Science | The Guardian

Vaccine development has gotten the lion’s share of funding - leaving important therapeutic trials ignored and underfundedIn the midst of a Covid-19 pandemic that has already taken the lives of more than 283,000 Americans, talks of a Covid-19 vaccine dominate the pandemic news cycle. Particularly with new announcements of multiple vaccine candidates with promising clinical trial success, there is a growing sense of hope. But as we face rising case counts and a likely second wave, it is important to remember that there are therapeutic drugs which – unlike the vaccines – can help Covid patients now.The current vaccine-centric mindset is not without its benefits. The rush to expedite a Covid-19 vaccine has brought about unprecedented support from public and private industries alike. The federal government has pledged billions of dollars in pharmaceutical development aid along with provisional holds on current regulatory measures to fast-track prospective vaccines. Private and publicly-owned entities have come together in a massive demonstration of the scientific process to quickly evaluate multiple vaccine candidates. Continue reading...

Deals struck by wealthy nations to secure treatments could leave the world’s poorest people unvaccinated without urgent action

Exclusive: Life expectancy has regressed to 2010 levels, say scientists, with poor hardest hit

Former lawyer Zhang Zhan was on hunger strike after her arrest for ‘picking quarrels’A citizen journalist detained for more than six months after reporting on the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak has had a feeding tube forcibly inserted and her arms restrained to stop her pulling it out, her lawyer has claimed.Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old former lawyer, has been on a hunger strike at a detention facility near Shanghai. Zhang was arrested in May and accused of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble”, an accusation frequently used against critics and activists inside China, after reporting on social media and streaming accounts. Last month she was formally indicted on charges of spreading false information. Continue reading...

As we head into the pandemic’s winter months, Natalie Grover speaks to Prof Kavita Vedhara about the continued impact of Covid-19-related stress on long-term mental health and how this might affect our ability to fight off infection Continue reading...

SpaceX’s Starship SN8 rocket has exploded during touchdown after a six-and-a-half-minute test flight. The flight was the highest yet for the rocket ship Elon Musk hopes will ferry humans to Mars, with the prototype shooting for an altitude of eight miles. The fiery landing occurred when low fuel tank pressure caused the ship to descend too quickly in the final stages

This blog is now closed. We’ve launched a new blog at the link below:

Fifth-century discovery suggests break with Rome did not cause steep decline in living standards for all

Newly discovered strategy in Asian bees repels killer hornets that can massacre whole hivesAsian honey bees paste pellets of animal poo on to their nests to repel attacks by giant killer hornets, scientists have revealed.The attacks can involve dozens of the heavily armoured hornets and lead to the “mass slaughter” of thousands of bees, the researchers said, after which the hornets carry off the bee larvae to feed their own offspring. But in a continuing evolutionary arms race, the bees have developed defence mechanisms such as hissing at them or mobbing the hornets to suffocate them. Continue reading...

Vaccine developed in Oxford criticised by FDA with efficacy rates and trials delaying official take-up

Exclusive: UK regulators give go-ahead for drug to be trialled ahead of possible treatment alongside psychotherapyUK regulators have given the go-ahead for the first clinical trial of the use of the psychedelic drug dimethyltriptamine (DMT) to treat depression.The trial will initially give the drug – known as the “spirit molecule” for the powerful hallucinogenic trips it induces – to healthy individuals, but it is expected to be followed by a second trial in patients with depression, where DMT will be given alongside psychotherapy. Continue reading...

Hoard of 64 coins, worth equivalent of £14,000 today, found by family weeding at New Forest homeAn important hoard of Tudor coins – some of which shine light on the marriage history of Henry VIII – has been found by a somewhat startled family weeding their garden.The British Museum revealed details on Wednesday of discoveries registered to its Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), the majority of which are made by the nation’s army of metal-detecting enthusiasts. Continue reading...

First results released from trial of Sinopharm shot involving 31,000 people

Scientist’s occult investigations into the Great Pyramid of Egypt, dating from the 1680s, are believed to have been burned when his dog Diamond upset a candleA collection of unpublished, burnt notes by Isaac Newton, in which the scientist attempts to unlock secret codes he believed were hidden in the measurements of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, have sold at auction for £378,000.The “exceptionally rare” set of papers, which date to the 1680s, were almost destroyed by Newton’s dog Diamond, who, legend has it, jumped on a table and upset a candle, setting them on fire. Scorched as they are, they reveal Newton’s fascination for alchemy, showing the scientist comparing the external dimensions of the pyramid, the lengths of its tunnels, heights of its chambers and sizes of its bricks, as he attempts to prove they had all been calculated from a common unit of measurement: the royal cubit. Continue reading...

