Deputy chief medical officer says benefits for older age groups clear, but adults under 30 should be offered an alternative to AstraZeneca jab. This live blog is now closed - please follow the global live blog for coronavirus updates
Genetic sequencing dating back 45,000 years shows intermixing with Neanderthals more common than previously thoughtGenetic sequencing of human remains dating back 45,000 years has revealed a previously unknown migration into Europe and showed intermixing with Neanderthals in that period was more common than previously thought.The research is based on analysis of several ancient human remains – including a whole tooth and bone fragments – found in a cave in Bulgaria last year. Continue reading...
The weight of buildings in dense urban areas can lead to subsidence, with effects particularly marked by the coastIt’s well known that ice sheets are heavy enough to bend the underlying rocks, but what about cities? Are some cities capable of reshaping the bit of planet they sit on?By 2050 around 70% of Earth’s population are projected to live in cities. This set Tom Parsons, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey, to wondering if the associated redistribution of mass into concentrated urban areas is capable of causing subsidence. Using the San Francisco Bay region (7.75 million people) as a case study, Parsons estimated the weight of all the buildings and their contents to be around 1.6 trillion kg – comparable to the weight of water behind a dam. Taking into account the underlying geology of San Francisco, Parsons modelled the pressure that the city exerts and showed that San Francisco’s buildings are responsible for between 5 and 80mm of subsidence. The findings are reported in the journal AGU Advances. Continue reading...
Medicines watchdog recommends physical and psychological therapies when treating pain with no known causePeople suffering from chronic pain that has no known cause should not be prescribed painkillers, the medicines watchdog has announced, recommending such patients be offered exercise, talking therapies and acupuncture instead.In a major change of pain treatment policy, the National Institute for health and Care Excellence (Nice) say that in future, doctors should advise sufferers to use physical and psychological therapies rather than analgesics to manage their pain. Continue reading...
The UK must tread carefully. While some countries seem to be emerging from the shadows, no one is safe when Covid spreads so freelyThe pandemic has transformed the lives of billions around the globe, but beyond that common experience, it has highlighted and deepened divides rather than closed them. On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund warned that inequality both within and between countries will not just persist, but increase this year. It predicted that rich western nations will recover faster than expected from the crisis due to successful vaccine programmes and the ability to increase public spending and borrowing, while developing countries will struggle; the number of people in extreme poverty last year was almost 95 million above pre-pandemic projections.At the same time, a divide is opening up between places that are experiencing some kind of new normal, with large parts of life assuming a recognisable pattern – including China, where the virus first emerged – and those plunging deeper into disaster. New Zealand and Australia are planning to open a trans-Tasman travel bubble. In Taiwan – perhaps the greatest success story – crowds happily mingle. In Israel, where more than half the population has been fully vaccinated, daily life in some ways resembles pre-pandemic times for many – though Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza remain under tight rules with relatively high infection rates. The government has faced condemnation for not vaccinating millions living under its military control. (It inoculated 100,000 who work in Israel or its settlements.) Continue reading...
Prime minister says easyJet boss right to ask whether it would be possible to use lateral flow tests for some returning travellers. This live blog is now closed - please follow the global coronavirus live blog for updates
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsWhat are thoughts? Where do they come from, and where do they go when they disappear? Are they “filed” somewhere, a bit like memories, where we can find them again, or once a thought has gone is that it?
Australian Antarctic Division says 109 people on board were uninjured, but the incident was ‘potentially traumatic’ for someAn engine room fire that destroyed two vessels on board Australia’s Antarctic resupply ship has left expeditioners shaken as they begin their journey home.The vessel, the MPV Everest, was in the middle of the Southern Ocean, four days into a two-week journey, when the ship’s portside engine room caught alight around 2pm on Monday. Continue reading...
The UK’s young have become the pigeons of the public realm, only remarked upon when they leave litter in the parkHouse prices were having a mini-boom by last July, buoyed up by what felt like the windfall of a stamp duty holiday and the pent-up demand of the first lockdown. By the autumn, prices were still climbing, but not to worry, said the experts: they’ll crash again when people start to lose their jobs. With that foot yet to fall, things continue to look very rosy, if you’re a house. For everyone else, a crazy situation has only got worse.The latest figures in the UK from December show that house prices are now 8.4 times the annual average income. The only time that figure has ever been marginally higher was just before the global financial crash in 2008. Those who have managed to hoick themselves on to the ladder think they’re the winners in a fiendish game of skill and chance. Compared with tenants, who pour their wages indefinitely down the drain of the rentier economy, mortgage-holders do seem well blessed. Continue reading...
