MPs vote to renew Coronavirus Act by 484 votes to 76; NHS England chief says decision due to lower infections and vaccine impact. This live blog is now closed - please follow the global coronavirus live blog for updates
Scientists pinpoint gene necessary for animals to adopt a typical gait by studying breed of rabbit that can’t hopIt sounds like a conundrum that Rudyard Kipling would have tackled in his Just So stories, but it turns out the reason why rabbits hop is rooted not in fables but genetics.Researchers say that by studying an unusual breed of bunny that walks on its front paws, they have pinpointed a key gene that is necessary for animals to adopt a typical gait. For rabbits, as well as animals such as hares and kangaroos, that is the ability to hop. Continue reading...
Type of stem cell deficiency is common among women who lose pregnancies, and sitagliptin may helpA common diabetes drug may be able to help women who have repeated miscarriages, researchers have found, after they identified that a certain type of stem cell deficiency is common among women who lose pregnancies.A study for the Tommy’s National Miscarriage Research Centre in London discovered that the diabetes drug sitagliptin can boost recruitment of these cells to the lining of the uterus, called the endometrium, in women who have experienced repeated miscarriages. Continue reading...
It may sound far-fetched, but a breakthrough in Israel has brought us a step closer to creating artificial wombs for humansA team of Israeli scientists announced the mother of all inventions last week. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science revealed in the journal Nature that they had successfully gestated hundreds of mice inside an artificial womb. They placed newly fertilised eggs inside glass vials rotating in a ventilated incubator, and grew the embryos for 11 days – the mid-point of a mouse pregnancy – outside their mothers’ bodies. The embryos developed normally; their hearts, visible through the glass vials, pounded steadily at 170 beats per minute.The mice were no bigger than sunflower seeds, but what they represent is enormous: the breakthrough brings us one step closer to reproduction without pregnancy. The division of labour in gestation is the most intractable imbalance between the sexes. Men only have to contribute a single cell to make a baby, whereas women carry their children for nine months and give birth, sometimes risking their bodies and often risking their careers, in a world of work built largely by men. An artificial womb would mean complete reproductive parity between the sexes: all anyone needs to do is throw in their gametes and the rest is taken care of. But this equality could come at great cost to women. This is radically disruptive technology, and with every new development we are sleepwalking into a world of tough ethical choices. Continue reading...
Polymer banknote pays tribute to scientist who cracked Enigma code during second world warA new £50 note featuring Alan Turing, the scientist best known for his codebreaking work during the second world war, has been unveiled by the Bank of England and will go into circulation on 23 June, the date of his birth.The Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, was due to reveal the design, which incorporates several features relating to Turing, on Thursday morning. Continue reading...
Mars mission’s next major milestone will be deployment of Ingenuity, a small helicopterWelcome to the first in a new series of occasional Marswatch columns. With the change of administration in America, the moon landings scheduled for 2024 are likely to be moved back to their original target of 2028. So we thought we’d change our focus to Mars.The big news at Mars is the landing of Nasa’s rover Perseverance. It touched down on 18 February and has been successfully exploring the 28-mile-wide (45km) Jezero crater ever since. Continue reading...
A majority of menstruating women have experienced changes to their cycle over the last year, surveys suggest. One of the main culprits? Persistent stress
by Dan Sabbagh Defence and security editor on (#5FS09)
12 riddles linked to new £50 note featuring the codebreaker may take seven hours to crackGCHQ has released its “most difficult puzzle ever”, a set of 12 riddles linked to design elements of the new £50 note featuring the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing.The questions begin with a relatively straightforward crossword-style puzzle that starts by asking where GCHQ’s predecessor agency, where Turing worked, was based during the second world war. A two-word answer, nine letters then four, is required. Continue reading...
by Presented by Ian Sample and produced by Madeleine on (#5FRS2)
In 2019, Ian Sample delved into the mind of a bullshitter, talking to psychologists about what prompts people to spout nonsense and gibberish. Recently, one of the researchers he spoke to, Shane Littrell, published a study asking – can you bullshit a bullshitter? Not being able to resist diving into the dark arts of BS once more, Ian Sample invited Shane back on the podcast to hear the answer and find out what it might tell us about the spread of misinformation Continue reading...