The director is returning to TV after 50 years, with a drama about two androids raising humans on a far planet. He talks about working through lockdown, doing big adverts for China – and living on £75 a weekThe lead character in Raised By Wolves is Mother, an android tasked with bringing up a young human family on a faraway planet. But things soon go wrong. Mother starts wildly overreacting to the tiniest provocation, then murders her partner. Before long, she’s screaming at visitors with such fury that their heads actually explode. Which raises the question: has its writer’s mum seen it yet?“Yeah, she has,” says Aaron Guzikowski hesitantly. Does she like it? “She was rendered speechless by it. I still don’t know. She hasn’t given me a satisfactory review yet.” What Guzikowski does have, though, is a young family, which is how he came up with the idea for the series. “I was thinking a lot about my children and technology,” he says. “And I started thinking about raising kids with artificial intelligence – and what that might be like. I have three young sons.” Continue reading...

Billions unlikely to get jabs as rich countries secure 53% of most promising vaccines

Billionaire, 49, confirms move to Wall Street Journal and says he plans to focus on new Tesla plant and SpaceX ventureElon Musk said on Tuesday he had relocated to Texas from California, where he plans to focus more on the new Tesla plant and his SpaceX venture.Related: Joe Biden pledges to distribute 100m vaccine shots in first 100 days of presidency – live Continue reading...

Protecting patients from Covid-19 is a wonderful step forward. But we cannot yet afford to relax our guard

Dr Richard Lawson argues for the need to prioritise frontline workers, Dr Hugh Adler praises clinical trial volunteers, and Heidi Chow says patents must be suspended so all countries can access the Covid vaccine“NHS staff no longer top priority to receive coronavirus vaccine” (Report, 3 December). This is because the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advises that the first priority should be prevention of mortality, and to do this they have opted for immediate protection of very vulnerable, elderly people in care homes, rather than general prevention of mortality by using the vaccine to reduce the reproduction rate (R-number) of the virus.JCVI did model the use of the vaccine to interrupt transmission of the virus in society, but decided this would only take place when a majority of the general population had been vaccinated, which would take many months to come about. It appears that they did not model giving the vaccine to potential super-spreaders, to people who encounter scores or even hundreds of other people during the course of their working day – people like doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers, teachers, police officers, shop workers, delivery drivers and many other groups who keep the real economy running. The key point is that these workers are at increased risk both of contracting and transmitting the disease. Continue reading...

American pilot who was the first person to fly faster than the speed of soundChuck Yeager, who has died aged 97, stands alongside the Wright Brothers and Charles Lindbergh in the history of American aviation. In 1947 Yeager was the first person to break the sound barrier; and, in hitting Mach 1, he set the US on a path that was to lead to Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing.On the evening of Sunday 12 October 1947, Yeager, a 24-year-old US air force test pilot based at Muroc army air field in California, dined with his wife, Glennis, at Pancho’s bar and restaurant in the Mojave desert. Then the couple went horse-riding, but it was a moonless night and, racing against his wife, Yeager hit a gate, knocked himself out, and cracked two ribs. The pain took his breath away. Continue reading...

Are the robots going to kills us? Film-maker Tonje Hessen Schei speaks to a range of interviewees including Elon Musk’s computer scientist in an eye-opening, anxiety-inducing filmWhat will happen when robots become smarter than humans – will they want to kill us? No, according to the computer scientist in charge of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence research company OpenAI. His name is Ilya Sutskever and he believes that super intelligent machines won’t hate us, but they will prioritise their own survival. Think about the way we treat animals. We’re fond of them but we don’t ask their permission to build a road; it’ll be like that. His analogy is an extraordinary moment in this doom-laden documentary about the future of AI from Norwegian film-maker Tonje Hessen Schei – an eye-opening film if your anxiety levels are up to it.Another interviewee jokes that AI is being developed by a few companies and a handful of governments for three purposes – “killing, spying and brainwashing” and the film then briskly rattles through the worst-case scenarios facing human civilisation. I suspect nothing here will be a bombshell to anyone who is up to speed on surveillance society in China, autonomous weapons, bias in policing algorithms, the effects of living in online echo chambers, big data and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But iHuman helpfully gathers all the strands together into one apocalyptic package, detailing the many ways in which technology is a risk to life as we know it. Continue reading...