Researchers at the University of the Philippines Los Baños aim to catch thousands of bats to develop a Japanese-funded simulation model over the next three years that they believe could help avert potential pandemics. They hope the bats will help in predicting the dynamics of a coronavirus outbreak by analysing factors such as climate, temperature and ease of spread Continue reading...
In the run-up to Christmas, the government dithered and made last-minute rule changes that left many people baffled. A surge in coronavirus cases soon followedAll through the spring of 2020, and into the summer, Michelle Mcallister carefully shielded her husband, James Mcallister. Michelle, 39, who lives in the Wednesfield area of Wolverhampton, was a full-time carer to James, 52. A former used car dealer, James had heart failure and had used a colostomy bag since a stomach ulcer burst in 2016. He was unable to work and was often in pain, reliant on a walking stick and occasionally a wheelchair to get around.The couple had three children: Luke, 22, Lauren, 19, and Morgan, 10. (Only the girls, Lauren and Morgan, lived with their parents.) When the kids came home from school or work, Michelle would make them sanitise their hands at a makeshift station she had improvised on a table by the front door. Only Michelle did the food shopping, as quickly as she could, to minimise exposure to the virus. Throughout the first wave, into the winter, Michelle kept James safe. “I thought that if James got Covid he would be really poorly or it would kill him,” Michelle says. “He was the one person I was worried about.” Continue reading...
Highest proportion of participants since 2013 saw 30 or more stars in Orion constellationThe number of stars visible in the skies above Britain increased in this year’s annual count, indicating a lessening of light pollution in lockdown.CPRE, the countryside charity, said 51% of people taking part in its citizen science count in February noted 10 or fewer stars in the Orion constellation, indicating severe light pollution. During the same period in 2020, before the first lockdown, 61% of counts registered 10 or fewer stars. Continue reading...
New variants of concern have changed the game, spreading worldwide and threatening to derail pandemic control effortsAt the end of 2020, there was a strong hope that high levels of vaccination would see humanity finally gain the upper hand over Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. In an ideal scenario, the virus would then be contained at very low levels without further societal disruption or significant numbers of deaths.But since then, new “variants of concern” have emerged and spread worldwide, putting current pandemic control efforts, including vaccination, at risk of being derailed. Continue reading...
Stories all reported potential benefits of tests, some using smartphone or watch, but 60% failed to mention limitationsMedical tests often offered through smartphones and watches and designed to detect the early signs of disease are being promoted by media without mention of their potential harms, an Australian study published in the leading US medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine has found.Researchers from the University of Sydney and Bond University in Queensland analysed 1,173 news stories from between 2016 and 2019 from newspapers, blogs, magazines, broadcast and podcast transcripts, and wire news services. Continue reading...
The solutions to today’s puzzlesEarlier today I set you two puzzles by the veteran US puzzle inventor Sam Loyd.1. The famous hot cross bun puzzle Continue reading...
Hot cross teasersUPDATE: Read the solutions hereToday’s paschal problems are from the archive of US puzzle maker Sam Loyd [1841-1911]. Two dynamo teasers for ‘dynamo teaser’*.1. The famous hot cross bun puzzle Continue reading...
The constellation is beautifully placed for evening observation in the northern hemisphereAt this time of year in the northern hemisphere, the constellation of Leo, the Lion, is beautifully placed for observation in the evenings. Continue reading...
New ‘quicker and kinder’ treatment combining drugs cuts length of time some patients have to spend in hospitalA new breast cancer treatment will cut the amount of time some patients have to spend in hospital from two and a half hours to five minutes.The treatment, called Phesgo, is being rolled out across England by the NHS and will be offered to breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. It will be available to people with HER2-positive breast cancer, which accounts for 15% of all such cancers. Continue reading...
