Head-scratchers for headbangersUPDATE: To read the solutions click hereIn the immortal words of Lemmy from Motörhead: “I don’t share your greed, the only card I need is the ace of spades.”Whether or not this was in response to the following puzzle is for you to decide. Continue reading...
The reptile, named Gunggamarandu maunala, is thought to have grown up to seven metres longA prehistoric species of crocodile that roamed the waterways of south-east Queensland, and is thought to be the largest to have lived in Australia, has been identified by researchers at the University of Queensland.Gunggamarandu maunala, whose name means “river boss” and incorporates words from the languages of the First Nations peoples from the area where the fossil was discovered, is believed to have grown up to seven metres long. Continue reading...
This year, the precise moment of the solstice is 04.32 BST on 21 June, about 20 minutes before the sun rises at StonehengeThe northern hemisphere’s summer solstice arrives at the end of this week. It marks the moment at which the Sun reaches its most northerly point in the sky. As a result, the northern hemisphere experiences its longest period of daylight in a single 24-hour period.Sunrise takes place as far to the north of east as it can, and sunset occurs as far to the north of west as it can. The summer solstice has clearly held significance to humans since pre-history. At the 5,000-year-old site of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, the location of the summer solstice sunrise is marked by the Heel Stone. This year, the precise moment of the solstice takes place on 21 June at 04.32 BST, about 20 minutes before the sun rises at Stonehenge. Continue reading...
Footballer’s cardiac arrest highlights importance of immediate use of CPR and defibrillation in saving livesSwift action was crucial to Christian Eriksen’s survival when the midfielder collapsed during the first half of Denmark’s opening game in the Euro 2020 championship against Finland.Denmark’s team doctor, Morten Boesen, confirmed that the 29-year-old had gone into cardiac arrest on the pitch and was brought back through a combination of CPR – the manual cardiopulmonary resuscitation that involves repeated pushing down on the chest – and an electric shock from a defibrillator. Continue reading...
Sheila Hunt, Patrick Russell, Michael Shipman and Bob Hely respond to Christian Wolmar’s letter on his non-locked-down lifeRe Christian Wolmar’s letter (8 June), at 84 my daily activity both during and after lockdown has been an hour’s walk with my dog. I am able to enjoy this partly because of knee replacements 15 years ago and partly because of a walk around where I live that is accessible to wheelchairs and anyone who has walking difficulties. It includes some lovely views and is partly along the banks of the Wear. I was part of a group that set this up years ago when, for me, a 10-mile walk was an every-weekend activity. Keeping active requires more that just wanting to.
Arts funding | NHS waiting times | Swearwords | DNA | Snow in JuneHave I got this right? All taxpayers contribute to publicly funded arts, but those arts must only represent the views of the 43.6% of voters who elected this government (How Oliver Dowden became secretary of state for the culture wars, 11 June)? Another example of Boris Johnson’s “fairness” agenda, clearly.
by Libby Brooks Scotland correspondent on (#5K0RQ)
Renowned astrophysicist Prof Catherine Heymans hopes to broaden the appeal of her white male-dominated field“I’m always shocked that it’s 2021 and we’re still having ‘first female’ stories,” says Prof Catherine Heymans. Nevertheless, it is an unavoidable fact that, with her appointment two weeks ago, the renowned astrophysicist not only became the first female astronomer royal for Scotland, but also the only woman to have held any of the astronomer royal positions in the UK.“It’s very hard to aspire to be something if you can’t see someone who looks like you in that job,” she says, recalling that she did not encounter her first female physics lecturer, her mentor Katherine Blundell, until she began her PhD. Continue reading...
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts
Two startling accounts of humanity’s devastating impact on the natural world make it clear that any potential solution will involve huge riskFor most of history, humans have viewed wild places as threats to their existence. The wilderness is a godless domain, “a thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions”, says the Old Testament.Only recently have we realised we had the story backwards. It is nature that has been menaced by humans and the consequences now threaten to overwhelm us. “Almost no rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has now escaped our clumsy signature,” says US essayist Nathaniel Rich. “The natural world is gone.” Continue reading...
