by Presented by Linda Geddes and produced by Madelein on (#5GXCV)
In the second of two episodes exploring our biological clocks, Linda Geddes speaks to Prof Till Roenneberg about how social restrictions during the pandemic have altered our sleep patterns and whether maintaining these changes could reduce social jetlag
‘If you want to do well, do it yourself’ says head of space agency as collaboration with US strained by earthly disputesRussia is ready to start building its own space station with the aim of launching it into orbit by 2030 if President Vladimir Putin gives the go-ahead, the head of its Roscosmos space agency has said.The project would end more than two decades of close cooperation with the United States aboard the ageing International Space Station (ISS). Continue reading...
These plants can clean contaminated soils, could they also offer a greener way of collecting much-needed substances?A magnificent tall tree called Pycnandra acuminata grows on the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, and it does something strange – when its bark is cut it bleeds a bright blue-green latex that contains up to 25% nickel, a metal highly poisonous to most plants in more than tiny amounts.
by Natalie Grover Science correspondent on (#5GVJ7)
Researchers say loss of diversity in Sweden’s Atlantic salmon population could compromise ability of fish to adapt to climate changeFish farming may have been devised as a remedy to reinvigorate dwindling fish stocks but this human solution has spawned another problem: lower genetic diversity.Now, a study shows that the genetic makeup of Atlantic salmon populations from a century ago compared with the current stock across 13 Swedish rivers is more genetically similar than distinct, which researchers say could compromise the ability of the fish to adapt to climate change. Continue reading...
UCL data of 10,000 volunteers shows cases 30% higher among those who slept poorly in their 50s, 60s and 70sPeople who regularly sleep for six hours or less each night in middle age are more likely to develop dementia than those who routinely manage seven hours, according to a major study into the disease.Researchers found a 30% greater risk of dementia in those who during their 50s, 60s and 70s consistently had a short night’s sleep, regardless of other risk factors such as heart and metabolic conditions and poor mental health. Continue reading...
American Humanist Association criticises academic for comments about identity using ‘the guise of scientific discourse’, and withdraws its 1996 honourThe American Humanist Association has withdrawn its humanist of the year award from Richard Dawkins, 25 years after he received the honour, criticising the academic and author for “demean[ing] marginalised groups” using “the guise of scientific discourse”.The AHA honoured Dawkins, whose books include The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, in 1996 for his “significant contributions” in communicating scientific concepts to the public. On Monday, it announced that it was withdrawing the award, referring to a tweet sent by Dawkins earlier this month, in which he compared trans people to Rachel Dolezal, the civil rights activist who posed as a black woman for years. Continue reading...
by Presented by Linda Geddes and produced by Madelein on (#5GT4J)
Do you like to get up and go as the sun rises, or do you prefer the quiet hush of the late evening? Many of us tend to see ourselves as being ‘morning larks’ or ‘night owls’, naturally falling into an early or late sleep schedule. These are known as our ‘chronotypes’. Studies have shown that those with later chronotypes are at risk of a range of negative health outcomes, from an increased likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes to depression. In the first of two episodes exploring our biological clocks, Linda Geddes speaks to Prof Debra Skene and Dr Samuel Jones to find out why our internal timings differ, and why it seems worse to be a night owl Continue reading...
by Presented by Rachel Humphreys with Sarah Boseley, on (#5GT2H)
Since the pandemic began, a crack team of scientists have been working to track Covid variants as they appear, to try to stop them from spreading. The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, has been speaking to some of themAt the end of last year, a crack team of British scientists discovered a new coronavirus variant that would spread across the world. The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, tells Rachel Humphreys about how the scientists went about tracing the variant.The UK is world-leading in its genomic sequencing and surveillance. When the coronavirus first reached the UK, genomic scientists began a major collaborative effort to sequence samples from people who had fallen ill. The Covid-19 Genomics UK (Cog-UK) consortium included the four public health agencies, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and more than a dozen universities. All viruses evolve and change over time; a virus with one or two mutations is called a variant. Genome sequencing aims to track those changes, which most of the time are insignificant. By late December, the UK was responsible for about half of all the world’s genome sequencing of the coronavirus. Continue reading...
Paleontologists say a mass grave in Utah shows the dinosaurs may not have always been solitary predators as previously thoughtTyrannosaur dinosaurs may not have been solitary predators as long envisioned but more like social carnivores such as wolves, new research announced on Monday has found.Paleontologists developed the theory while studying a mass tyrannosaur death site found seven years ago in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah, one of two monuments that the Biden administration is considering restoring to their full size after former president Donald Trump shrank them. Continue reading...
Ingenuity successfully takes flight, hovering at height of about 3 metres before touching back downNasa is celebrating the first powered, controlled flight on another planet after its Ingenuity helicopter rose into the Martian sky, hovered for a moment, then gently returned to the dusty surface.The robotic craft climbed to an altitude of about 3 metres on its maiden flight on Monday morning, having hitched a ride to Mars with Nasa’s Perseverance rover, which touched down in February on a mission to search for signs of life. Continue reading...
