We can’t afford inaction. The funds needed are a fraction of the trillions Covid is costing us

This week the perennial beauty appears in Taurus so watch the western sky at sunset for it to emergePrepare this week to track down a perennial celestial beauty, a young crescent Moon. This week, it appears in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull. New moon takes place on 12 April at 03:30 BST, so watch the western sky at sunset for it to emerge from the twilight over the coming days. Continue reading...

Head of country’s disease control centre says vaccines ‘don’t have very high protection rates’

Immunity certification could foster ‘an erroneous sense of no risk’ in people’s behaviour, according to analystsCovid-status certificates – to allow those who have been vaccinated, recovered from the virus or have tested negative to attend an event or holiday abroad – could do harm as well as good, UK government science advisers have warned.While they could encourage some people to get vaccinated, the scientists say others may deliberately go out to get infected, in order to test positive for antibodies and get a certificate enabling them to mix more freely. Continue reading...

Loneliness | GPs | Letters | Gorillas | Church of EnglandWhile I was not entirely surprised to learn that nearly three-quarters of the population of West Dunbartonshire had experienced loneliness lately, I was shocked that over half of dwellers in Eden had (3.7m over-16s in Britain often or always feel lonely, ONS finds, 7 April). On reflection, however, I recollected that Adam was 100% lonely until God did something about it!

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?

Using ipatasertib, researchers say some brain cancers could potentially be made vulnerable to immunotherapy agentTwo people with advanced brain cancer of the sort that led to the death of the MP Tessa Jowell have responded well in a small trial to an experimental combination of chemo and immunotherapy drugs. In one case, the life-threatening tumour seems to have disappeared.Doctors at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden hospital in London cautioned that this was very early research but said it was unusual to have such a good response in patients in an early trial. Continue reading...

States consider tougher restrictions to slow spread of virus as country fights second wave of infections

Three-quarters of population could be fully immunised by first week in August, according to forecasts

For most people, the risks of Covid outweigh the minimal risks from the vaccinesLast Wednesday, the European Medicines Agency stated there was a plausible link between the Oxford/AstraZeneca (Vaxzevria) vaccine and rare types of blood clotting, which the MHRA estimates may happen in one in 100,000 young adults who get the vaccine.It is challenging to think of such low risks: when we have to count the zeros, all intuition goes. So what else has roughly a one in 100,000 chance for a young adult? We could choose from the risk of dying when under general anaesthesia, or in a skydiving jump, or, on the positive side, winning the Lotto jackpot if you bought 450 tickets, or guessing the last five digits of someone’s mobile phone number. Continue reading...

The Ingenuity helicopter, which arrived on the red planet in February, is expected to take to the skies on WednesdayNasa is gearing up to attempt the first controlled flight on another planet next week, with the tiny Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.The helicopter is expected to take to the skies next week, with Wednesday being the earliest time scheduled. Continue reading...

Three senior academics in medicine, chemistry and physics share their experiences and thoughts on how to improve underrepresentation

Pharmaceutical firms warn of delays to items such as the large bags in which vaccine cells are grown

The Japanese artform, based on a belief that a repaired pot can be stronger, taught me about tragedy and the ability to overcome itMy brother died at the age of 10, when I was eight. When I was nine, I shushed my best friend for mentioning him. At 11, I forced myself to stop turning my head away when we drove past a cemetery. And at 16 I spoke his name aloud for the first time, although it was many more years before I could actually talk about him.“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. Decades after my brother died I found a way to understand this, and that way was through the metaphor of kintsugi (kin=gold + tsugi=joining), the Japanese repair technique that puts a broken pot back together but reveals the breaks and scars by highlighting the seams with pure gold. A shattered pot becomes a new entity, one that says out loud: I was broken, but now, even though I am not perfect, I am more beautiful and stronger than ever. Continue reading...

The state began accepting international arrivals on Thursday after two-month suspension caused by outbreaks linked to hotel quarantine programVictoria has recorded its first overseas Covid-19 case in hotel quarantine since resuming international flights.The state began accepting international arrivals on Thursday following a two-month suspension caused by outbreaks linked to its hotel quarantine program. Continue reading...

People who emigrated before the pandemic struck have found themselves marooned from family for more than a yearSee all our coronavirus coverageJacinda Ardern’s government has been urged to end months of misery for migrant workers in New Zealand and reunite families separated by Covid-19.Hundreds of migrants who moved to New Zealand in the months before March last year were unable to bring their families into the country when Covid-19 prompted border closures. Continue reading...

