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Study of tree rings dating back to Roman empire concludes weather since 2014 has been extraordinaryThe series of severe droughts and heatwaves in Europe since 2014 is the most extreme for more than 2,000 years, research suggests.The study analysed tree rings dating as far back as the Roman empire to create the longest such record to date. The scientists said global heating was the most probable cause of the recent rise in extreme heat. Continue reading...

The trauma of intensive care often triggers long-term mental health problems, and counselling is crucial to rehabilitation

It’s human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may existStories about people getting blood clots soon after taking the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine have become a source of anxiety among European leaders. After a report on a death and three hospitalisations in Norway, which found serious blood clotting in adults who had received the vaccine, Ireland has temporarily suspended the jab. Some anxiety about a new vaccine is understandable, and any suspected reactions should be investigated. But in the current circumstances we need to think slow as well as fast, and resist drawing causal links between events where none may exist.As Ireland’s deputy chief medical officer, Ronan Glynn, has stressed, there is no proof that this vaccine causes blood clots. It’s a common human tendency to attribute a causal effect between different events, even when there isn’t one present: we wash the car and the next day a bird relieves itself all over the bonnet. Typical. Or, more seriously, someone is diagnosed with autism after receiving the MMR vaccine, so people assume a causal connection – even when there isn’t one. And now, people get blood clots after having a vaccine, leading to concern over whether the vaccine is what caused the blood clots. Continue reading...

Parents whose only hope was finding foreign sponsorship or a clinical trial are now looking for homegrown breakthroughsFor three years, Vidya tried to find the cause of her son’s recurrent fevers and low cognitive development. When she found out, she was devastated.Vineeth, 10, has an incurable illness – mucopolysaccharidosis type 2 – that affects his organs. Afflicting just one in a million, the enzyme-replacement medication that can help stop the illness getting any worse costs £100,000 a year, far beyond the reach of even a wealthier Indian parent. Continue reading...

Moon will gain altitude and illumination until Friday when it will sit between giant star and red planet

Here are the current coronavirus hotspots in New South Wales and what to do if you’ve visited them

Suspension follows similar move in Ireland due to reports in Norway of blood clots despite no proof of a link

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Graded exercise therapy is not the right way to treat people with ME or long Covid, argue Dr Charles Shepherd and Rachel HardingDr Alastair Miller, Professor Paul Garner and Professor Peter White are not correct when they state that graded exercise therapy (GET) is a safe and effective treatment for ME/chronic fatigue syndrome (Letters, 11 March).Having reviewed all the published evidence from clinical trials, the new Nice guideline no longer recommends GET as an effective treatment for ME/CFS. Continue reading...

Manx government has run strict regime to keep island virus-free but isolation exemption for ferry workers causes anger

Projects tackling some of world’s major problems – including the climate crisis – are set to be cancelled or cut back after budget cutsHundreds of key research projects aimed at tackling some of the world’s major problems – from antimicrobial resistance to the climate crisis – will have to be cancelled or cut back thanks to budget cuts imposed by the government.Last week, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency – which controls science funding in Britain – told universities that its budget for international development projects had been cut from £245m to £125m. Continue reading...

Inequalities in vaccine take-up rates highlight need for government to build trust in deprived communities

Data reveals huge disparities between vaccination take-up rates in richer and poorer areas

Prof Neil Ferguson is ‘80% sure’ British Covid cases will stay low until autumn, but warns of need for booster jabs

Psychological burdens from stress to loneliness to lack of sleep have been shown to affect immune responses to other vaccinationsSleep well. Take time out to relax. Connect with your friends and family. Such things would be advisable at any time – but might it be especially important in the coming months. According to a growing body of evidence, our psychological state can shape the immune system’s reaction to a new vaccine – including the development of protective antibodies that will help us to fend off infection.We already know that physical factors, such as the body mass index, can have an immediate effect on vaccine efficacy. In late February, for instance, a study of Italian healthcare workers found that obesity blunted the antibody response to the Pfizer/BioNTech jab. But based on our understanding of various vaccines for other diseases, it seems clear that our mental health and overall stress levels will also play an important role. “There’s quite a spectrum of opinion as to what things may help or harm the immune system,” says Prof Daniel Davis, an immunologist at the University of Manchester. “But most scientists would agree that stress has an effect.” Continue reading...