India added to travel red list, Hancock tells MPs, as number of Indian variant cases in UK rises to 103. This live blog is now closed – please follow the global coronavirus live blog for updates
The solutions to today’s puzzlesEarlier today I set you the following two puzzles. The first is from the UK’s Mathematical Olympiad for Girls:Painting the houses Continue reading...
Nasa’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has completed the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, the space agency has announced.The small helicopter successfully took flight on the red planet on Monday morning, hovering in the air at about 3 metres (10ft), before descending and touching back down on the Martian surface
A colourful puzzle from the UK girls’ maths olympiadUpdate: the solutions can now be read here.Today’s puzzle celebrates the UK’s outstanding performance at last week’s European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, which is the world’s most prestigious female-only maths competition for pre-university students.Yuhka Machino and Jenni Voon, both aged 17, placed 6th and 7th overall, each earning gold medals. Overall, the UK ranked fifth out of 55 countries, behind Russia, the USA, Peru and Romania. (The event was held online, allowing 17 non-European countries to participate as guests.) Continue reading...
Physicists are always looking for eureka moments – but we should be careful with headline-grabbing announcementsThere is something curious about the great experiments and discoveries in fundamental physics from the past few decades. They have covered black holes, gravitational waves, the Higgs particle and quantum entanglement. They have led to Nobel prizes, reached the front pages of newspapers and made the scientific community proud. But they haven’t told us anything new: they have confirmed what we expected about the world. All these phenomena were in the university textbooks I studied almost half a century ago. Their existence was predicted by our best established theories. I do not mean to diminish the awe. On the contrary. It is amazing that the phenomena were observed, and even more amazing that they were figured out before we could see them. Their detection is a celebration of the power of scientific thinking to see into the unseen. Yet a malignant voice could have whispered in our ears at each step: “What’s the great surprise? We expected this.” Fundamental experimental physics has long been, in this sense, quite conservative. It has simply been confirming the best theories of last century over and over again.Last week findings from Fermilab, the US’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory, appeared to contradict what we thought to be the case. The laboratory announced a new measurement of the “magnetic moment” of the muon – one of the universe’s elementary particles, a heavier brother of the electron. The measured value of the muon seems to disagree with the value predicted by the theory. It is an observation that does not complement our established theories; it clashes with them. Continue reading...
Once you’ve traced out the full Ursa Major constellation, look for Polaris and shooting starsThis week, take the time to look north. Start by identifying Ursa Major, the great bear. This large constellation stretches across the northern sky. It is the third largest constellation in the entire sky and has been recognised for millennia across many different cultures, mostly because of its seven brightest stars. Continue reading...
If all goes to plan, craft will ascend to 10 feet above the surface of Mars, hover for 30 seconds, then rotate before descendingNasa on Monday will attempt to fly a miniature helicopter above the surface of Mars in what would be the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.If all goes to plan, the 1.8kg helicopter will slowly ascend to an altitude of three metres above the Martian surface, hover for 30 seconds, then rotate before descending to a gentle landing on all four legs. The flight is due to take place at 3.30am US eastern daylight time (8.30am BST/7.30am GMT). But data confirming the outcome is not expected to reach Nasa until about three hours later. Continue reading...
Countless inquiries have found the same problems afflicting the mental health system, but cost and access barriers still leave those seeking and providing care in despair
Mike Whittaker has a suggestion to reduce test costs for those wishing to travel abroad, while Catherine Dunn says that if the government invested in public health infrastructure, we would have a more effective testing systemYour article (Airlines warn the cost of Covid tests will stop people going abroad, 9 April) considers the cost of Covid tests for a family, calculated as the cost of a single test, multiplied by the number in the travel group.But the tests are to detect if any person in the group has the virus. Hence in principle, the samples from all persons in a travel group could be combined into one single sample tube, which is then tested with a single test. A positive result would then show that somebody in the group had Covid, thereby preventing the whole group from travelling. This would allow costs to be reduced for each travel group.
The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsScientists and astronomers tell us that the universe is expanding. But what is it expanding into, ie what’s beyond the universe?
An exhibition at London’s Science Museum shows how far carbon capture research has comeTackling climate change may bring unexpected benefits, London’s Science Museum will reveal next month. A special exhibition on carbon capture, the fledgling technology of extracting greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and emissions from factories, will display bottles of vodka, tubes of toothpaste, pens and yoga mats made from carbon drawn out of thin air.In addition, the exhibition – Our Future Planet – will showcase prototypes of the gas-harvesting machines that can provide this carbon. They include the Lackner artificial tree which mirrors the actions of living plants by breathing in carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. This Heath Robinson-like device – made up of dangling panels of carbon-absorbing material – was built by Klaus Lackner at Arizona State University and will be the first to be displayed in Britain. Continue reading...