Island to pay visitors after tourism sector hammered by pandemic; EMA looking at reports of rare bleeding condition and four cases of rare blood clots in J&J jab

Experiments suggest that the subatomic world may be much more complex than we thoughtTo find out how the universe truly works, scientists have for decades worked on the standard model of particle physics. When the Higgs boson was found at the Large Hadron Collider almost a decade ago, it was supposed to be the final piece in the jigsaw at the smallest, subatomic scale. Yet this week came the news that there may be new particles or forces that aren’t accounted for in the standard model.What these might be is a mystery hidden, say researchers at Fermilab in the US, within muons, a bulkier relative of electrons, one of the building blocks of matter. Scientists at Cern in Geneva also think they have picked up something unexpected in muon-electron interactions, contrary to standard model predictions. Do they possess differences besides their mass? The answer might be yes. There are holes in the standard model. It does not account for gravity and does not explain dark matter, which makes up two-thirds of reality, nor why nearly all the anti-matter created in the big bang has disappeared. And it has little about the “dark energy” to which we ascribe the accelerating expansion of the universe. Continue reading...

One in 340 people not in care homes, hospitals or other institutional settings test positive in week ending 3 April in England. This live blog is now closed – please follow the global coronavirus live blog for updates

Space exploration is an incredibly expensive and unnecessary way to ignore the many problems here on earth

People in the UK under 30 will be offered an alternative to the AstraZeneca vaccine because of a possible link to rare blood clots. Could the move dent confidence in the widely used jab?The government’s Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation said this week that people aged 18 to 29 who are not at high risk of Covid should have the option of an alternative jab to the AstraZeneca vaccine if one is available in their area. It follows the accumulation of evidence linking the jab to rare blood clots, although no definitive causation has yet been established. The move has sparked fears of a loss of confidence in the widely used AstraZeneca vaccine, at a point when the UK is emerging from lockdown.The Observer’s science editor, Robin McKie, tells Anushka Asthana that the risks of blood clots are still incredibly low: the current evidence puts the risk at about one in every 250,000 shots. But given there are other vaccines to offer, he says this caution makes sense. Continue reading...

‘Unimaginable amounts’ of water will flow into oceans if that temperature rise occurs and ice buffers vanish, warn UK scientistsMore than a third of the vast floating platforms of ice surrounding Antarctica could be at risk of collapsing and releasing “unimaginable amounts” of water into the sea if global temperatures reach 4C above pre-industrial levels, UK scientists say.Researchers from the University of Reading said that limiting the temperature rise to 2C could halve the area at risk and avoid a drastic rise in sea levels. Continue reading...

Chest-beating behaviour in male gorillas allows them to signal their size and avoid fights with larger rivalsIt is a trope used in films from King Kong to Tarzan – a male primate standing upright and beating its chest, sometimes with a yell and often with more than a dash of hubris.But it seems the pounding action is less about misplaced bravado than Hollywood would suggest: researchers studying adult male mountain gorillas say that while chest-beating might be done to show off, it also provides honest information. Continue reading...

Trichloroethylene was used as a general anaesthetic agent, and chronic exposure over a career could have led to Parkinson’sWe have received reports that anaesthetists exposed to trichloroethylene (TCE) may develop Parkinson’s disease (Rates of Parkinson’s disease are exploding. A common chemical may be to blame, 7 April). TCE was used as a general anaesthetic agent from the 1940s to the early 80s (when it was known by its tradename Trilene). If so, the presumption is that it would be chronic exposure over the course of a career that would present the greatest risk, and there has been no suggestion that patients receiving this agent would develop the disease.We are asking our members to contact us with their experiences of Parkinson’s in themselves or colleagues if they used Trilene. In 1915, it was recognised that TCE could damage nerves. Indeed, its first medical use was to treat trigeminal neuralgia by destroying the nerves that caused (or carried) the very unpleasant facial pain suffered by patients with this condition. A drug used medically to deliberately damage nerves may now be causing harm by damaging nervous tissue after environmental or accidental exposure.

What threat does variant that is causing devastation in Brazil pose, and how is it different?

A scientific journal covering a Hungarian doctor’s discovery is up for sale, alongside a letter from Edward Jenner, apologising for a delay in vaccine supply

Campaigners call for the closure of the Madrid research firm, after whistleblower video allegedly captures unacceptable treatmentUndercover footage of “gratuitous cruelty and abuse” allegedly taken in an animal testing facility in Spain – which has previously secured funding from the EU and Spanish authorities for projects – has been published, provoking calls for the centre’s closure.Madrid-based contract research organisation Vivotecnia conducts experiments on a range of animals including monkeys, dogs, mini pigs, rats, mice and rabbits for the biopharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetic, tobacco and food industries. An animal rights organisation said the footage was taken by a whistleblower who worked at the facility between 2018 and 2020. It appears to show animals housed in barren conditions, being taunted, smacked and shaken, and cut into with no or inadequate anaesthesia. Continue reading...