Behind the numbers: why the devices being used in England’s schools need another test to confirm positive cases

Scientists hope that ice will give up more clues to the fate of the 1845 Arctic expedition to find the Northwest PassageIt remains one of the greatest mysteries of naval exploration. What doomed John Franklin’s 1845 attempt to sail the Northwest Passage, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in his ships Erebus and Terror?The expedition claimed the lives of all 129 men and has gripped the public’s imagination for the past century and a half. Now Canadian researchers are facing a crucial decision on whether to relaunch attempts to find new clues about the ships’ fate. Continue reading...

Archaeologists unearth monks’ cells and churches with biblical inscriptions dating back to fourth century ADA French-Norwegian archaeological team has discovered new Christian ruins in Egypt’s Western Desert, revealing monastic life in the region in the fifth century AD, the Egyptian antiquities ministry said.“The French-Norwegian mission discovered during its third excavation campaign at the site of Tal Ganoub Qasr al-Agouz in the Bahariya Oasis several buildings made of basalt, others carved into the bedrock and some made of mud bricks,” it said in a statement on Saturday. Continue reading...

It’s been a tough time to be 17 or 18, but there have been some upsides, tooMy sons are 18 and 17. It was the younger’s birthday this week and I made an awful cake that definitely breached my minimum cake standards (I hesitate to criticise Nigella, but there is such a thing as too much peanut butter). He looked a bit overwhelmed when we sang happy birthday, and I worried all day about him and his 17-year-old pandemic life, without access to the places and people that help being 17 make sense. There is nothing I can do about that, so I am fixating on the cake, sitting here wondering if I have time to make a replacement. I don’t, but I might anyway. What else do I have to offer him – another load of laundry?Because neither of my kids actually needs me now. They could live independently without dying of hunger or septic shock (the elder managed five weeks last summer) and after an emergency remedial tutorial on “what can’t go in a microwave” at Christmas, probably without fire or explosion either. They can clean a loo, iron trousers and brave an HMRC helpline; they can make absorption-method rice, a from-scratch pasta sauce and decent chocolate chip cookies. After six months of Covid testing, one has more savings than I do; the other is cagier, but after a decade of not spending his birthday and Christmas money, I suspect he does, too. Continue reading...

This week sees the opening of the first UK high-street clinic offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. Could popping psilocybin be the future of mental healthcare?In the summer of 1981, when he was 13, Grant crashed a trail motorbike into a wall at his parents’ house in Cambridgeshire. He’d been hiding it in the shed, but “it was far too powerful for me, and on my very first time starting it in the garden, I smashed it into a wall”. His mother came outside to find the skinny teenager in a heap next to the crumpled motorbike. “I was in a lot of trouble.”Grant hadn’t given this childhood memory much thought in the intervening years, but one hot August day in 2019, it came back to him with such clarity that, at 53, now a stocky father of two, he suddenly understood it as a clue to his dangerously unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Continue reading...

Medical physicist who pioneered body scanning as a way to diagnose diseaseFrom the earliest X-rays to the latest body scanners, the ability to visualise the inside of the living body has revolutionised medical diagnosis. With a profound understanding of physics, great technical ingenuity and a mission to put these skills to use in the service of medicine, John Mallard, who has died aged 94, was one of the first to establish routine scanning services that revealed tumours in organs such as the brain and the liver. His team at the University of Aberdeen built the first whole-body MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner and produced the first clinically significant MRI images of a hospital patient.Mallard was interested in ends rather than means and pioneered several different forms of imaging technology, adopting another technique each time it offered the chance to produce clearer images or greater safety for the patient. In the beginning, locating tumours or other pathology involved injecting radioactive tracers and picking up their emissions with detectors outside the body. Continue reading...

Preliminary data presented to Sage shows women five times as likely to report new disability or increased fatigueWorking-age women who are hospitalised with coronavirus are five times as likely to develop long Covid as men in the same age group, according to research presented to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).Preliminary data shared with scientific advisers suggests that women under 50 are five times as likely as men under 50 to report a new disability, six times as likely to experience greater breathlessness, and twice as likely to feel more fatigued up to 11 months after leaving hospital. Continue reading...

World Health Organization tells countries to continue using jab while it looks into blood clot reports

My family treated my positive Covid test as exciting news, like they had been watching EastEnders for 17 years and finally something had happened

When I damaged my vocal cords, I was forced to change the way I spoke – and discovered how much our voices reveal who we are. By John Colapinto Continue reading...