Australian observatory that shared Apollo 11 images reaches deal with US company Intuitive MachinesThe Parkes radio telescope in regional New South Wales, which famously shared Apollo 11’s landing images to more than 600 million people in 1969, will provide support to new commercial lunar missions this year aimed at ultimately creating a “sustainable presence” for humans on the moon.“The Dish”, as it has become known in Australia, will provide ground station support to the Houston-based Intuitive Machines group for the “multiple lunar missions” it is planning with Nasa over the next five years. Continue reading...
Experts discover crucial evidence that could reveal how magnetic fields behave around black holesAn image that captures streaks of polarised light swirling around a supermassive black hole is providing new insight into how galaxies can project streams of energy thousands of light-years outward from their core.Black holes are places where the pull of gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape. Most surrounding matter gets sucked in, but some particles escape just moments before they are captured and are blown far out into space. Continue reading...
by Featuring Rick Morton and Michael Williams; presen on (#5FR7Q)
The journalist and author was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder in 2019. In this recording of Guardian Australia’s monthly book club, he discusses his book My Year of Living Vulnerably, which explores how trauma affects the brain, and how part of getting better is through learning to loveYou can also check out: Continue reading...
Molecular switch makes human organ three times larger than great apes’, study findsIt is one of the defining attributes of being human: when compared with our closest primate relatives, we have incredibly large brains.Now scientists have shed light on the reasons for the difference, by collecting cells from humans, chimps and gorillas and turning them into lumps of brain in the laboratory. Continue reading...
I was taught to use my head, not my heart. But acknowledging sadness at what is lost can help us safeguard the futureOver the course of my career, the climate crisis has changed from something only experts could see – reading clues trapped in frozen air bubbles or statistical patterns in long-term data sets – to something that everyone on Earth is living through. For me, it has gone from being something I study to a way that I see the world and experience my life. It’s one thing to publish a study on the hypothetical impact of increasing temperature on California’s people and ecosystems; it’s another to feel my stomach gripped by fear as my parents flee a catastrophic California wildfire cranked up by longer, hotter, drier summers.
All your daily interactions with others, big and small, make up your social biome, and the pandemic has severely damaged most of ours. Here’s how to reinvigorate it
Tree-planting can also increase health risks if it focuses too narrowly on small number of species, paper saysOutbreaks of infectious diseases are more likely in areas of deforestation and monoculture plantations, according to a study that suggests epidemics are likely to increase as biodiversity declines.Land use change is a significant factor in the emergence of zoonotic viruses such as Covid-19 and vector-borne ailments such as malaria, says the paper, published on Wednesday in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. Continue reading...
To prevent catastrophe, governments must transform our resilience to climate breakdown, AI and engineered pandemicsIt is profoundly difficult to grapple with risks whose stakes may include the global collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity. The pandemic has shattered our illusions of safety and reminded us that despite all the progress made in science and technology, we remain vulnerable to catastrophes that can overturn our entire way of life. These are live possibilities, not mere hypotheses, and our governments will have to confront them.As Britain emerges from Covid-19, it could find itself at the forefront of the response to future disasters. The government’s recent integrated review, Britain’s taking of the G7 presidency and the Cop26 climate conference, which will be hosted in Glasgow later this year, are all occasions to address global crises. But in order to ensure that the UK really is prepared, we need to first identify the biggest risks that we face in the coming decades. Continue reading...
