Science has got us much closer to getting back to how things were, but if we don’t remember patience and kindness it will count for very littleWith the gradual easing of restrictions, we are all being faced with questions of “how”. How are we going to manage the “new normal”? How are we going to navigate the months ahead? How are we going to feel in all these unfamiliar situations?These are not easy questions to answer. We have never experienced anything like the pandemic and we can’t begin to know how we will feel as we re-engage with the world outside our front doors. We have been through so many changes and had so much uncertainty that we can feel a bit disoriented and a bit lost. And we can feel anxious. Continue reading...

Nigel Topping acknowledges world is running out of time as he lobbies businesses and lawmakers in lead-up to Cop26 summitThe UK’s climate champion, Nigel Topping, says he is stubbornly optimistic that the world will converge on an agreement to forge a transition to a net zero future at the UN climate talks later this year.Topping’s role in the run-up to the UN Cop26 climate summit, to be held in Glasgow in November, is to drive and encourage action from businesses, civil society, and local and regional government on climate change. Continue reading...

Results show Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs are proving highly effective

Scientists say ice equivalent to 1-2 metres of sea level rise is probably already doomed to meltA significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink of a tipping point, after which accelerated melting would become inevitable even if global heating was halted, according to new research.Rising temperatures caused by the climate crisis have already seen trillions of tonnes of Greenland’s ice pour into the ocean. Melting its ice sheet completely would eventually raise global sea level by 7 metres. Continue reading...

Scientists’ warning comes as government comes under pressure to explain border policy

Government says it has deployed thousands more vaccine doses to areas with rising cases due to India variants

My wife, Caroline Thomas, who has died aged 79 of cancer, was an applied psychologist who worked on safety and accident prevention, championing the role of consumers in the development of standards.Known professionally as Caroline Warne, she played a pivotal role in consumer safety and accident prevention over six decades, beginning with research into industrial and household accidents, and culminating in her chairing the consumer policy committee of the International Standards Organization (ISO). She was appointed OBE in 2005. Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s puzzlesEarlier today I set three puzzles from Terms & Conditions Apply, a free online game about website deviousness (that I made with Jonathan Plackett.) The puzzles in the game exaggerate the tricks websites use to extract our data.1. Naughty negatives Continue reading...

Not enough people are vaccinated against Covid as a new variant spreads, requiring us to remain vigilant for a little longer

It’s important to recognise the vital role they’ve played in development of vaccines and treatmentsA few weeks ago, I received my first shot of a vaccine against Covid-19. As the newly vaccinated exited the clinic, there was a mix of relief and elation on people’s faces. We exchanged little smiles of solidarity. If we could have burst into spontaneous applause, I’m sure we would have done.

Sage member suggests latest Covid lockdown easing may be reversed if hospital admissions rise

Puzzles about internet deviousnessUPDATE: Solutions can be read here.It’s a depressing fact of online life that websites are often shameless in using shady practices, like misdirection and obfuscation, to get us to sign up to, or to agree to, something we do not want.Today’s puzzles exaggerate the cunning tricks websites use to extract our personal data – but only just! Continue reading...

Faint constellations representing crow, cup and serpent feature in classical Greek and Roman mythThis week offers us the opportunity to locate three of the fainter constellations that are linked by myth: Corvus, the crow; Crater, the cup; and Hydra, the serpent. Corvus is one of the oldest recognised constellations, dating back to Babylonian star charts from at least 1100BC. Hydra was also recognised by the Babylonians, although Crater is a slightly later invention. Continue reading...

Half of all adult women will experience at least one urinary tract infection in their lifetime, yet it remains misdiagnosed, mismanaged and under-researchedAs a health policy analyst and a woman who suffered for many years with a once poorly-recognised chronic disease – endometriosis – I am dismayed to have stumbled upon another public health crisis severely impacting women’s lives. Like endometriosis and the pelvic mesh scandal – to name just two women’s health conditions ignored for too long – this condition is misdiagnosed, mismanaged and under-researched.Each year thousands of Australians – mostly women – are let down by testing for a common bacterial infection, leaving them undiagnosed and unable to access effective treatment for painful, life-altering symptoms. Continue reading...

