Science | The Guardian

Slow-moving storms such as recent deluge in Germany could become 14 times more frequent by 2100Catastrophic floods such as those that struck Europe recently could become much more frequent as a result of global heating, researchers say.High-resolution computer models suggest that slow-moving storms could become 14 times more common over land by the end of the century in a worst-case scenario. The slower a storm moves, the more rain it dumps on a small area and the greater the risk of serious flooding. Continue reading...

The discovery of the rare maiden pink at an electricity substation shows how nature can flourish in unlikely spots

Experts weigh in on the ‘anthropomorphic’ design of New Shepard, the Amazon CEO’s Blue Origin rocketJeff Bezos’s 11-minute trip aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space on Tuesday left the world’s richest man feeling “unbelievably good” and his crew “very happy”. But afterwards, as he wondered aloud how fast he could refuel, the rest of the world was left pondering just why the New Shepard rocket had such a distinctive shape.As social media erupted with innuendo, we contacted a few experts to find out why it looked, in the words of one astrophysicist, so “anthropomorphic”. At one major research institution, the press officer referred us to the gender studies department, but Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was able to shed some light on the topic. Continue reading...

SuperBIT project will suspend telescope under balloon the size of a football stadium 25 miles above surface of EarthA balloon the size of a football stadium could help astronomers get crystal-clear shots of space for a fraction of the cost of an orbital telescope like Hubble.The secret weapon behind the SuperBIT project is a simple helium balloon – albeit one that floats up to 25 miles (40km) above the surface of the Earth and expands to a football-stadium size when fully inflated. Continue reading...

More than 1,000 scientifically significant specimens taken from former quarry after discoveryWhen Sally and Neville Hollingworth started going stir crazy in lockdown, rather than baking bread or doing quizzes on Zoom, the amateur palaeontologists turned to Google Earth.The couple passed the time planning for their next trip – using the satellite images to inspect sites that had previously yielded fossils – when they stumbled across a quarry in the Cotswolds. From the exposure of the geology Neville, who has a PhD in geology, could tell the site was promising, but he was not expecting it to yield one of the best fossil finds in the UK in decades. Continue reading...

1.5 million children lost a caregiver during pandemic, including thousands in the UKAn estimated 1.5 million children worldwide under the age of 18 have lost a parent, grandparent or caregiver due to Covid-19, according to a global study.

The 82-year-old became the oldest person to go to space, six decades after being denied by the US government

He and his fellow space-obsessed billionaires are exactly like the rich men aboard the Titanic who pushed others aside to jump into lifeboatsJeff Bezos is the most reptilian of billionaires. His heart has never shown evidence of a drop of warm blood. Despite all of the public relations that money can buy, his discomfort with normal human emotion shines through every time he is forced to contort his face into a squinting, uncomfortable smile. It seems overwhelmingly likely that once he gets to space, he will peel back the skin from his bald pate like the creatures in V and exclaim to his fellow aliens: “I’m here!”Related: Bezos blasted for traveling to space while Amazon workers toil on planet Earth Continue reading...

Space-obsessed billionaires come under fire with the Amazon founder declaring the critics ‘largely right’As Jeff Bezos blasts into space on Tuesday, his voyage has some people asking whether the billionaire’s time, or at least money, might be better spent here on earth.Bezos, the Amazon founder who has an estimated net worth of $206bn, is taking off from Texas on Tuesday morning on the rocket New Shepard, owned by his company Blue Origin. Continue reading...

Little evidence that social restrictions during the pandemic have added to rates of death and ill-health

The Guardian’s global environment editor, Jonathan Watts, speaks to Shivani Dave about extreme weather events – including the extreme heat recently recorded in the US and Canada. In the first of two parts, we hear how extreme heat comes about and why extreme weather events such as floods and monsoons look set to become more likely and even more extreme Continue reading...

Re-emerging from lockdown can feel fraught with danger, especially for people with a history of anxietyI recently took my first flight since the pandemic began. As I arrived at the airport, I prepared for a scene of utter carnage: people everywhere, all of them insisting on breathing; virulent microbes reveling in a field of unsuspecting targets.As someone with a history of anxiety, I took a deep breath – figuring it would be my last opportunity to do so before landing – and entered the fray. Continue reading...

Statistician says PM’s initial excuse for not self-isolating is part of pattern of pilot studies that lack transparency

First human spaceflight of Blue Origin’s sub-orbital New Shepard rocket to launch in Texas

Fragile health systems are at risk due to high numbers of medical staff leaving to work in richer countries, say experts

Four charts that show why the big unlocking could be coming too soon

Low in the south, the planets are slowly moving apart following December’s great conjunctionIf you missed it last month, this week offers night owls another chance to watch the moon cruise past the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.Low in the south, Jupiter and Saturn are gradually moving apart following their great conjunction last December, when they appeared so close in the sky that they could not be seen as separate objects. Jupiter currently resides in Aquarius, the water bearer, with Saturn sitting squarely in Capricornus, the goat. Continue reading...

