Palaeontologist who studied the bony ancestors of salmon and cod, and what lungfish had in common with four-limbed animalsEarly in his scientific career, Brian Gardiner, who has died aged 88, was seduced by fossils – the remains, shapes or traces of ancient organisms preserved in rock. Brian wanted to learn how these should be interpreted and classified and what they reveal about evolution. In the 1950s, working at Queen Elizabeth College, London (which has now merged with King’s College London), and using the collections of the Natural History Museum (NHM), he first studied fish embedded in Jurassic limestone formed 170-200m years ago. This period contains fearsome, primitive cartilaginous sharks, and the biggest bony fish ever – Leedsichthys, reaching 20 metres long.Using anatomical clues, Brian unravelled a story of the “modernisation” of bony fishes as they evolved into the streamlined, fast-swimming, dominant group represented today by salmon and cod. Changes were discovered in fins, tails, teeth and jaws, and a reduction in the hitherto bulky external armour. Critically, there was the transition of softer cartilage into ossified discs in the backbone, a specialisation shared with amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, including humans. Brian became keen to explore wider relationships. Continue reading...

Analysis rebuts claim by Boris Johnson that jab was developed ‘because of greed’

Why do we scream? Whilst past research has largely focused on using screams to signal danger and scare predators, humans scream in a much wider range of contexts – from crying out in pleasure to shrieking with grief. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Prof Sascha Frühholz about his new study identifying what emotions humans communicate through screams, and how our brains react differently to distinct types of scream calls Continue reading...

Trial suggests psilocybin combined with psychological therapy is as effective as antidepressant drugMagic mushrooms have a long and rich history. Now scientists say they could play an important role in the future, with their active ingredient a promising treatment for depression.The results from a small, phase two clinical trial have revealed that two doses of psilocybin appears to be as effective as the common antidepressant escitalopram in treating moderate to severe major depressive disorder, at least when combined with psychological therapy. Continue reading...

Households in Southwark and Barnet added to test drive in effort to curb spread of South African variant

Remains of buildings near Yorkshire town said to be ‘most important Roman discovery of last decade’When developers broke ground on the outskirts of Scarborough, they were hoping to build a housing estate ideal for first-time buyers, families and professionals, with en suites, off-street parking and integrated kitchens galore. But before shovels had even hit earth, they found someone else had got there first: the Romans.The remains of a Roman settlement believed to be the first of its kind discovered in Britain – and possibly the whole Roman empire – has been uncovered near the North Yorkshire seaside town. Continue reading...

Intact remains, discovered in Morocco, may help engineers create stronger lightweight structuresPterosaurs, one of the first and largest vertebrates to learn to fly, have often been seen as the cool cousins of the infamous Tyrannosaurus rex.Now scientists have discovered the 100m-year-old secret to the success of the flying pterosaur: a neck longer than a giraffe. Continue reading...

Scientists say AstraZeneca vaccine has greater effect when it comes to cellular response

Outbreaks such as the South African variant that’s emerged in south London will require constant vigilance as lockdown easesAll viruses mutate. They do this to adapt and survive better in their specific host. The virus that causes Covid-19 is no different: it has moved from the animal realm, where it most likely originated in bats, to the human world. Since then, scientists have been locked in a battle between the spread of the virus and the ability to immunise against it. We now have the vaccines to protect us against Covid-19 – but what happens when this virus mutates further, as it likely will?As lockdown restrictions ease, south London has already seen a cluster of new cases related to the South African variant. Over the next six months, dealing with emerging variants will be one of the major challenges that scientists face. Some vaccines show promising signs of coping with new variants – the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna seem to offer some protection against the variants first identified in Kent and South Africa. Most virologists think that Covid-19 vaccines will protect against severe disease and death, even in people who have been infected by a mutated strain of the virus. Continue reading...

New Netflix drama Stowaway is the latest in a crop of movies that suggests space travel is more random death and boredom than warp speed nineAnybody who fancies watching a new science fiction film this month can count their lucky stars. A Netflix drama, Stowaway, features Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette and Daniel Dae Kim as a trio of astronauts who are on their way to Mars when they discover that an unfortunate launch-plan engineer, Shamier Anderson, is still onboard. The trouble is, there is only enough oxygen for three of them. American viewers can also see Voyagers (due for release in Britain in July), in which 30 hormonal starship passengers are preparing to colonise another world. The trouble is, something goes wrong on their mission, too, and the trip turns into an interplanetary Lord of the Flies. The moral of both stories is that you should probably push “astronaut” a few slots down your list of dream jobs. But if you’ve caught any other science fiction films recently, it’s bound to be quite far down the list, anyway.Again and again over the past decade, cinema has warned us that venturing beyond the Earth’s atmosphere is uncomfortable, dangerous, exhaustingly difficult, frequently tedious, and almost certain to involve interplanetary angst and asphyxiation. George Clooney’s morose The Midnight Sky rounded off 2020 with a fatal spacewalk. Aniara and Passengers posited that existence on a colony ship was a lot grimmer than Wall-E had led us to believe. The “sad dads in space” sub-genre coalesced with Brad Pitt’s Freudian moping in Ad Astra, and Robert Pattinson’s in High Life. No wonder today’s youngsters would rather be YouTubers or influencers than astronauts. The overriding thesis of current science fiction films is this: space travel is rubbish. Continue reading...