To mark National Puppy Day, Elizabeth Lo’s acclaimed film Stray gives humans rare insight into the canine gaze, courtesy of homeless mutts in IstanbulFrom the moment Zeytin makes her first appearance in Elizabeth Lo’s feature Stray, there is no doubt you are in the presence of a unique spirit. As she surveys an Istanbul side street at dawn, her features are alert, her gaze is uncompromising and her deep, dark eyes sparkle with intelligence. There’s something of Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen about her, or maybe Brad Pitt in one of his less kempt moments. But non-dog comparisons don’t do her justice. This is one indomitable bitch.Lo first encountered Zeytin and her friend Nazar on a 2017 casting trip to Turkey, and knew immediately that she had found the star she was looking for – which is to say, a dog who could carry a human film. “We were wandering through a busy underground tunnel filled with people when suddenly these two giant stray dogs streaked past us,” she says. “They were running with such a sense of purpose and it was so intriguing. What appointments did these dogs have to keep?” Continue reading...
Experts reveal ‘cautious excitement’ over unstable particles that fail to decay as standard model suggestsScientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva have spotted an unusual signal in their data that may be the first hint of a new kind of physics.The LHCb collaboration, one of four main teams at the LHC, analysed 10 years of data on how unstable particles called B mesons, created momentarily in the vast machine, decayed into more familiar matter such as electrons. Continue reading...
Having altered how we think about time, the physicist sets his sights on perhaps the most maddeningly difficult theory of allCarlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, sold more than 1m copies in English translation in 2015 and remains the world’s fastest-selling science book. In The Order of Time and Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli illuminated the disquieting uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, gravitational waves and other tentative physics. Nobody said that post-Newtonian physics was easy, but Rovelli’s gift is to bring difficult ideas down a level. His books continue a tradition of jargon-free popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. Only in recent years has science become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive again.Rovelli’s new book, Helgoland, attempts to explain the maddeningly difficult theory of quantum mechanics. The theory was first developed in 1925 by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg during a summer holiday he spent on the barren North Sea island of Helgoland. It was there that the 23-year-old, stricken by hay fever, conceived of the “strangely beautiful interior” of an atom’s mathematical structure and, at a stroke, overturned the certainties of classical physics. Gone was the old idea that atoms consisted of tiny electrons that moved mechanically round heavier protons – as planets orbit the sun. Heisenberg’s intuition was that electrons moved in diffuse, cloudlike waves. Continue reading...
by Presented by Ian Sample and produced by Madeleine on (#5FNZB)
On 23 March 2020, the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the first lockdown in response to the growing number of cases of Covid-19. At the same time, countries around the world began to close their schools, restaurants, and offices and ask citizens to physically distance from one another. In the 12 months since, more than 2 million people have died, viral variants have emerged, and we have developed safe and effective vaccines.One year into the pandemic, Science Weekly is asking: what happens next? Ian Sample talks to the professors Martin Landray, Mike Tildesley, and Deborah Dunn-Walters about Covid treatments, vaccines and what the next 12 months may hold Continue reading...
by Peter Walker Political correspondent on (#5FNQ4)
No funding earmarked for research agency and Europe’s Horizon scheme despite imminent start to financial yearThe government risks creating a serious funding gap for science, Labour has warned, saying that delays over budgets and cuts to research are undermining the sector and giving the lie to ministers’ boasts about Britain’s status as a science superpower.The party has highlighted a continued standoff over post-Brexit funding for collaboration with European scientists via the Horizon research programme, as well as the lack of an agreed budget for the main government science funding scheme, saying the government risked “badly letting down” the sector. Continue reading...
Vaccinating the world is the only way out of Covid, but a mixture of nationalism and protectionism is blocking the exitCovid-19 has proved to be the greatest humanitarian and economic disaster of the century. A reported 2.7 million people have already died from the pathogen. Its recession is estimated to be twice as deep as that associated with the 2008 crash. Ultimately, the only way out of the pandemic is to vaccinate the world. Yet there has been an alarming outbreak of a “my country first” approach to vaccine allocation. In February, the US announced that it would not donate any doses to poor countries until it had a plentiful supply. Fewer than 10 days later, India cracked down on vaccine exports. These are political decisions, as no one doubts either country’s ability to vaccinate their own populations.That is why the EU’s threat to limit the export of locally produced vaccines is so concerning. Brussels has enough vaccines. Having stumbled, the bloc’s leaders know it looks bad to see doses leaving the EU for Britain, which has already vaccinated half its population. European leaders should realise that only cooperation can end the pandemic. Without worldwide coordination, there will be no way to get jabs to the 8 billion people on the planet. Vaccinating the globe at once has never been done. “But if we can put a rover on Mars,” the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wrote in the Guardian this month, “we can surely produce billions of vaccines and save lives on earth.” Continue reading...