UK government proposals to recognise vertebrates as sentient beings are welcome, but this should be just the startLook a dog in the eye and a conscious being looks back. A being that feels hunger, thirst, warmth, cold, fear, comfort, pleasure, pain, joy. No one can seriously doubt this. The same is true of any mammal. You cannot watch rats playing hide and seek and doubt that they have feelings – that they are sentient creatures. But as animals become more distant from us in evolutionary terms, some doubt begins to creep in.Consider a bee sneaking past the guards of a rival colony to steal honey. Or the Brazilian ants that, in order to hide their nest at the end of each day, seal off the entrance from the outside. Left out in the cold at night, these ants will never see the morning, but their sacrifice increases the chance that their sisters will. The urge to attribute feelings to insects can be surprisingly strong. Continue reading...

Healthy immune systems work best when exposed to microbes. So what will lockdown have done to our resistance to germs?Every time you kiss another human being intimately for 10 seconds, more than 80m bacteria are transferred from mouth to mouth. If you’re at a party and double dip your tortilla chip into the salsa three times, around 10,000 bacteria will be transferred from your lips to the dip. Say “hi” to your co-workers as you sit down at your office desk and you’ll also be greeted by over 10m bacteria on its surface.Disturbing as these figures may seem, many scientists believe that exposure to these microbes helps fine-tune our immune systems – the network of cells and molecules that protect us from diseases. In 1989, epidemiologist David Strachan first proposed the “hygiene hypothesis” – the idea that being too clean causes defects in the immune system, leading to a rise in inflammatory diseases, such as asthma and allergies. While Strachan’s theory is debated and hygiene saves countless lives, decades of data support the idea that exposure to microbes helps the immune system develop. Continue reading...

Advanced technique used to recover genetic material may help solve the mystery of early manScientists have pinpointed major changes in Europe’s Neanderthal populations – from traces of blood and excrement they left behind in a Spanish cave 100,000 years ago.The discovery is the first important demonstration of a powerful new technique that allows researchers to study DNA recovered from cave sediments. No fossils or stone tools are needed for such studies. Instead, minuscule traces of genetic material that have accumulated in the dust of a cavern floor are employed to reveal ancient secrets. Continue reading...

Starving and trapped by ice, the Norwegian’s crew had discovered how to beat scurvy on an earlier voyage. The benefits proved crucialThirteen years before he became the first person ever to reach the south pole in 1911, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen experienced his first merciless taste of winter in the Antarctic. Stuck onboard the Belgian expedition ship Belgica, which was grounded in pack ice, he and the rest of the crew contracted scurvy and faced certain death.That is when, according to a new book published later this month, Amundsen started eating raw penguin meat – and discovered a secret that would later give him a huge advantage over Captain Robert Falcon Scott in the race to the south pole. Continue reading...

Misinformation could be causing real harm in the communityLike viruses, false information spreads through networks. In March 2020, more than a quarter of the top Covid-19 related videos on YouTube contained misleading claims and those had more than 60m views worldwide. The World Health Organization’s Covid “myth-busters” page counters ideas such as the notion that eating garlic protects you against infection. But how many people believe such claims?University of Cambridge researchers found in an online survey that about 15% of UK respondents thought it was more reliable than not that “the coronavirus is part of a global effort to enforce mandatory vaccination”, while 9% supported “the new 5G network may be making us more susceptible to the virus”. They found the most important factor linked to resilience to misinformation was numeracy. While we are fully aware that correlation is not causation, it encourages the idea that greater “data literacy” in the population could help bring some critical awareness of the dubious claims circulating on social media. In the meantime, research has shown that an effective strategy is to vigorously “pre-bunk” misinformation – essentially inoculating people against fake news by getting in the warnings first. Continue reading...

All todays events as they happened: China cancels spring Everest climbing season from Tibetan side while Portugal to reopen to UK tourists from Monday

Top adviser warns of India variant impact as scientists urge delay in lockdown changes

It can be debilitating and last a lifetime, but type 2 diabetes, if caught early, can be reversed with weight lossIt’s 10 years since Professor Roy Taylor revolutionised treatment for type 2 diabetes with a groundbreaking study that showed the disease could be reversed through rapid weight loss. Until his research was published, type 2 diabetes was thought to be an incurable, lifelong condition. Now, for many people, we know it is not.But his achievements – and the thousands of people he has cured – are not something he dwells upon. “I’m in a very lucky position of being able to do this research,” he says, “which really extends what I’ve been doing as a doctor throughout my life.” He laughs at the suggestion that he must occasionally marvel at his own success: “No, no,” he chuckles. “Lots of occupations make a useful contribution to society. I wouldn’t set myself apart.” Continue reading...

