Study shows that our knowledge of why tumours form is still inadequateScientists will have to rethink how environmental triggers allow tumours to form and develop, one of Britain’s leading cancer experts warned last week. Michael Stratton, director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said recent results from an international cancer research study – which aimed to pinpoint environmental triggers involved in oeosophageal cancer – indicated current scientific understanding of tumour formation was inadequate.The research – on a type known as oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma – was aimed at uncovering why certain parts of the world suffer extremely high rates of the disease. These areas include parts of Iran, Turkey, Kenya and China where the disease is the most common form of cancer. In many other parts of the world, its incidence is relatively low. Continue reading...

Discovery of nobleman Khuwy shows that Egyptians were using advanced embalming methods 1,000 years before assumed dateThe ancient Egyptians were carrying out sophisticated mummifications of their dead 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence which could lead to a rewriting of the history books.The preserved body of a high-ranking nobleman called Khuwy, discovered in 2019, has been found to be far older than assumed and is, in fact, one of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever discovered. It has been dated to the Old Kingdom, proving that mummification techniques some 4,000 years ago were highly advanced. Continue reading...

Don’t beat yourself up if Covid times get to you. We need release from all the stressFor me, it was a shoe. One missing shoe. Honestly, it wasn’t even a great shoe, just one that I wear to walk the dog. But it was gone. Apparently to the same place all the solitary socks have gone, up there in footwear heaven. And, really, after the two years that we’d had, one would be forgiven for expecting me to roll right on through that. After all, I am a pandemic survivor.But instead, I sat on the bottom step and cried. Continue reading...

Survey shows minister is falling short in pledge to send out 300,000 devices

Health authorities compared vaccination rates with Zodiac signs, but the results may require further investigationExciting news for people who believe in science enough to want mass vaccination, but not enough to think horoscopes are made up: Utah’s Salt Lake county health department says there’s a big difference in vaccination rates depending on your Zodiac sign.At least, that’s what officials found when they analysed anonymised data on 1.2million residents, providing a table of the least and most vaccinated star signs.How many people of each Zodiac sign are vaccinated: Salt Lake county did this using anonymized state data. That’s likely quite accurate.How many people of each Zodiac sign live in the county overall: They estimated this by looking at the nationwide distribution of Zodiac signs, using data from the University of Texas-Austin. Then they assumed their county would have a similar distribution. Continue reading...

Frances Haugen’s ‘testimony tour’ of revelations about the tech company makes good copy, but will its executives listen?If you wanted a paragon of astute, thoroughly modern whistleblowing, then Frances Haugen is your woman. She is the former Facebook employee who revealed that the company knew about the harm that some of its products, especially Instagram, were causing but did little or nothing about them because it prioritised growth and revenue above all else.A good CV is essential to establish your street cred and Haugen ticks all the Silicon Valley boxes. A degree in electrical engineering? Check. An MBA from Harvard? Check. Specialised in algorithmic management? Check. Experience with, and knowledge of, ranking algorithms at a number of tech companies? Check (Google, Pinterest, Yelp). And of course you’ll have held down a substantial position in the company about which you are blowing the whistle. Again, Haugen ticks that box: at Facebook, she was the lead product manager on the civic misinformation team, which dealt with issues of democracy and misinformation; she later worked on counterespionage. Continue reading...

Uncanny and creepy, premonitions that turn out to be authentic can feel profound. But is there science to explain them?Around seven years ago, Garrett, was in a local Pizza Hut with his friends, having a day so ordinary that it is cumbersome to describe. He was 16 – or thereabouts – and had been told by teachers to go around nearby businesses and ask for gift vouchers that the school could use as prizes in a raffle. There were five other teenagers with Garrett, and they’d just finished speaking to the restaurant manager when suddenly, out of nowhere, Garrett’s his body was flooded with shock. He felt cold and clammy and had an “overwhelming sense that something had happened”. He desperately tried to stop himself crying in front of his peers.“It was like I’d just been told something terrible,” the now 23-year-old from the southwest of England says (his name has been changed on his request). “I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was, but I just knew something had happened.” Garrett returned home and tried to distract himself from a feeling he describes as grief. The phone rang. His mum answered it. A few hours earlier – around the time Garrett was in the restaurant – his grandfather had died from a sudden heart attack while on a cruise. Continue reading...