As temperatures rise and pollution increases, wildfires, floods and extreme winds have battered many parts of the world in the last six months Continue reading...

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were due to be part of a pilot trialling tests instead of self-isolation

Cases are soaring in many countries, and the social and political effects are becoming clearer“At the root of every pandemic is an encounter between a disease-causing microorganism and a human being … It is a social phenomenon as much as it is a biological one,” writes Laura Spinney in her book Pale Rider, arguing that Spanish flu “pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war”.It will be a long time before we, or our descendants, can fully assess Covid’s impact. But its social and political effects are emerging more clearly. It has played a role in extraordinary turmoil in places from Colombia to Cuba to South Africa, exacerbating poverty and frustration. The unrest is rooted in longstanding social and economic problems. In South Africa, where 10,000 troops have now been deployed, it is the furious response to the jailing of the divisive former president Jacob Zuma, who faces a slew of corruption charges; authorities suspect his followers of orchestrating the violence. But Covid’s erosion of social and economic wellbeing and trust in leaders has surely contributed. Continue reading...

Accepting that all we can control are our actions and our values is a simpler and more empowering way to live

Lockdown has been hard for all of us – even our pets. Now my dog wants my undivided attentionI adore my dog, Peanut. She’s a Miniature Schnauzer with a sweet nature and a button nose. She runs like a rabbit and pulls a lopsided smile when we greet her in the morning.She likes to get close to me, really close. In my face close, then she stares. At times, as I gaze into her moony eyes, I wonder if she wants to suck out my soul. Or perhaps she truly is my daemon? Continue reading...

Using a name inspired by Indonesian farmers, Subak will share information and fund hi-tech solutions to fight global heatingAs monikers go, Subak may seem an odd choice for a new organisation that aims to accelerate hi-tech efforts to combat the climate crisis. The name is Indonesian, it transpires, and refers to an ancient agricultural system that allows farmers to co-ordinate their efforts when irrigating and growing crops.“Subak allows farmers to carefully synchronise their use of water and so maximise rice production,” said Bryony Worthington, founder and board member of the new, not-for-profit climate action group. “And that is exactly what we are going to do – with data. By sharing and channelling data, we can maximise our efforts to combat carbon emissions and global warming. Data is going to be the new water, in other words.” Continue reading...

With few rules left to govern our Covid behaviour, we’ll increasingly take on the pleasure, or burden, of working out the right thing for ourselvesSo the prime minister says that with the removal of Covid restrictions we will now be able to make our own “informed decisions” about what we will and will not do. Generally, we might feel it’s a sign of a good government and a good society that it allows and enables its members to make their own informed decisions about how they want to live their lives. But it’s hard to rejoice at the removal of most Covid restrictions with the current dramatic rise in new infections. When more than 100 experts have signed an open letter in the Lancet calling the full easing of restrictions “dangerous and premature”, it can feel less like relief and freedom, and more like we’re being released into a wild unknown – and one that comes with ever-increasing ethical burdens on us as individuals.For in this new chapter, we need to recognise that the transfer of decision-making powers from government to us is not just about practical decisions but also about important ethical ones. We’ll make decisions about what we choose to do as we continue to spread a harmful new disease to one another causing various kinds of harms. And the risk of dangerous variants increases with each new infection. Let’s not forget that the Alpha variant was created in the UK and quickly spread around the world. So the possibility of us creating new variants also has global implications. Continue reading...

Britain’s own rocket man has arrived to challenge Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Hurrah!Thinking, maybe, that it brings some purifying wonder to the pointless exercise, space plutocrats like to emphasise that their wish as grown men to ride in a space rocket dates from more innocent times. “Ever since I was five years old I’ve dreamed of travelling to space,” Jeff Bezos says. Specifically to ride upwards for roughly as far as Huntingdon is from London, float for a few minutes, then come back again? It only increases your respect for the tots who settle for Disneyland.Beating Amazon’s founder to it last week, Richard Branson also aimed to bring to his somewhat shorter (turn back at Newport Pagnell) Virgin stunt, a flavour of Le Petit Prince. “I was once a child with a dream, looking up at the stars,” the author of Screw It, Let’s Do It offered as the origin myth behind a video of him bobbing about in his space suit. It may be an incongruous thought for anyone who has come, after a lifetime’s exposure, to understand Branson’s dream as primarily that of making money and hoisting nearby women into the air. But fair enough, he was probably innocent once, even if it doesn’t, like any early interest in the stars, come across in his autobiography, Losing My Virginity. Continue reading...