Biologists recently created a chimera with both human and monkey cells. But not all scientists are happy to blur species boundariesWhen King Minos of Crete was given a magnificent bull by the sea god Poseidon for a sacrifice, he could not bring himself to kill it. In anger, Poseidon enchanted Minos’s wife Pasiphaë to be filled with lust for the creature. The result of their trans-species mating was the bull-headed monster the Minotaur.Hybrids of humans and animals throng within myth and legend: centaurs, mermaids, goat-footed Pan. We’re both fascinated and uneasy about the boundary that separates us from other animals – and whether it is leaky. Continue reading...

US team succeeds in captive breeding of sunflower sea stars and aims to reintroduce them to the wildScientists in a San Juan Island laboratory in Washington state have successfully raised sunflower sea stars, or starfish, in captivity for the first time, in an effort to help save these charismatic ocean creatures from extinction.Sunflower sea stars, whose colours vary widely, can grow as big as a bicycle wheel and have about 20 legs. They were once abundant in coastal waters from Alaska to Mexico, but since 2013, nearly 6 billion of these now critically endangered animals have died from a gruesome wasting disease linked to warming seas. Populations have plummeted by more than 90%. Continue reading...

State-run media says landing ‘spectacularly conquered’ a new milestone; it joins US Perseverance rover which landed in FebruaryAn unmanned Chinese spacecraft has successfully landed on the surface of Mars, Chinese state news agency Xinhua has reported, making China the second space-faring nation after the US to land on the red planet.The official Xinhua news agency said the lander had touched down on Saturday, citing the China National Space Administration. Continue reading...

Latest updates: prime minister announces acceleration of vaccination programme as Indian variant threatens June lockdown easing

AI inspires hypothesis that sleeping human brain might try to break its overfamiliarity with daily dataIt’s a common enough scenario: you walk into your local supermarket to buy some milk, but by the time you get to the till, the milk bottle has turned into a talking fish. Then you remember you’ve got your GCSE maths exam in the morning, but you haven’t attended a maths lesson for nearly three decades.Dreams can be bafflingly bizarre, but according to a new theory of why we dream, that’s the whole point. By injecting some random weirdness into our humdrum existence, dreams leave us better equipped to cope with the unexpected. Continue reading...

A list of possible measures that could be taken by the government to limit the spread of the variant

Soil scientist with a key role in creating the Environmental Change Network and the University of the ArcticWhen Bill Heal, who has died aged 86, began studying soil decomposers in the 1950s, researchers aimed to understand the ecosystem in which they functioned. Growing awareness of global heating in the decades since has given this work increased urgency: the very slow rates of decomposition of plant material in peat enable the removal of great quantities of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as storage of carbon in its acidic and waterlogged conditions.Soil decomposers constitute the “factory of life”. Below-ground organisms, ranging in size from bacteria and nematodes to earthworms and molluscs, comprise a quarter of Earth’s living species. In order to study how they break down dead plants and animals, researchers inserted cotton fabric strips vertically into soil, with the degree of decomposition assessed by the loss of the strip’s tensile strength. Continue reading...

Analysis: If B.1.617.2 proves highly transmissible, hospitalisations could peak again, models show

The good news is, we think existing vaccines will protect us against this rapidly spreading strain. But we need more data

Deployment of jabs could be speeded up for multi-generational households in areas virus is spreading quickly

A moving and clear-eyed history of bodily freedoms that takes as its central character Wilhelm Reich, inventor of the orgone accumulatorRight at the end of this exhilarating journey through a century’s struggles over the human body, Olivia Laing invites her reader to “imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear”. This simple hope comes to sound like a radical demand for the impossible; after such a vivid catalogue of the many humiliations and cruelties a body can be made to bear, it isn’t easy to imagine.Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and feel and love without harming or being harmed, shines through every sentence of the book. But she is too canny a writer to miss the rich and bitter irony in which efforts to realise this promise so often get caught: every movement to liberate the body comes to be marked in some way by the constrictive regime it’s trying to escape. The writer who best grasped this irony was the Marquis de Sade, of whom Laing writes with an open and compelling ambivalence. De Sade’s nihilistic fantasies of sexual torture are a discomfiting reminder of how easily the liberty of one individual becomes the enslavement and abasement of others. Continue reading...

For example this display shows a cat asleep in a ray of sunshine! Is that legal?