In coastal North Carolina, evidence of forest die-off is everywhere. Nearly every roadside ditch I pass is lined with dead or dying treesTrekking out to my research sites near North Carolina’s Alligator River national wildlife refuge, I slog through knee-deep water on a section of trail that is completely submerged. Permanent flooding has become commonplace on this low-lying peninsula, nestled behind North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The trees growing in the water are small and stunted. Many are dead.Throughout coastal North Carolina, evidence of forest die-off is everywhere. Nearly every roadside ditch I pass while driving around the region is lined with dead or dying trees. Continue reading...

Conversation rather than conversion is vital in the consulting room – is that the same for politics?Those who find writing a chore are better off not knowing about the literary method of Adam Phillips. Every Wednesday he walks to his office in Notting Hill. On this brief journey some idea begins to take shape, usually related to his day job (Phillips is a Freudian psychoanalyst who spends the rest of the week seeing patients). So long as this notion sparks his interest it will – by the time he sits down at his computer – have been transmuted into his first sentence. The next hours are spent unfurling that sentence into an essay, which typically forms part of a collection. Over 30 years this routine has produced almost as many books, in Phillips’s breezy, aphoristic style, on topics ranging from monogamy to sanity to democracy.The ease of Phillips’s prose is conditioned by his reluctance to “convince” anyone, including himself. The author treats his readers like his patients, aiming to provoke and stimulate rather than persuade. Yet if psychoanalysis – and psychoanalytic literature – is a discourse concerned with change, how is this achieved without arguing, lecturing or coaxing? Is there a paradigm for altering another person from which coercion is entirely absent? That is the question Phillips poses – with a note of anxiety about his own literary and therapeutic practice – in On Wanting to Change. If there is “something pernicious about the wish to persuade people; or rather to persuade people by disarming them in some way”, then psychoanalysis offers “a form of honest persuasion. Or that, at least, is what it aspires to be.” Continue reading...

Cardiovascular problems aren’t just a risk factor for Covid-19, but can also be a complication of having the disease. A growing number of studies are showing that many of those who have been hospitalised for Covid-19, as well as people who managed the initial infection at home, are being left with heart injuries including inflammation, blood clots and abnormal heart rhythms. Nicola Davis speaks to Dr Betty Raman to find out how the virus damages organs outside the lungs, and what’s being done to help Continue reading...

Iain Duncan Smith and second MP warn of eroded confidence in plan after ‘messy’ MHRA advice

US shot is as effective as existing jabs and is easier to store than Pfizer’s – but it is not cheap

Vaccine centre volunteer, 26, and student, 19, respond to MHRA review of this Covid-19 injection

Light pollution is killing insects and birds – and an ancient human connection with the heavenly bodiesSevere light pollution in Britain appears to have fallen, according to the CPRE, the countryside charity. Across a week in February, the charity asked volunteers to look up and count the stars they could see. The results suggest that 51% of participants were experiencing severe light pollution, compared to 61% the previous year – an effect, the charity concluded, of darker town and city centres, owing to lockdown. Sadly, though, the overall trend is worrying: human illumination of the planet is growing by 2% a year. This has serious consequences: there is mounting evidence that light pollution is a serious contributing factor to what has been called the “insect apocalypse”. Disoriented by light, birds also die as they migrate over cities: a distressing 100,000 a year succumb over New York City, confused by the illumination of the skyscrapers. The solution is simple and obvious: to turn unnecessary lights off – also saving energy – and to shade those required at street level.Light pollution also has the effect of deracinating humans in densely populated areas from what was once a vivid, intense, and often deeply generative relationship with the night sky. In ancient Babylonia, astronomy was inextricably linked with the development of branches of mathematics, with cosmology and divination, and with the establishment of calendars. Early Greek philosophers and mathematicians were also concerned with the arrangement of the heavenly bodies, borrowing heavily from their eastern forebears to try to understand the universe and the human place within it. Stars, of course, have been used since time immemorial to help human beings move around the planet: Polynesians used a range of methods, including star navigation, to travel prodigious distances across the Pacific. Continue reading...

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...

Experts warn of impact after advice changes in response to 79 blood clot cases out of 20m vaccinations

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...

Study finds 34% developed psychiatric or neurological conditions after six months

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?

I thought this crisis had shown who the key workers of the UK were. So why are things now getting worse for us?

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...