Senior scientists say problems at Immensa site show private firms should not be carrying out PCR tests

The Orion capsule will be launched on the Space Launch System, paving the way for the resumption of people to walk on Earth’s satellite againNasa has announced plans to launch an uncrewed flight around the Moon in February 2022, paving the way for astronauts to once again set foot on Earth’s satellite.The US space agency said on Friday that it was in the final phase of testing to send its Orion capsule on an orbit around the Moon on its Space Launch System rocket. Continue reading...

Chris Boshuizen was one of four astronauts – including William Shatner – who flew into space with Blue Origin. Here he describes the wonder of the journeyIt was a balmy morning in the west Texas desert when Chris Boshuizen stepped into Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket capsule for a journey most of us will never experience.He waved a quick goodbye to the Amazon billionaire and took his seat next to William Shatner as the capsule door bolted shut. Continue reading...

Are you finding it harder than ever to concentrate? Don’t panic: these simple exercises will help you get your attention backPicture your day before you started to read this article. What did you do? In every single moment – getting out of bed, turning on a tap, flicking the kettle switch – your brain was blasted with information. Each second, the eyes will give the brain the equivalent of 10m bits (binary digits) of data. The ears will take in an orchestra of sound waves. Then there’s our thoughts: the average person, researchers estimate, will have more than 6,000 a day. To get anything done, we have to filter out most of this data. We have to focus.Focusing has felt particularly tough during the pandemic. Books are left half-read; eyes wander away from Zoom calls; conversations stall. My inability to concentrate on anything – work, reading, cleaning, cooking – without being distracted over the past 18 months has felt, at times, farcical. Continue reading...

Dame Joan Collins and Brian Cox unimpressed by historic trip, saying ‘let’s take care of this planet first’The Star Trek actor William Shatner’s recent historic space flight saw him boldly go where some fellow actors refuse to follow, as the nonagenarian was labelled a “fool” for taking part in his record-breaking jaunt.Dame Joan Collins, who once appeared in an episode of the science fiction series, and the Succession star Brian Cox, are both unimpressed by Shatner, at 90, becoming the oldest person to travel into space when earlier this month he flew in a rocket built by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Continue reading...

How the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker became one of the world’s most contentious thinkers. By Alex Blasdel Continue reading...

Researcher ‘staggered’ that institutes used newspaper photos to assess mask use and effect on Covid rates

Researchers say findings in Mozambique demonstrate impact of human interference in natureIvory poaching over decades has led to the evolution of tuskless elephants, researchers have found, proving that humans are “literally changing the anatomy” of wild animals.A previously rare genetic mutation causing tusklessness has become very common in some groups of African elephants after a period in which many were killed for their tusks, according to a study published in the journal Science. Continue reading...

Infections in UK at highest level since July but prime minister says ‘we are within the parameters of what the predictions were’. This live blog is now closed. Please follow the global Covid live blog for further updates

Chance encounters, serendipity, the glint in the eye – as we open up from lockdown, they’re back baby!It was June 2020, really early in the morning, still dark around the edges, and I was crossing the big intersection at Spencer and Bourke streets in Melbourne.I was half asleep and the only people around were tradies. At the other end of the crossing, I locked eyes with one of them and, out of nowhere, suddenly felt weak with lust. Continue reading...

US collector ‘falls in love’ with 8-metre-long dinosaur found in South Dakota and reassembled in ItalyAn 8-metre-long dinosaur skeleton has sold at auction for €6.6m (about £5.5m), more than four times its expected value, to a private collector in the US said to have fallen in love with the largest triceratops ever unearthed.The 66m-year-old skeleton, affectionately known as Big John, is 60% complete, and was unearthed in South Dakota, in the US, in 2014 and put together by specialists in Italy. Continue reading...

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...

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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