Critical sequence of tests begins in space simulator to prepare Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer for its journey to the great gas giant

Study finds antibodies against Sars-CoV-2 three-and-a-half times higher in people vaccinated again after 12 weeks rather than three

Boris Johnson should get the preliminaries under way and advance the start dateThe good news is that Boris Johnson has finally announced a public inquiry into the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 pandemic. Public inquiries remain pivotal in our public life, even today, and it was inconceivable that there would not be one on what the prime minister this week called “a trauma like no other”. For many months though, Mr Johnson has prevaricated on the timing and the details. It always seemed to be never quite the right moment. Now, amid expectations that the worst of the pandemic may possibly be ending at least in this country, that excuse is running out of road.The bad news is that Mr Johnson is still playing for time. The public inquiry will not start until spring 2022. This is a ludicrous delay. When it gets under way, it will be lengthy and extensive. Although the terms of reference have not been set, Mr Johnson acknowledges that they are likely to be wide. That means the inquiry will probably have to cover, among other things, Britain’s pandemic preparedness, the state’s lockdown and economic responses, the record of the NHS, the problems in social care, the impact on ethnic minorities and other at-risk groups, test-and-trace efforts, medical treatments and vaccines, modelling, statistics, public messaging and international comparisons. It is a huge agenda. Continue reading...

Hollywood star is aiming to be first to shoot a feature film in space, but Russia has launched rival bid

My mentor and friend Michael Atkinson, who has died aged 95, was for many years professor of gastroenterology at the University of Nottingham, where one of his most important contributions was the development of the Atkinson tube, which helps people with oesophageal cancer to swallow.Born in Rawdon, just outside Leeds, to Herbert, a plumbers’ merchant, and his wife, Janet (nee Palliser), a postmistress, Michael went to Aireborough grammar school in West Yorkshire, then University College London for his medical education during the second world war. Continue reading...

Public health officials and scientists are investigating a rise in infections to verify the risk

With restrictions in England due to be further relaxed on 17 May, new coronavirus variants first detected in India are spreading across the UK. Public Health England designated one, known as B.1.617.2, as a ‘variant of concern’ last week. It is now the second most common variant in the country. Anand Jagatia speaks to the Guardian science correspondent Nicola Davis and Prof Ravi Gupta about what we know and how concerned we should be

Boris Johnson promises a public inquiry into the pandemic, but our scientific community could provide more honest answersBoris Johnson’s promise of a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic is welcome, but tardy and vague. It is scarcely surprising that the government has been dragging its feet, for no independent, objective and credible inquiry could be anything but devastating about the political handling of the crisis. The long and lethal litany of blunders and cover-ups presented in Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s book Failures of State beggars belief, even while it is so recent in memory.Official inquiries are rarely characterised by frankness or timeliness. Like the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, they tend to become drawn-out exercises in political point-scoring, at best detonating a weak charge long after the event. If the Covid inquiry does ever happen (Johnson hardly has a good track record of keeping promises), it is likely to be trammeled by evasion, foot-dragging and blame-shifting on a scale that will make Chilcot look terse and incisive in comparison. Continue reading...

Vital international scientific work, including studies into how viruses spread, is being jeopardised by short-sighted cutsGiven the ambitions outlined in the government’s integrated review of “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, you could be forgiven for thinking that research into the causes, detection and control of emerging infectious diseases with pandemic potential was being taken pretty seriously at the highest level. The government will “build on the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic to improve our use of data to anticipate and respond to future crises”, and intends to “drive towards a more science-led approach to the problems we face”. Or so it claims.At the sharp end, the reality is very different. The integrated review was published five days after UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the body representing the UK’s seven research councils, posted an open letter explaining that its official development assistance (ODA) allocation had been slashed and there was now a £120m deficit in funds promised to research already up and running. This has left the programme I lead, the One Health Poultry Hub, with a 70% cut in its funding. Continue reading...

Reports that Sage will meet on Thursday to discuss threat with PHE figures expected to show big jump in cases linked to variant

Should you have a lateral flow test before sex? Is it essential to wait until you’re fully vaccinated? Doctors, scientists and other experts answer the big questions

While its doors have been closed to the public, scientists have been busy digitising its vast archive – from 100-year-old insects to rare mineralsThe main exhibition room at the Natural History Museum in London is cathedral-like, with Hope the blue whale suspended mid-air like a demigod. Filled with specimens collected by explorers, this remarkable place teaches us about the evolution of life on our planet.There is a “great unlocking” happening in this building, home to one of the world’s largest natural history collections. Insects on pins and old minerals that have been sitting in mahogany display cases for hundreds of years are being re-examined, digitised and brought into the 21st century. Continue reading...

MRNA vaccines appear to neutralise Indian variant; CDC says there is ‘plausible causal association’ between vaccine and dangerous clotting

GB study points to highlighting personal benefits being key to counter vaccine hesitancy

However, UK trial found two doses of the same vaccine triggered less adverse reactions