Comments raise hopes that the vaccine could soon be available to Americans aged 16 and aboveUS Food and Drug Administration (FDA) staff said on Tuesday that data on Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine was in line with its guidance on emergency use authorization, raising hopes it could soon be available to Americans aged 16 and above.Related: Biden picks defense secretary as Trump hosts vaccine summit – live Continue reading...

North Yorkshire’s two national parks, the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors, have been named international dark sky reserves after a five-year campaign for designation, forming the largest dark sky area in the UK Continue reading...

More than a million of you read our article calling for volunteers to take part in research into why some gamers invert their controls. The response was incredibleIt is fair to say that no one was anticipating this. When the Guardian ran my article on the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London and how it planned to investigate why some gamers invert their controls, I expected a modicum of interest among seasoned readers of the Games section. When I placed an appeal at the end of the article asking for volunteers to take part in a series of virtual research experiments, I thought we’d maybe get a few dozen responses. That’s not what happened. At the time of writing this, more than 1,250,000 have read the article.“The moment the article went live, our phone notifications went crazy,” says Dr Jennifer Corbett who is leading the study with her colleague Dr Jaap Munneke. “In less than a few hours, we had more than 100 participants, and by the end of the day, more than 500. We have more than 1,000 volunteers now and we’re so grateful.” According to Corbett, the lab currently has the resources to test around 100 participants in the first exploratory study, but they are working on ways to support follow-up studies so that every eligible volunteer can be tested. “There are so many questions we can pursue – we just need to find the time and money to keep going!” Continue reading...

Analysis: Funding and high public interest contributed to slashing of research and approval time

From black holes to consciousness, Nobel-winner Roger Penrose shows the beauty of theory. But it needs more support• Dr Thomas Fink is the director of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences

The US aviation legend was a fighter ace in the second world war, before becoming the first man to break the sound barrier, training test pilots, fighting in the Vietnam war and becoming immortalised in The Right Stuff

The alarming pattern of second waves of Covid-19 infection across the world, and the promise of vaccines on the horizon, has once again brought public health messaging into focus. So what has the pandemic taught us about what makes a successful programme? The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, speaks to Prof Linda Bauld about how best to encourage people to change their behaviour in order to mitigate the spread of disease Continue reading...

Lead author of controversial paper making the claims says it has been ‘through rigorous peer review’A study that found US school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic cut the life expectancy of each child in primary school by an average of three months contains “critically flawed assumptions” and “clear mistakes in study design”, according to a rebuttal led by an Australian epidemiologist.The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on 12 November, was widely shared on social media including by scientists, doctors and policymakers and was covered in dozens of news stories. Continue reading...

Pilot planned for January will give subjects a shot of both Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech versions

This blog is now closed. We’ve launched a new blog at the link below:

Two compounds in fresh faeces inhibit cold sensation, Chinese researchers sayGiant pandas have been seen smearing themselves with horse manure in the wild, and the sweet smell of scat isn’t the only reason – it appears the manure helps them tolerate low temperatures, according to a study.Unlike insects that make a beeline for faeces, digging for olfactory cues to locate food, attraction to excrement across mammal species is rare. But researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences observed that a giant panda subspecies in China’s Qinling Mountains tended to seek out and sniff fresh horse manure and then roll over it. Continue reading...

UK study finds rapid tests coupled with tough quarantine rules helped bring rate down

Protein analysis provides digital picture of immune response and mortality risk, say scientists

My father, John Mitchell, who has died aged 75, was the founder of Carbohydrate Polymers, a scientific journal which grew from humble roots to become one of the publisher Elsevier’s lead journals. John recognised the need for this much-needed outlet for research into polysaccharide science – the branch of food technology focused on the carbohydrates found most often in plants, algae and micro-organisms

Stress due to racism can wear and tear on the body – literally ‘getting under the skin’ to affect African Americans’ healthI’m part of a research team that has been following more than 800 Black American families for almost 25 years. We found that people who had reported experiencing high levels of racial discrimination when they were young teenagers had significantly higher levels of depression in their 20s than those who hadn’t. This elevated depression, in turn, showed up in their blood samples, which revealed accelerated ageing on a cellular level.Related: 'To be black or brown is to see your body suffer' | Angela Saini Continue reading...