She was in the Go-Betweens, Tracey Thorn was in the Marine Girls, their 30-year friendship enhanced both their livesOn 31 March 1983, she burst into my dressing room, asking at the top of her voice, “Has anyone here got a lipstick I can borrow?” I looked up to see a tall woman in a Lurex dress, with a mass of blonde hair. Our two bands, Marine Girls and the Go-Betweens, were on the same bill at the Lyceum in London. I was 20, and she was 31. I was a tentative singer, she was a loud, outspoken drummer. I was from suburbia, she was from Brisbane, Australia. And I was still a student, while she had already been a social worker, then joined a feminist punk band called Xero. She’d hitchhiked across Europe with a girlfriend, she’d seen every art film, read every avant-garde book. She’d slept at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, she’d swum with Roger Moore, she could recite Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. But I didn’t know any of this. I just knew that she looked like self-belief in a minidress, and that she had arrived in my life. “Who was that?” I asked when she had gone. “That,” came the reply, “was Lindy Morrison.”It took a couple of years for us to become friends. We were opposites in many ways, and at different stages of life, but there were similarities: we both lived with the boyfriend we were in a band with; we had strong opinions about everything – feminism, love and art; we liked Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, Patti Smith, Simone de Beauvoir, and we had no time for a lot of the men who surrounded us in the music business. I’d watch her on stage, fierce and sweating behind the drum kit, long hair flying in her face, all energy, all concentration, and I was proud to be her friend. Continue reading...
Research into how some HIV-positive people keep the virus at bay promises to yield new treatment possibilities, from vaccines to gene therapiesThe year was 1998 when Joel Blankson encountered a patient he would never forget. Blankson was working in the HIV clinic at John Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, when an HIV-positive woman in her mid-40s arrived for some routine tests.Blankson gave her a PCR test, intending to prescribe a newly developed combination of medicines called antiretroviral therapies to suppress the infection, and prevent her developing Aids. Continue reading...
Exiting the EU was not good for Britain. Greed did not bring us the vaccine. Johnson’s narratives will not stand the light of dayThere can be few people who have not at some stage in their lives felt that they had been “taken for a ride” or conned. Yet that, I think, will be the dawning realisation of a fair proportion of the 37% of the electorate who – without, in most cases, having the faintest idea of the implications – voted on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union.Now, usually, if one is conned, it is over some relatively minor matter in the great scheme of things, and one learns one’s lesson. But when a significant part of a country is taken for a ride, it cannot be dismissed as a trivial matter from which it can easily recover. Continue reading...
There is plenty of evidence that empathy can be taught in childhood, but it gets more complicated when it comes to adults, especially when it is forcedCan people change?That’s the question behind the multibillion-dollar self-help industry, the proliferation of blogs and podcasts that promise to make you a better human, and the ubiquitous and vacuous “inspo” memes. Continue reading...
Spreading fears over the Oxford vaccine undercuts science and public healthIt has been a disquieting week for those concerned about the lifting of Covid restrictions. Numbers of cases and deaths may be declining but the news that the AstraZeneca vaccine has been linked to cases of rare blood clots and has been suspended for use in younger people in Germany and the Netherlands is a disturbing development. The AstraZeneca jab is the prime hope we have of clearing Britain of this disease and is now, once again, under hostile scrutiny. Not for the first time, this vaccine has become enmeshed in geopolitics and its usefulness questioned. It is a grim story.In this case, fears have been raised that the vaccine may be linked to seven deaths among a total of 30 rare blood-clotting cases that arose after administration of the vaccine. That is of obvious concern, but a quick look at the arithmetic puts those fears into perspective. Those 30 cases occurred among 18 million recipients of the AstraZeneca jab, a risk of less than one in 500,000. Now run this simple thought experiment and ask what would happen if we stopped the vaccination of 500,000 middle-aged people, say, for a month? About 85 would be hospitalised and about five would die from Covid, it is estimated. Those figures reveal the power of vaccinations that have already prevented more than 6,000 Covid deaths in the UK, with tens of thousands of lives likely to be saved this year. Continue reading...
The physicist on Newton finding inspiration amid the great plague, how the multiverse can unite religions, and why a ‘theory of everything’ is within our graspMichio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at City College, New York, a proponent of string theory but also a well-known populariser of science, with multiple TV appearances and several bestselling books behind him. His latest book, The God Equation, is a clear and accessible examination of the quest to combine Einstein’s general relativity with quantum theory to create an all-encompassing “theory of everything” about the nature of the universe.How close do you believe science is to accomplishing a theory of everything?