A professor has suggested that press coverage could make people believe they have the condition

Sleeping sickness, strange behaviour and mass hysteria ... a neurologist makes sense of ‘psychosomatic’ illness

Researchers to examine whether mixing vaccines may give longer-lasting immunity against virus

To understand why so many are craving human touch we can look to our evolutionary history – and the secrets of our skin

They are 20 disparate diseases that, like mines, unduly affect the world’s poorest people. Now there’s a plan to eradicate them by 2030In January the World Health Organization launched a new strategy for eradicating neglected tropical diseases, boldly setting targets to eliminate 20 of them by 2030.But what are neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)? There is no easy answer. The concept was first proposed in the early 2000s to bring to light a group of diseases that disproportionately affect poor people yet, despite their collective impact, do not attract as much attention as diseases such as HIV/Aids, malaria or tuberculosis. Continue reading...

Colony does not perish when queen dies as ‘chosen’ workers shrink brains and expand their ovariesFew species in the animal kingdom can change the size of their brain. Fewer still can change it back to its original size. Now researchers have found the first insect species with that ability: Indian jumping ants.They are like catnip to researchers in the field. In contrast to their cousins, Indian jumping ants colonies do not perish once their queen dies. Instead, “chosen” workers take her place – with expanded ovaries and shrunken brains – to produce offspring. But, if a worker’s “pseudo-queen” status is somehow revoked, their bodies can bounce back, the research suggests. Continue reading...

A bright meteor shot across and lit up the night sky of south Florida and the Bahamas on Monday. The moment was captured by security cameras and dashcams across the region

Analysis: buying new and existing technologies ensured alternatives if a vaccine failed or had supply issues

Local restrictions may be needed, specialists warn, as South Africa strain is identified in London

Mark Winstanley describes the quiet revolution that is transforming care for those with mental illness, while Dr Patrick Roycroft and Dr Sarajane Aris call for more compassion-based psychological helpIn the 1970s, cancer was stigmatised and support was underfunded. We have come a long way since then – albeit with road still left to travel. A key factor in this turn of fortune was hope that things could be a lot better for people living with cancer. That hope is often missing from discussions on mental health. But it is there.You are right to flag some key issues in mental health in your editorial (The Guardian view on mental health: this emergency requires a response, 12 April). We are still some way off parity of esteem, there are problems in ensuring that the workforce is in place to meet demand, and there are genuine concerns about the prevalence of severe mental illness in young adults. But what the editorial didn’t mention was that there is a quiet revolution under way, led by the NHS and supported by the charity sector and public bodies, to transform community mental health services. Continue reading...

More than 200 people submitted reports and videos of a fiery trail and apparent space-rock explosionTo the American Meteor Society it was simply Event 2281-2021, an unremarkable name for a spectacular fireball that made an uncomfortably close pass to Earth on Monday.A fiery trail and apparent space-rock explosion was captured on doorbell cameras and dashcams and was visible to stargazers from Florida to the Bahamas as it passed an estimated 9,300 miles above the planet at about 10.19pm ET. Continue reading...

Prof Marie Scully developed a diagnostic test at University College London hospital after seeing rare side-effect in patient

This documentary about the celebrated folklorist also takes a leisurely look at the working methods of the artists he reveresThere’s an unmistakable slow-cinema vibe to this scrupulously observational documentary, which seems somehow to go on for weeks despite its 100-minute running time. The ostensible subject matter is American anthropologist Henry Glassie, who is college professor emeritus in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University; but it isn’t really “about” him in any conventional sense. Instead, the documentary, directed by Irish film-maker Pat Collins, invites us to experience Glassie’s methods for ourselves, in extended sequences in which it simply watches artists at work, seemingly in real time as they sculpt religious icons, build giant coil pots, weave carpets. The accent is very much on “folk” creators – people with little formal art education, rooted in a community, and whose work is (largely) to serve a function, rather than purely aesthetic.Well, it’s fascinating and hypnotic to watch, and for most of the film Glassie, with his luxuriant Mark Twain moustache, is glimpsed only briefly, sitting in the corner of the frame, taking notes, or snapping the odd picture, or, like us, simply watching. The film follows in his decades-old tracks, starting off with Brazilian metal workers and woodcarvers, visits an Anatolian village that makes traditional rugs, and ends up in County Fermanagh where, in the 70s, Glassie recorded the history and music of this border community. Continue reading...