Dr Tony Hulse and Dr Caroline Ponmani say they are seeing evidence of diabetes being triggered by the virus in children, while JK Cruickshank explains why there is a likelihood of the condition arising after a Covid-19 infectionThe possibility that Covid-19 could trigger diabetes (Doctors suggest Covid-19 could cause diabetes, 19 March) fits with the experiences of paediatricians treating diabetic children in London and the south-east. Following the first Covid-19 wave, we undertook a study of 178 children from 12 hospitals in south and north-east London, Kent and Sussex who had developed type 1 diabetes between January and July 2020. We found that the prevalence of newly diagnosed children was high when compared with the levels of type 1 diabetes seen in the previous four years. But two inner south London hospitals had unusually high numbers of children with type 1 diabetes.The children who had developed diabetes in the pandemic were significantly sicker than before, with a higher level of diabetic ketoacidosis when they arrived at hospital. This did not relate to a delay in coming to hospital. We also know of two children where there was evidence that their diabetes was triggered by a Covid-19 infection. We are undertaking detailed studies as we believe that there may be link between the two conditions; the cause of type 1 diabetes is complex, but it appears that asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic Covid-19 infections may be a trigger factor.
The solution to today’s puzzle about trust, secrets and the world’s weirdest proofEarlier today I set the following puzzle, based on the remarkable mathematical concept of a ‘zero-knowledge proof,’ which has applications in cyber security. (To find out why this concept is so revolutionary, and how it relates to the puzzle, you can read the original article here.)The stolen paper clip Continue reading...
Three-month gap between vaccinations is recommended but HealthEngine website allows bookings for second jab within days of firstOne of the booking websites contracted by the federal government for the Covid vaccine rollout is erroneously allowing Australians to book in for their second dose within days of their first shot, a problem general practitioners say is compounding demand on their clinics.The next stage of the vaccine rollout, phase 1b, officially started on Monday, allowing a cohort of 6 million higher-risk Australians to begin receiving their vaccinations at about 1,000 GP clinics or 100 commonwealth-run respiratory clinics. Continue reading...
Cloud of ash and gas engulfed Roman city within minutes and suffocated inhabitants, research saysA giant cloud of ash and gases released by Vesuvius in 79 AD took about 15 minutes to kill the inhabitants of Pompeii, research suggests.The estimated 2,000 people who died in the ancient Roman city when they could not escape were not overwhelmed by the lava, but rather asphyxiated by the gases and ashes and later covered in volcanic debris to leave a mark of their physical presence millennia later. Continue reading...
by Written by A Mark Williams & Tim Wigmore, read on (#5FMVW)
What makes an elite sports star suddenly unable to do the very thing they have been practising for years? And is there anything they can do about it? By A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore Continue reading...
The pandemic has revealed the true value of social interaction – and even changed my outlook on meeting new peopleLast year, in what would turn out to be my last night out for a while, I found myself in a dreaded situation: at a friend’s drinks, speaking to a total stranger. Not long into our conversation, my brain started searching for escape routes. I had a full glass and there was a queue for the loo, so I put my acting skills to the test and told this perfectly harmless person that I – a man who has never smoked – “needed a cigarette”.I’m comfortable admitting that, before Covid, I didn’t think “meeting new people” was on my list of preferred pastimes. My Golden Globe-worthy performance as “man with cigarette” suggests I could possibly (definitely) be guilty of writing new people off before getting to know them, particularly if there wasn’t an immediate “spark” between us. As much as I love my friends, maintaining relationships takes time, so why open myself up to someone new if there’s no obvious connection? Continue reading...
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