At the end of last year, a crack team of British scientists discovered a new coronavirus strain that would spread across the world. As new variants emerge, can they keep them at bay?In late November last year, the people of Swale in Kent were being lambasted for disobedience. They were being Covid-shamed. The district, home to a large number of apple orchards, as well as the historic towns of Faversham and Sittingbourne, had the highest infection rates in the country. Close behind was nearby Thanet, the two areas totalling a little less than 500 sq km. The rules on wearing masks and social distancing were being “wilfully disregarded”, said Swale council leader Roger Truelove at an emergency meeting. Afterwards he told reporters: “We do get reports of crowding in supermarkets, and so we will be writing to supermarkets.” The council planned to “supercharge the messaging” that people should follow the rules. But they were not to know – how could they? – that the coronavirus had played a particularly nasty trick on their coastal borough.At least two months before anybody spotted that the UK had a problem, a new variant of the virus had emerged without any warning. The hunt for what would later be dubbed the Kent variant took over the lives of some of the UK’s leading scientists for many urgent weeks, leading to the cancellation of Christmas and the UK’s third lockdown. The variant spread so fast, it now accounts for most of the Covid cases in the UK. Continue reading...
Chief medical officer Jeannette Young says state will stop sending Covid-19 patients to Princess Alexandra hospitalQueensland will temporarily stop sending Covid-19 infected patients to Brisbane’s highly-regarded Princess Alexandra hospital after authorities discovered it was the source of two separate clusters which forced the city into a three-day lockdown last week.The news came as the state reported one new locally acquired Covid-19 case. Continue reading...
SN11 explodes after high-altitude flight over Texas, the fourth prototype in a row to failFor the fourth time in a row, SpaceX has lost one of its Starship prototypes during a high-altitude test launch.Starship Serial Number 11 (SN11) launched from the company’s test site in Boca Chica, Texas, on 30 March at 8am local time (2pm BST) in thick fog. Similar to the three previous attempts, SN11 climbed to roughly 10km (6.2 miles) in altitude using three methane-fuelled Raptor engines, developed by the company. Continue reading...
by Sally Weale Education correspondent on (#5G2W2)
Government commitment to Horizon Europe fund averts immediate threat to science, say universitiesThe government has stepped in at the 11th hour with an additional £250m in funding to help pay for the UK’s association with Horizon Europe, the European Union’s funding programme for research and innovation.Universities welcomed the move as “a significant affirmation of the government’s belief in research” which would avert the immediate threat to UK science. Continue reading...
The team behind Once Upon a Time in Iraq has compiled a moving and sometimes hopeful three-parter that offers a global perspective on the crisisLike the virus itself, the programmes about it have moved from localised subjects to a slightly wider field and now have expanded to take in a global view. It hasn’t been a perfectly linear progression, of course, but most of the first documentaries were composed largely of footage recorded by medical professionals themselves, at work and then – exhausted and tearful – at home.After that came socially distanced films recording the impact on local communities and bereaved families, the experiences of survivors and the long-term consequences for those who do not make a full recovery. Alongside that have come considerations and critiques of the UK response to the crisis and comparisons – not generally favourable – with that of other countries. Continue reading...
An adolescence of shame about being LGBTQ+ can have lingering effects on our behaviour that stretch well into adulthoodGuilt and shame can be addictive. In certain religious and traditional contexts, it can even be venerated, honoured – the requisite emotion that subdues human ego and maintains humility at the feet of a far higher power. But it can also leave an indelible stain on our character, our personality, and our mental health that endures for years, particularly for those brought up in such conservative environments where guilt and shame were measurements of our own self-worth.“It’s good to cry when you pray. Tears wash away your sins,” an aunt – a devout Maronite Catholic – once remarked to me as a child. I took those words and held them close to my chest, and for many years in my adolescence, Good Friday was the moment of repentance, of a dive deep into my own being in search of guilt. I’d sit, in darkness, burrowing into the corners of my mind, scouring the memories of the previous year in search of acts or incidents that would render me guilty, that would strike the emotional cords, and activate the stress hormone that made tears well up in my eyes. Continue reading...
by Dr Anthony McIntosh, public sculpture manager, Art on (#5G1TM)
With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: Brown Dog by Nicola Hicks, in Battersea Park
by Presented by Patrick Greenfield and Phoebe Weston on (#5G1KB)
In part two of The Age of Extinction takeover of Science Weekly, Patrick Greenfield and Phoebe Weston explore a relatively new and controversial technology called DNA barcoding that is helping scientists to differentiate between species – including fungi, which we heard about in part one. As the catastrophic loss of biodiversity around the world continues, could DNA barcoding at least allow us to accurately record the species that are perishing? Continue reading...