Experts point to risks of indoor Covid-19 transmission: ‘If you don’t wear a mask, the virus spreads further. It’s as simple as that’

Study is part of £20m research drive that scientists hope will end stigma around the condition

Models can give us an idea, but are very sensitive to what we don’t knowMathematical models simulated vast numbers of possible futures for after the UK government lifts Covid restrictions in England from 19 July. Many sources of uncertainty mean we don’t know which one, if any, of these projections might occur.First, even with fixed assumptions about the epidemic, the play of chance produces wide prediction intervals. For example, assuming people substantially relax their cautious behaviour after 19 July, the Warwick models lead to peak Covid hospital admissions of 900 to 3,000 a day around the end of August. Continue reading...

The cognitive scientist explains the link between intelligence and telling fibs – and why lying is such a common form of communication in fields from art to politicsMartin Turpin is a PhD researcher at the department of psychology at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who is studying linguistic bullshit. He is the lead author of a recent paper entitled Bullshit Ability As an Honest Signal of Intelligence, which found that people who produce “satisfactory bullshit” are judged to be of high intelligence by their audience.What made you choose bullshit as a topic to research?

RAF chief says system to track objects up to 22,000 miles from Earth is ‘incredibly important’An American space force plan to develop a global monitoring system to track objects up to 22,000 miles from Earth could establish radar stations in the US, UK and Australia.The head of the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Wigston, is in the US for talks over the plans, and said on Saturday the British were “very interested” in the project and hosting one of the American radar stations. Continue reading...

We should be suspicious of the role of the Chinese Communist party in the harvesting of genetic data from unborn babies, argues William MatthewsIn her column (What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?, 10 July), Arwa Mahdawi suggested that the alleged involvement of the People’s Liberation Army (which is directly answerable to the Chinese Communist party) with BGI’s data-gathering (likewise answerable as a China-based company) is essentially equivalent to data-gathering by western companies. To suggest that the former case is worse, she argued, “smacks of Sinophobia”.As a scholar of China, I cannot agree. While the harvesting of genetic data by any company is frightening and fraught with ethical issues, it should be obvious that this is a false equivalence. It is undoubtedly worse if genetic data is gathered by a company which must also comply with the rule of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and its military-industrial complex, a regime which harvests and aggregates data on its citizens on a massive scale and uses it directly to implement the most repressive system of social control on earth in Xinjiang. Continue reading...

I’ve travelled the world covering everything from HIV to MMR to Ebola… and then Covid came along. These are stories that changed me – and the worldShe was tall, wrapped in a green patterned dress that clung to her legs and ended just above dusty flip-flops. In the bustling, sweltering market, Grace Mathanga looked at me appraisingly, as if to say: “What have we here?” And I knew she was the one.It was the end of 2002. I had flown to Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, with excitement in my heart and fear of failure eating at my gut. I’d been the Guardian’s health correspondent for a couple of years, and had written some big stories: about the Bristol babies inquiry into the deaths of small children during operations carried out by inadequate surgeons; about suicides on antidepressants, and fake cures for cancer. And I had harried the pharmaceutical industry over their prices and compromising payments to doctors. But now I had been dispatched to Africa in pursuit of an idea dreamed up by the then Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, a story with the potential to help save thousands of lives – if I could pull it off. Continue reading...

Restrictions on movement in three LGAs, limits on retail and pause on construction announced. This blog is now closed

Chief health officer Brett Sutton says Victoria needs to brace itself for ‘any possibility’

Fears for Fairfield, Liverpool and Canterbury Bankstown residents, while shutdown of construction sector expected to cost $800m to $1bn per week

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Vaccine drive comes amid warnings of a nightmare winter as immunity falls due to Covid restrictionsThe largest flu vaccination programme in UK history is to be rolled out this year, ministers have said, with jabs offered to all school pupils aged under 17.Last year free flu vaccines were expanded to all adults over 50 and children in the first year of secondary school but this year the plans are even bigger, with secondary school pupils up to Year 11 included in the programme. Continue reading...