Researchers claim breakthrough in study of 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in seaFrom the moment it was discovered more than a century ago, scholars have puzzled over the Antikythera mechanism, a remarkable and baffling astronomical calculator that survives from the ancient world.The hand-powered, 2,000-year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses. But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle. Continue reading...

New species of wētā, a giant flightless cricket, is seen as ‘reflecting traits’ of Jacinda ArdernNew Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has received what may be her greatest accolade yet: a large insect named in her honour.A new species of wētā – a giant flightless cricket that is endemic to New Zealand – has been named Hemiandrus jacinda for being Labour-party red in colour and “long-limbed”. Continue reading...

Peyo and his owner once competed at dressage events. Now they spend their time doing rounds in a French hospital, often staying with sick people until the end. All photographs by Jeremy Lempin/Divergence Continue reading...

Ecuador’s president to decide on proposal to expand islands’ marine reserve, seen as vital to protect world heritage site from fishing industry

Inquiry into 2012 burglary is revived after French police turn up a DNA match for unrelated crimeGerman police say they have solved a nine-year-old burglary case after DNA found on a half-eaten piece of sausage matched that of a man detained in France over an unrelated crime.Police in the western town of Schwelm said on Thursday the sausage belonged to the victim, and the suspect – a 30-year-old Albanian citizen – appeared to have helped himself to a bite during the break-in in Gevelsberg in March 2012. Continue reading...

Access to IVF and fertility services and postponement of parenthood drive rise in global twinning ratesTwins may be more common today than at any time in history, according to the first comprehensive survey of twin births around the world.Researchers analysed records from more than 100 countries and found a substantial rise in twin birthrates since the 1980s, with one in 42 people now born a twin, equivalent to 1.6 million children a year. According to the study, the global twin birthrate has risen by one-third, on average, over the past 40 years. Continue reading...

No trials of graded exercise have shown to harm patients, say Dr Alastair Miller, Prof Paul Garner and Prof Peter White, so those with post-Covid fatigue syndrome should not be discouraged from trying itDr Joanna Herman is right to call out the lack of care being offered to sufferers of long Covid (People with long Covid urgently need help. Why can’t we access it?, 10 March). The willingness of doctors to speak out as patients has done much to highlight the long-term effects of Covid-19.We know that long Covid is more than one disease, all of which will need different treatments. But we do not know that graded exercise therapy is detrimental to recovery from the post-Covid fatigue syndrome. There are no such studies. Continue reading...

Matt Hancock acts on official advice concerning segment of society more likely to be in poor health

Last week videos of what appeared to be Tom Cruise at home and playing golf appeared on TikTok. It later emerged the clips were actually AI-generated by a creator of ‘deepfake’ videos. Deepfake videos depict situations that have never happened in the real world, and are becoming increasingly convincing. Alex Hern goes behind the scenes to find out exactly how such videos were made, and how far this technology has progressed Continue reading...

Designer babies and ethical quicksand ... The biographer of Steve Jobs tells the story of Jennifer Doudna and the development of gene-editingOne of the most striking passages in Walter Isaacson’s new book comes towards the end. It is 2019 and a scientific meeting is under way at the famous Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in New York State, but James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is banned from it because of the racist and scientifically unfounded views he has expressed on intelligence. Isaacson, who is to interview Watson, therefore has to make his way to the house on the nearby campus that the scientist has been allowed to keep. When the conversation sails dangerously close to the race issue, someone shouts from the kitchen: “If you are going to let him say these things, then I am going to have to ask you to leave.” The 91-year-old Watson shrugs and changes tack.The voice from the kitchen belonged to Rufus, Watson’s middle-aged son who suffers from schizophrenia. “My dad’s statements might make him out to be a bigot and discriminatory,” he once said. “They just represent his rather narrow interpretation of genetic destiny.” In many ways, Isaacson observes, Rufus is wiser than his father. Continue reading...

Innovation in NHS self-care will see patients in England swallow tiny cameras instead of having standard endoscopyPeople will be able to check if they have bowel cancer by swallowing a tiny capsule containing miniature cameras, in an extension of patient self-care.In what experts described as a trend towards more NHS at-home care, hastened by the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of people in England will be able to avoid the discomfort of having a camera inserted into their bowel by instead swallowing a capsule the size of a cod liver oil tablet. Continue reading...