Outdoor therapy can help people to become reflective and their body language while moving gives clues to their feelingsCovid has transformed the way many of us work and that includes the people who look after our mental health. For much of lockdown, psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists have all had to venture into the world of online therapy, tackling their clients’ issues via a computer screen, and often the experience has felt less than ideal for all those involved.But throughout much of lockdown, another option has become increasingly popular: combining therapy with the benefits of the great outdoors. The British Psychological Society (BPS) issued guidance on this outdoor approach last summer, advising its members on how best to take their work outside, addressing issues such as confidentiality and the absence of a boundaried space. Yet many therapists ditched the four walls and a couch approach a long time ago and have been working out in nature for years. Continue reading...
The MIT researcher says that for humans to flourish we must move beyond thinking of robots as potential future competitorsDr Kate Darling is a research specialist in human-robot interaction, robot ethics and intellectual property theory and policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. In her new book, The New Breed, she argues that we would be better prepared for the future if we started thinking about robots and artificial intelligence (AI) like animals.What is wrong with the way we think about robots?
He believed orgasms could be a healing force and coined the term ‘sexual revolution’. Reich’s understanding of the body is vital in our age of protests and patriarchy, writes Olivia LaingThere are certain people who speak directly into their moment, and others who leave a message for history to decipher, whose work gains in relevance or whose life becomes uncannily meaningful decades after their death. It’s hard to think of a better example of the latter right now, in this year of protests and plague, than the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, one of the strangest and most prescient thinkers of the 20th century.What Reich wanted to understand was the body itself: why you might want to escape or subdue it, why it remains a naked source of power. His wild life draws together aspects of bodily experience that remain intensely relevant now, from illness to sex, anti-fascist direct action to incarceration. The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin read Reich, as did many of the second-wave feminists. Susan Sontag wrote Illness As Metaphor as a riposte to his theories about health, while Kate Bush’s song “Cloudbusting” immortalises his battle with the law, its insistent, hiccupping refrain – “I just know that something good is going to happen” – conveying the compelling utopian atmosphere of his ideas. Continue reading...
Space agency breaks with tradition by awarding $2.9bn contract to single company in ‘big step’ for moon-to-Mars strategyNasa has chosen SpaceX to build the next-generation spacecraft that will return humans to the moon, further strengthening Elon Musk’s grip on the burgeoning public-private space industry.The $2.9bn contract to build the lunar lander that will spearhead the Artemis program, Nasa’s ambitious project to return to the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972, was announced on Friday. Continue reading...
There is a greater need than ever for measured, up-to-date information about this condition, writes Prof Michael Sharpe. Plus letters from Robin Davies and Prof Paul GarnerGeorge Monbiot has written about post Covid-19 illnesses (Apparently just by talking about it, I’m super-spreading long Covid, 14 April). He referred to slides he had obtained from a talk I was invited to give because of my clinical expertise in this area. In my talk, I emphasised the need to listen to patients and assess them individually, as many different factors – biological, psychological and social – may be contributing to their illness.I said that while we find that most patients referred to post-Covid clinics by GPs do not have evidence of persisting and serious organ damage, some are very anxious that they may have. Mr Monbiot appears to be surprised to hear that this anxiety is not helped by media articles emphasising organ damage and permanent disability; most clinicians will not be. Continue reading...
Billionaire Jared Isaacman is chartering a SpaceX rocket to take him and three others into orbitThis week was the 60th anniversary of the first human spaceflight. On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The flight lasted 108 minutes and reached a maximum altitude of 327km (203 miles).Following the re-entry of his space capsule, Gagarin parachuted the last 7km to Earth, landing in a potato field near Saratov. A woman and her granddaughter were planting the crop, and were startled to see him in his bright orange flight suit coming towards them. Continue reading...
Experts calculate the total number of the dinosaurs that lived over 127,000 generationsOne Tyrannosaurus rex seems scary enough. Now picture 2.5 billion of them. That’s how many of the fierce dinosaur king probably roamed Earth over the course of a couple of million years, a new study finds.Using calculations based on body size, sexual maturity and the creatures’ energy needs, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, figured out just how many T rex lived over 127,000 generations, according to a study in the journal Science on Thursday. It’s a first-of-its-kind number, but just an estimate with a margin of error that is the size of a T rex. Continue reading...
by Damian Carrington Environment editor on (#5GMWP)
New paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat into space, reducing need for air conditioningThe whitest-ever paint has been produced by academic researchers, with the aim of boosting the cooling of buildings and tackling the climate crisis.The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years. Continue reading...
Scientists confirm they have produced ‘chimera’ embryos from long-tailed macaques and humansMonkey embryos containing human cells have been produced in a laboratory, a study has confirmed, spurring fresh debate into the ethics of such experiments.The embryos are known as chimeras, organisms whose cells come from two or more “individuals”, and in this case, different species: a long-tailed macaque and a human. Continue reading...