the murder weapon a virus called Sars-CoV-2. Continue reading...

A data scientist and economics student joined forces in search of the real pandemic death toll – and the results are startling

Aerial Archaeological Mapping Explorer will allow users to see landscapes from England’s pastA digital aerial archaeology tool will allow people to discover previously unknown details about local landscapes, including prehistoric hill forts, Roman settlements and cold war military installations, through virtual flights over England.The virtual map is like a “huge archaeological jigsaw puzzle,” according to Historic England, the agency that looks after the country’s historic environment. Continue reading...

We look at where to get the jab, parental consent and the impact of natural infection

People have been advised to reduce consumption by 30% for health and environmental reasonsBritons have cut their meat consumption by 17% over the past decade but will need to double these efforts if they are to meet targets for healthy diets and sustainable food production set out in the national food strategy earlier this year.Meat production is a major contributor to global heating and land degradation, while eating lots of red and processed meat has been linked to a greater risk of developing cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer. Continue reading...

Jabs could begin within weeks if US government approves request, with children getting a third of dose given to adultsA Covid vaccine for kids aged five to 11 just got another step closer to authorization, with Pfizer-BioNTech announcing on Twitter that the full application has been submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).Experts say authorization of the vaccine for children will be critical to controlling the pandemic. Nearly 850,000 cases were confirmed among US children in the past four weeks, and kids still account for a disproportionate share of weekly cases. Continue reading...

Pictures taken by Perseverance rover show how water helped shape planet’s landscape billions of years agoImages from Mars reveal how water helped shape the red planet’s landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will guide the search for evidence of ancient life, according to a new study.In February, Nasa’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, where scientists suspected a long-gone river once fed a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta visible from space. Continue reading...

Material retrieved by China’s Chang’e-5 spacecraft sheds new light on the moon at a time when it was thought to be cooling down

The rage we all feel today will create the politics of tomorrow. I’m not sure we’re ready for thatEvery chapter of this pandemic has had its attendant emotions – and since we’re all in this together, it’s possible to sense a collective emotional experience along with the physical experience of lockdowns and restrictions.Initially there was confusion, then deep fear and anxiety, then when lockdowns lifted joy and pride. With Delta we returned to fear again and later weariness, depression, lethargy and listlessness. Continue reading...

The space cemetery, named for the fictional captain in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is where the International Space Station is likely to end up. Deputy editor, David Munk, recommends this story about deep and dark spaces

Highlights of the Royal Society of Biology’s photography competition 2021, from ants feasting on honeydew to zebras drinking in the savannah Continue reading...

Instead of relying on vaccines alone, countries such as France and Germany are using extra measures to keep cases and deaths lowOnly two months after being forced at the last minute to “cancel Christmas” in 2020, Boris Johnson committed to a “cautious and prudent” roadmap out of lockdown that recognised the evolving epidemiology of the virus. But memories are short. On 19 July, all social distancing and face-covering requirements, as well as limits on the number of people at indoor or outdoor events, were lifted in England. As the summer progressed, international travel restrictions were eased and fully vaccinated people and children were no longer required to isolate if they had been in contact with someone who contracted Covid-19.Some people in England, and many more elsewhere, watched with astonishment. Israel, a world leader in vaccinations, was already seeing the beginning of a rapid increase in cases driven by the new Delta variant. England had a rising number of cases; 54% of the population was fully vaccinated by 19 July. CNN, capturing a widespread view, called England’s approach an “experiment” (a leader in the Irish Times prefaced that word with “reckless”). Fortunately the large increase in cases that some feared would arrive after 19 July didn’t materialise. According to the Sage modelling subgroup, this was largely due to a slow return to pre-pandemic behaviour, school holidays and continued home-working.Christina Pagel is director of UCL’s Clinical Operational Research Unit, which applies advanced analytical methods to problems in healthcare. Martin McKee is professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Our powers of reason have undoubtedly made the world a better place. So why are we so in thrall to fake news?‘Rationality ought to be the lodestar of everything we think or do.” This is the opening sentence of Steven Pinker’s call for a return to reason at a time when critical thinking and the grounding of belief in evidence is in short supply. Everyone, he argues, should want to be rational, yet 75% of Americans believe in at least one phenomenon that defies the laws of science, including psychic healing, extrasensory perception, haunted houses. Even intellectual sophisticates argue that reason, objectivity and truth are merely social constructs that justify the privilege of dominant groups. Why, Pinker demands, is humanity losing its mind? Less than a year after Covid-19 emerged, scientists achieved the magnificent feat of discovering a vaccine, yet at the same time there was an eruption of irrational conspiracy theories: the pandemic was a hoax, a plot by global elites to control the world economy or a bioweapon engineered in a Chinese laboratory.Reasoning, Pinker explains, is a mechanism in the brain that enables us to argue and evaluate arguments. No human being has ever attained perfect rationality but, convinced that objective truth is a possibility, we have developed rules that enable us to approach it. We can cultivate the rules of reason and make them normative. And, Pinker insists, it works. Reason has enabled human beings to reach the moon, extinguish smallpox and invent computers, so it puts us in touch with objective truths. Reason also tells us that some people are oppressed, and others privileged, and that measures should be taken to rectify such injustice. As a result, we have developed the golden rule, which was not revealed by “God” but is a product of human evolution, developed independently and rationally by all cultures. Continue reading...

Last week the pharmaceutical company Merck released promising early data on a pill for Covid-19, which trials suggest halves hospitalisations and deaths. So what do we know about this experimental treatment? Madeleine Finlay talks to the Guardian’s science correspondent Hannah Devlin about whether this antiviral could be a gamechanger. And as some UK experts warn ‘there isn’t much A&E capacity left’, we also hear from Prof Peter Horby on the importance of drugs in the fight against Covid-19Archive: NBC News Continue reading...