Conspiracy theories on origins distract from tackling the pandemic and boost tawdry blame gamesIn the storm of disinformation since the emergence of Covid-19, the assertion that the virus is human-created has lingered on the fringes. This outlandish conjecture, once confined to conspiracy theorists, has undergone a renaissance after Joe Biden’s insistence that scientists should investigate the possible lab origins of Covid. From Vanity Fair to the Washington Post, the theory has been given a veneer of respectability.But there is an essential caveat that has been overlooked – that two different hypotheses are possible does not make them equally likely. Occam’s razor is a general rule of thumb, an injunction to “keep it simple”; when confronted with competing explanations for events, it is usually sensible to adopt the interpretation that pivots on the smallest number of supplementary assertions and assumptions. Continue reading...
Bids in 10-minute auction started at $4.8m for 20 July trip on Blue Origin spacecraft with Bezos and his brotherJeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has sold the spare seat of the company’s 20 July New Shepard space rocket blast-off for $28m, the company announced on Saturday.Related: Rocket men: Bezos, Musk and Branson scramble for space supremacy Continue reading...
Experts say three billionaires have upended the traditional model for human spaceflight and are shaping a thriving new eraIt was a week in which two space-faring billionaires tussled again in their futuristic game of cosmic oneupmanship. And this time, for once, Elon Musk was not at the party.The declaration that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and world’s richest man, was heading into space next month on the first crewed launch of his Blue Origin New Shepard rocket was followed quickly by an apparent leak from within Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic empire that the British tycoon might look to upstage him with a Fourth of July Independence Day spectacular of his own. Continue reading...
Taskforce chief Kate Bingham gets damehood and Oxford research leaders also rewardedKey figures in the battle against Covid-19 and Britain’s vaccine success have been rewarded in the Queen’s birthday honours list, with vaccines taskforce chair Kate Bingham getting a damehood.Honours are also bestowed on two leaders of the research teams at the Oxford Vaccine Centre who developed and manufactured a vaccine backed by the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. Prof Sarah Gilbert, Saïd professor of vaccinology at the Jenner Institute, becomes a dame while Prof Andrew Pollard, professor of paediatric infection at the University of Oxford, gets a knighthood. Continue reading...
News that the Amazon overlord is about to jet off has got the Virgin boss clamouring to get there first. You can do it, Richard!It’s famously impossible to take a bathroom break during a rocket launch, meaning Jeff Bezos will soon experience what it’s like to be one of his warehouse workers. Or, as the Amazon boss put it last week: “To see the Earth from space … changes your relationship with humanity.” That’s hugely encouraging. I feel like we’re just one successful interstellar wormhole mission to a distant galaxy away from allowing employees to unionise.Related: The tech billionaire space race: who is Jeff Bezos up against? Continue reading...
This month the Pentagon will release its much-awaited UFO report. Extraterrestrial buffs think they’ll be vindicated - but they’ve gotten a bit ahead of themselves
Cambridge research suggests foot problem was more common after Blackadder-style shoe became popularFrom waist-squeezing corsets to crinoline skirts, fashion has rarely been about comfort – or safety. Now researchers have revealed that even in medieval times, men and women could become martyrs to fashion, linking a trend in pointy shoes to a rise in the prevalence of bunions.Bunions – or hallux valgus– are bulges that appear on the side of the foot as the big toe leans in towards the other toes and the first metatarsal bone points outwards. Studies suggest factors such as genetics probably predispose some people to the condition, but it is thought high heels and pointy shoes may exacerbate the problem or speed up its development. Continue reading...
Operators of Rosalind Franklin rover practise controlling it in preparation for Martian landing in June 2023A precise replica of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover has begun a series of test drives at the Aerospace Logistics Technology Engineering Company’s Mars terrain simulator in Turin, Italy.Rover operators will practise controlling the rover in preparation for its landing on Mars’s Oxia Planum in June 2023. As it moves around the simulated Martian terrain, the ground test model is supported by a cradle attached to the facility’s roof, simulating Mars’s lower gravitational field, which is just a third that of Earth. Continue reading...
Huge star, 25,000 light years away, dims by 97% then slowly returns to former brightnessAstronomers have spotted a giant blinking star, 100 times the size of the sun, lurking near the heart of the Milky Way.Telescope observations revealed that over a few hundred days the enormous star, which lies more than 25,000 light years away, dimmed by 97% and then slowly returned to its former brightness. Continue reading...