Advisory meeting will discuss feasibility of human challenge trials despite first jabs becoming available

A slender, waning crescent moon will slide past the brilliant jewel of Venus in the pre-dawn skyGetting up before dawn brings a reward this week. Between 11 and 13 December, a slender, waning crescent moon will slide past the brilliant jewel of Venus in the pre-dawn sky. The chart shows the view looking south-east from London on 12 December at 07:00 GMT. Continue reading...

This blog is now closed. We’ve launched a new blog at the link below:

This is an achievement that answers one big scientific question but raises more fundamental ones for society

No one would argue that running isn’t good for you, but do we really have to pretend to like it, too?For the 126th time this year, I turn the corner by the rowing club and begin the climb towards Stamford Hill. I have half a kilometre to go. Mist has settled on the river to my left, where waterfowls, Egyptian geese and a single, stately heron have gathered by some rushes in a dazzlingly pretty scene for Haringey in late November. They likely make some pleasant noises, but only the fortunes of HMS Royal Oak reach my ears, as my earphones sizzle with its battle against four French frigates near the Bight of Benin in the War of 1812. I am trying to enjoy myself.Last November, with the cooperation of this magazine (ie they paid me), I defied my natural inclinations and did a radical diet and exercise overhaul. The experience produced not just an eminently readable lifestyle piece, but a substantial improvement in my general fitness. And then, shortly before Christmas, it ended, as did my adherence to its stipulations. I jettisoned the protein shakes and the thrice-weekly workouts, and gamely resumed my close personal relationship with butter, sugar, alcohol and grease. I discarded all the measures that had given me these results bar one – running. Continue reading...

Vaccine safety message ‘vitally important’, head of medicines regulator tells Andrew Marr Show

Director of Wellcome Trust, speaking on Desert Island Discs, says he believes everyone should get a second chance in educationThe director of the Wellcome Trust has spent the last nine months under intense pressure, advising government ministers on Covid-19 as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage). Yet Sir Jeremy Farrar has revealed that his most frequent nightmare has been about sitting his A-levels more than 40 years ago.“I used to wake up thinking, ‘Have I got to do my bloody A-levels again?’ For years, and it’s only in the last year or two I’ve got over that actually. It’s amazing, the scars.” Continue reading...

We trace the extraordinary research effort, from the discovery of the virus’s structure to the start of inoculations this week

When Covid-19 struck, immunologists hit the ground running, and haven’t stopped since. But the effort paid off, writes a scientist who worked on the Oxford clinical trials

Successful docking will be followed by orbiter separating and returning lunar material to EarthA Chinese probe carrying samples from the lunar surface has successfully docked with a spacecraft orbiting the moon, in another space first for the nation, state media reported.The manoeuvre on Sunday was part of the ambitious Chang’e-5 mission – named after a mythical Chinese Moon goddess – to bring back the first lunar samples in four decades. Continue reading...

A capsule released by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft containing pristine asteroid fragments briefly turned into a fireball as it returned to the Earth’s atmosphere, before landing in the South Australian outback In the early hours of Sunday. For the past six years, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft has conducted a remarkable 5.2bn km mission to extract the first subsurface samples from the asteroid Ryugu, which scientists hope will shed light on the origins of life Continue reading...

WHO says virus spreading fast despite vaccine progress; French infections rise to 2.29m; Brazil reports 627 new deaths. This blog is now closed. Follow our new global coronavirus blog here

Released capsule entered atmosphere at 5.30pm GMT on Saturday before landing safelyA capsule containing pristine asteroid fragments that may unlock secrets about the formation of the universe has been recovered in the South Australian outback after landing safely back to Earth on Sunday.For the past six years, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft has conducted a remarkable 5.2bn km mission to extract the first-ever sub-surface samples from the asteroid Ryugu, which scientists hope will shed light on the origins of life. Continue reading...