Initial glitch as over-45s rush to book jab, while third vaccine offers alternative to AstraZeneca for under-30s

After mounting concern over reports of rare but serious blood clots in a small number of recipients of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, last week the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommended that healthy adults under 30 should have an alternative jab if they can. To find out what’s behind the change in advice, Nicola Davis speaks to Dr Sue Pavord about what this rare clotting syndrome is, and asks Prof Adam Finn about how the JCVI made its decision Continue reading...

Sixty years ago, an air force pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, taking the Soviet Union's own giant leap for mankind and spurring a humiliated United States to race for the moon. Gagarin's 108-minute mission marked a historic achievement for the Soviet Union, which beat the US in a tight race to launch the first human into space. Continue reading...

Evidence is growing of a link between the Covid-19 vaccine and a deadly thrombosis – and theories are emerging as to whySince rare but severe clotting was seen in some people following vaccination with AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, researchers worldwide have been grappling to understand why the clotting syndrome, known as “thrombosis with thrombocytopenia” (clotting with a low platelet count), occurs.Most cases of these clots occurred in veins in the brain (a condition called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, or CVST), though some occurred in other veins, including those to the abdomen (splanchnic vein thrombosis). It has a high death rate. Continue reading...

Nightmare scenarios involving deadly new variants are making us all too gloomy – but there’s a scientific case for optimismIt can be quite easy, reading the press, to believe that the pandemic will never end. Even when good news about vaccines started to arrive in the autumn, this grim narrative managed to harden. In the past month, you could read “five reasons that herd immunity is probably impossible”, even with mass vaccination; breathless reports about yet-uncharacterised but potentially ruinous variants, such as the “double mutant” variant in India, or two concerning variants potentially swapping mutations and teaming up in a “nightmare scenario” in California; get ready, some analysts said, for the “permanent pandemic”.Among many people I know, a sort of low-grade doom has set in. They think the vaccines are a mere sliver of hope, only holding back the virus for a short time before being worn down by a rush of ever-cleverer variants that will slosh around us, perhaps for ever. Things might briefly get better, they believe, but only by a little, and even that is tenuous. Continue reading...

Inhaling budesonide found to shorten recovery for over-65s, and over-50s with underlying conditions

Madrid regional government says it has suspended all activity at Vivotecnia after inspection found ‘signs of animal mistreatment’Regional officials in Spain have temporarily halted all activity at an animal testing facility after the publication of undercover footage that appears to show animals being taunted, smacked, tossed around and cut into with no or inadequate anaesthesia.Since 2000, Madrid-based contract research organisation Vivotecnia has carried out experiments on animals ranging from monkeys to mini pigs and rabbits for the biopharmaceutical, chemical, cosmetic, tobacco and food industries. The facility has in the past secured funding from the EU and Spanish authorities for its projects. Continue reading...

Dizzy diplomats, twitching schoolgirls, children in comas ... psychosomatic illnesses are not always as unexplainable as they seem, writes neurologist Suzanne O’SullivanI cannot resist a news headline that refers to a mystery illness and there is no shortage to keep me interested. “Mystery of 18 twitching teenagers in New York”; “Mysterious sleeping sickness spreads in Kazakhstani village”; “200 Colombian girls fall ill with a mysterious illness”; “The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome”. One medical disorder seems to attract this description more than any other: psychosomatic illness. That the body is the mouthpiece of the mind is evident in our posture, in the smiles on our faces, in the tremor of our nervous hands. But, still, when the body speaks too explicitly, when the power of the mind leads to physical disability, it can be hard to understand why. This perplexity is most apparent when psychosomatic disorders affect groups, spreading from person to person like a social virus, in a phenomenon often referred to as mass hysteria.We are currently caught in a pandemic. We have been ordered to hide and to search our bodies for symptoms. If there was ever a time for a psychosomatic disorder to spread through anxiety and suggestion, this is it. The threat of a virus can affect health in more ways than one. Since 2018 I have been visiting communities affected by suspected contagions of psychosomatic illness. I have seen what fear can do to our physical health. I have also seen the curative effect of hope. Continue reading...

Adequate support now could head off a post-pandemic exodus of health workers who feel broken by their experiences

Pilot scheme is under way to harness forecasts to predict where conditions that fuel cases are likely to developA weather-based surveillance system that could offer advanced warning of outbreaks of meningitis is being piloted across sub-Saharan Africa in a bid to save lives, researchers have revealed.According to the Meningitis Research Foundation, meningitis affects about 5 million people around the world each year, one in 10 of whom die, while two in 10 are left with lasting impacts, such as brain damage. Continue reading...

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...