Observers in north America and Europe were able to witness a morning solar eclipse, as the moon passed between the Earth and the sun. While those in Canada, Greenland and northern Russia were treated to an annular eclipse, creating a 'ring of fire', skygazers elsewhere saw a partial eclipse, creating a crescent sun
From New Jersey to Milton Keynes, skygazers in the northern hemisphere were able to see a partial solar eclipse, witnessing a crescent sun in an eclipsed sunrise in some parts of the world
Smaller firms are developing most antibiotics targeting superbugs but often at risk of bankruptcySmall drugmakers and biotech firms that are developing the bulk of new antibiotics need far more financial support, according to a new report, which warned that without these life-saving medicines there could be a pandemic of drug-resistant infections, worse than Covid-19.The Access to Medicine Foundation, an Amsterdam-based non-profit group, said small and medium-sized firms, which account for three-quarters of all late-stage antibiotics in development, struggle to secure enough funding and are often at risk of bankruptcy, potentially leaving new medicines stranded on the lab bench. Continue reading...
by Presented by Phoebe Weston and produced by Anand J on (#5JWG0)
There are more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth, but by the end of the century, 30% of these could be lost. This week, research warns that knowledge of medicinal plants is at risk of disappearing as human languages become extinct. Phoebe Weston speaks to Rodrigo Cámara Leret about the study, and the links between biological and cultural diversity Continue reading...
Group of scientists contest privacy concerns that they say are hampering research into illnesses such as long CovidResearchers have said they could struggle to find new treatments for conditions dealt with by GPs, from long Covid to depression, if they cannot get access to the patient data held by GPs because of concerns over privacy.Related: Why has the NHS patient data-sharing scheme been pushed back? Continue reading...
DNA tests on ancient bones show men were related and died following violent incidentsThe skeletons of two Viking age men who were related but died on opposite sides of the North Sea are to be reunited in an exhibition in Copenhagen this month.DNA tests on the ancient bones suggest the men were either half-brothers or a nephew and an uncle, according to Prof Eske Willerslev, a Danish evolutionary geneticist based at the University of Cambridge. Both of the Norsemen died following violent incidents. Continue reading...
When America’s richest are paying proportionately less in tax than those struggling from paycheck to paycheck, the tax system demands a radical overhaulThis week, Jeff Bezos announced his plan to become the first billionaire in space. Next month, on the 52nd anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, he will fly about 100 km above the rest of us, see the curve of the Earth and experience a few minutes of weightlessness, before a final descent. As a metaphor for the relationship between the super-rich and everyone else, it does not come much better. What also takes some beating is the justification from the world’s richest person for living out the sci-fi dreams he had as a boy: he has so much money he doesn’t know how to spend it.“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” he said in 2018. “That is basically it.” To which the possible counter-suggestions might include: pay your workers more. Or perhaps: pay higher taxes. Because the other big bit of Bezos news this week is that in 2007 and 2011 the multi-billionaire did not pay a cent in US federal income tax. He was in good company: in 2018 Elon Musk of Tesla also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn and George Soros are also all recent members of the zero club. Continue reading...
Australian scientists develop a microscope that works with 35% more clarity, raising hope for improvements in medical imagingAustralian researchers have developed a microscope that can image tiny biological structures that were previously not visible in what has been described as a significant step for quantum technology.It is believed to be the first time that quantum technology has improved on existing light microscopes, which in future may lead to improvements in medical imaging and navigation systems. Continue reading...
Researchers say species exposed for long periods to light pollution near the shore were less likely to survive than those living farther awayYoung clownfish on coastal reefs are dying faster as a result of exposure to artificial light at night, according to new research.An international team of scientists studying reefs on Moorea, a tiny island of French Polynesia, have found that orange-fin anemonefish – a species of clownfish – exposed for long periods to human-generated artificial light were 36% less likely to survive than clownfish living in reefs farther from the coast. Continue reading...
Juno passed within 645 miles of Ganymede, the closest any spacecraft has come to the moon since 2000Nasa’s Juno spacecraft has provided the first closeups of Jupiter’s largest moon in two decades.Juno zoomed past icy Ganymede on Monday, passing within 645 miles (1,038km). The last time a spacecraft came that close was in 2000 when Nasa’s Galileo spacecraft swept past our solar system’s biggest moon. Continue reading...
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