Delta variant spreading rapidly, with one in 95 people in England testing positive for the virus last week

Scientists cannot shield the prime minister from the fallout of an unethical policy that will see rising deathsThis week Boris Johnson presented the UK with his plan to lift all of England’s Covid restrictions on Monday. He was flanked by Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. Both men were there to show that Mr Johnson is following the science. To many experts, it seemed that the scientists were following the prime minister. Many suspect that their presence was political insurance rather than real reassurance.Such doubts are not unreasonable. England will be the first country in the world to end all constraints in the face of exponentially rising Covid-19 cases. Some experts say this is an unethical strategy of “herd immunity by mass infection”. It is hard to disagree. Other nations in the UK face pressure to follow suit. This policy will lead to more Covid cases, more hospitalisations and more deaths. The NHS risks being overwhelmed. Prof Whitty says the move is demanded by the roadmap out of lockdown. This has been defunct since vaccination rates began freefalling. Doubts persist over a shortage of vaccine stocks, which may explain a reluctance to jab the over-12s. The plan presumed no variants of concern, yet by May we had the highly transmissible Delta variant. Its designation ought to have caused more than just a month’s pause for thought. Continue reading...

If civilisation perishes on planet Earth, Musk, Bezos and Branson seem to think humans have a backup elsewhereBranson, Bezos, Musk: why are these billionaires, with all their worldly riches, fixated on space travel? The Tesla founder, Elon Musk, argues that in becoming “multiplanetary”, humans might gain “failsafe” protection from the risks of extinction or planetary collapse, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos speaks of “saving the Earth”. If civilisation perishes on one planet, these billionaires seem to think we have a backup elsewhere.Bezos, Musk and Richard Branson seem animated by a lofty goal: securing the future of humanity by going into space. Many have dismissed this as billionaire bravado that pays little attention to real, down-to-earth problems such as environmental collapse. Worse, others say it echoes rapacious, historic land grabs. But “going to space” and “saving the human race” are ideas that have long captivated people on Earth. Their shared history shows why we remain captivated by this prospect, regardless of who, right now, are its cheerleaders. Continue reading...

English Institute of Sport to roll out saliva tests tracking hormones that may drive fluctuation in women’s performanceHighs and lows are a feature of any athlete’s career, but for some female contestants, these peaks and troughs in performance may come more regularly – driven by hormonal changes associated with their menstrual cycles.Now, the English Institute of Sport (EIS) is seeking to level the playing field through the rollout of regular saliva testing to track the rise and fall of two key drivers of these monthly changes: oestrogen and progesterone. Continue reading...

International experts say ‘unethical experiment’ could allow vaccine-resistant variants to develop

I was part of the F1 champion’s commission. As a Black female engineer, I’ve seen the lack of minorities in science and technologyI was delighted to receive an email from Lewis Hamilton last year, asking that I join his newly created commission on diversity in British motorsport. I accepted because Hamilton has become a champion for social change through the platform sport gives him.After 10 months of research, including in-depth interviews, surveys and literature reviews, the report was published this week and is a testament to his leadership and persistence, alongside that of the Royal Academy of Engineering, which co-chaired it. Continue reading...

Tests could show the probability of illnesses occurring in five, 10 or 20 years, with huge moral and ethical implicationsWe’re soon going to have to make our own choices about social distancing, wearing masks and travel. When the legal enforcement of rules is lifted, the way in which each of us deals with the risk of Covid-19 will be down to personal judgment. But how well equipped are we to make these decisions?

Pharmaceuticals firm thinks creating cluster of companies at its site could result in up to 5,000 jobsGlaxoSmithKline is seeking to create a £400m campus in Stevenage for new life sciences companies that it believes could result in up to 5,000 jobs over the next decade.The pharmaceuticals company has kicked off a process to find a private sector developer to transform a third of its existing 37-hectare (92 acres) research and development site in Stevenage into one of Europe’s largest clusters for new life sciences businesses. Continue reading...

Britain has broken the promises Boris Johnson made before the G7 – a change of tack is necessary to make Cop26 a successCovid and the climate crisis are the two defining global crises of our time and Britain has a crucial role to play in addressing them both. As the Cop26 host, it will be responsible for overseeing a successful outcome at the UN climate talks in Glasgow in November.Only a few weeks ago, before the prime minister hosted the G7, Boris Johnson promised the group of wealthy nations would vaccinate the world by the end of the year. Continue reading...

‘Vaccines aren’t perfect,’ epidemiologist says, but offer lower risk of hospitalisation and prevention against spread of virus

Calls for national screening programme as symptoms revealed range from brain fog to tinnitus

University of Queensland researchers are investigating if protein in venom of Fraser Island spider can stop cardiac cells dyingA protein in the venom of a deadly Australian funnel-web spider may be able to reduce cardiac damage from heart attacks and extend the life of donor hearts used in transplants, according to new research.Venom from the Fraser Island funnel-web, named for the south-east Queensland island where it is found, contains a protein known as Hi1a. Continue reading...