Before the vaccine, Britain’s pandemic defences were in a scandalous state. The government must still be held to account for its failuresContact tracing was once advertised as the centrepiece of the government’s strategy for managing the pandemic. The coronavirus would be held at bay and other nations would be in awe at Britain’s “world-beating” system. Neither goal was achieved.A report, published on Wednesday by the Commons public accounts committee, struggled to find evidence that NHS test and trace has made a significant difference in reducing transmission. That is not to say it did nothing. Hundreds of thousands of daily tests have been administered. In the second half of last year, 2.5 million people who tested positive were contacted and a further 4.5 million people were told to self-isolate. (How many did so and for how long is another question.) Continue reading...

Those of us who have received free vaccinations may want to show our appreciation by contributing to a scheme to ensure vaccine rollout in lower income countries, writes Paul TylerThe timely reminder (A ‘me first’ approach to vaccination won’t defeat Covid, 5 March) from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, coincides with a growing public awareness that we are all in this pandemic together. UK citizens will not be safe – or able to travel freely – until all the world is protected. We who have received free vaccination – thanks to the NHS – may want to show our appreciation by contributing to the rollout in lower income countries.To this end, members from all parties of the House of Lords have come together with GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) to enable UK residents to contribute to the Covax programme. Our #GetOneGiveOne campaign has raised £56,000 from individual donations in its first week. Continue reading...

Research, not yet peer-reviewed, shows antimicrobial lotion Dermol 500 neutralises virus

The scientific community are rising to the challenge of worldwide vaccination, undertaking a health programme of unprecedented scale

African swine fever led to mass cull of pigs in China and may have increased human-virus contact as people turned to other meat

Science-fiction author honoured in Nasa’s chosen name for Mars rover’s touchdown“Mars is a rock - cold, empty, almost airless, dead. Yet it’s heaven in a way,” Octavia E Butler wrote in her acclaimed novel Parable of the Sower. Decades later, Nasa has informally named the touchdown site of the Mars rover Perseverance after the late science fiction novelist.Nasa said there was “no better person” to mark the landing site than Butler. “Her guiding principle, ‘When using science, do so accurately,’ is what the science team at Nasa is all about. Her work continues to inspire today’s scientists and engineers across the globe – all in the name of a bolder, more equitable future for all,” said Nasa’s Thomas Zurbuchen. Continue reading...

Russian space agency Roscosmos and Chinese counterpart CNSA to develop research facilities on surface of moon or in its orbitRussia and China have unveiled plans for a joint lunar space station, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos saying it has signed an agreement with China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) to develop a “complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the moon”.The CNSA, for its part, said the project was “open to all interested countries and international partners” in what experts said would be China’s biggest international space cooperation project to date. Continue reading...

New findings cement idea that ritual and religion was invoked using talismans to soothe nervesWith sky-high levels of maternal mortality, the science of obstetrics virtually nonexistent and the threat of infectious disease always around the corner, pregnant medieval women put their faith in talismans to bring them divine protection during childbirth.From amulets to precious stones, the list of items that the church lent to pregnant women was substantial, but the most popular lucky charm was a “birthing girdle”. Continue reading...

Biak island residents say SpaceX launchpad would devastate island’s ecology and displace people from their homesPapuans whose island has been offered up as a potential launch site for Elon Musk’s SpaceX project have told the billionaire Tesla chief his company is not welcome on their land, and its presence would devastate their island’s ecosystem and drive people from their homes.Musk was offered use of part of the small island of Biak in Papua by Indonesian president Joko Widodo in December. Continue reading...

Two studies fail to find evidence to support claims supplements protect against coronavirus

Scottish first minister announces limited changes to mixing, in particular for teenagers. This live blog has now closed – please follow the global coronavirus live blog for updates

Apparent inconsistencies in QCovid risk prediction tool wrongly identifying some patients as high risk

One year after being the first western country to lock down, Italy is bracing for a third wave of the pandemic

Social distancing measures mean most of us now have very little opportunity to talk to strangers and acquaintances. These chats might seem insignificant, but they can provide lots of psychological benefits. To find out more, Linda Geddes speaks to Gillian Sandstrom about what we’re currently missing out on. And, when told Gillian finds finishing a chat particularly hard, Linda gets in touch with the author of a recent paper asking why we find it so challenging to end a conversation Continue reading...