World Health Organization experts conduct on-the-ground research into origins of pandemic in China

UK has bought 30m doses of product that could transform world’s immunisation programmes

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsGiven that we have a naming convention for colours, we all know that blue is blue. So how do we know that if I saw blue through someone else’s eyes, I wouldn’t see it as yellow, or pink etc?

The poorest countries are missing out on adequate doses of vaccines – and the health implications should concern us allNine months ago world leaders were queueing up to declare any Covid-19 vaccine a global public good. Today we are witness to a vaccine apartheid that is only serving the interests of powerful and profitable pharmaceutical corporations while costing us the quickest and least harmful route out of this crisis.I am sickened by news that South Africa, a country whose HIV history should have taught us all the most appalling life-costing consequences of allowing pharmaceutical corporations to protect their medicine monopolies, has had to pay more than double the price paid by the European Union for the AstraZeneca vaccine for far fewer doses than it actually needs. Like so many other low- and middle-income countries, South Africa is today facing a vaccine landscape of depleted supply where it is purchasing power, not suffering, that will secure the few remaining doses. Continue reading...

Unique physiology allows the Australian marsupial to produce square-shaped faeces that may aid communicationHow wombats produce their cube-shape poo has long been a biological puzzle but now an international study has provided the answer to this unusual natural phenomenon.The cube shape is formed within the intestines – not at the point of exit, as previously thought – according to research published in scientific journal Soft Matter on Thursday. Continue reading...

29 January 1986: Millions watch as NASA’s space shuttle Challenger explodes in the skies above Cape Canaveral, Florida, moments after launchWashington

I had resolved to ride my bike to work every day. The quest was a disaster from start to endAs my bike’s front wheel hurtled towards the concrete ledge separating land from lake, two thoughts flashed through my mind.“Oh my God, I can’t destroy another work laptop” and “Well, there goes my new year’s resolution”. Continue reading...

Researchers say the variant that swept Victoria during last year’s second wave was mutating into something more worryingA variant of Covid-19 similar to the one that spread rampantly in the UK would likely have developed in Victoria during last year’s second wave had Melbourne not gone into an extended lockdown, a leading virologist says.Associate Prof Stuart Turville from the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales said when his laboratory examined samples from patients as part of a study called “ADAPT” in Sydney, they started to see key differences in those infected with the virus during the second wave. Continue reading...

Government has ordered 60m doses of jab, which appears to work well against Kent variant

Boris Johnson and head of UK regulator say vaccine produces immune response in all age groups

Mission is politically charged as China seeks to avoid blame for alleged missteps in outbreak response

Explainer: Move attributed to ‘insufficient data’ but experts say no evidence vaccine doesn’t work

Archaeologists say foundations excavated in Tiberias are of a mosque built in about AD670Archaeologists in Israel say they have discovered the remnants of an early mosque believed to date to the earliest decades of Islam during an excavation in the northern city of Tiberias.The foundations of the mosque, excavated just south of the Sea of Galilee by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, point to its construction roughly a generation after the death of the prophet Muhammad, making it one of the earliest Muslim houses of worship to be studied by archaeologists. Continue reading...

Swimming pools, cinemas and theatres to be allowed to operate at full capacity from 1 FebruaryIndia’s health minister, Harsh Vardhan, has claimed it has “successfully contained the pandemic” and “flattened its Covid-19 graph” as the country of 1.34 billion people reported just 12,000 new cases in the past 24 hours – a stark contrast to the 90,000 cases a day being reported in September.With more than 10.7m coronavirus cases, India still has the second highest number in the world, but over the past two months it has seen a steady and steep decline in new cases, despite little by way of restrictions to prevent the spread of infection. Continue reading...

Delivering doses to other countries will reduce chance of virus coming back in new forms, say experts

Experts also studying similarities with lasting effects of Chikungunya virus in hope of finding new treatments

Bottled water is atrocious for the environment. You’re better off buying a water filter for healthier, tastier water

As we head into yet another month of lockdown in the UK, with hospitals overwhelmed, how do we cope with the monotony, isolation, boredom and stress? Science Weekly gets inspiration from the people who choose to put themselves through extreme situations – including astronauts, arctic research scientists and submariners Continue reading...

We risk creating healthcare apartheid, where the virus still rages in poorer nations. Ultimately, this will harm all of us

Could such a large amount of money end the Covid pandemic? Eradicate disease? Provide universal healthcare and fund vaccine research?You know that daydream where you suddenly come into a vast fortune? You could buy a castle or a tropical island hideaway, help out all your friends, do a bit of good in the world. But what if it was a truly incredible sum? What if you had $1tn to spend, and a year to do it? And what if the rules of the game were that you had to do it for the world – make some real difference to people’s lives, or to the health of the planet, or to the advancement of science.A trillion dollars – that’s one thousand billion dollars – is at once an absurdly huge amount of money, and not that much in the scheme of things. It is, give or take, 1% of world GDP. It’s what the US spends every year and a half on the military. It is an amount that can be quite easily rustled up through the smoke and mirrors of quantitative easing, which is officially the mass purchase of government bonds, but which looks suspiciously like the spontaneous creation of money. After the 2008 financial crash, more than $4.5tn was quantitatively eased in the US alone. All the other major economies made their own money in this ghostly way. Continue reading...

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

Beetles donated to Natural History Museum found to be 4,000 years old indicating climate used to be warmerRarely is finding a pair of wood-eating beetles in a dusty cabinet a cause for celebration. But when Natural History Museum curator Max Barclay chanced upon the dead insects, in one of the museum’s specimen drawers, he spotted an opportunity to solve a decades-old mystery: why a pair of foreign beetles had been submerged in an East Anglian bog. The answer sheds light on the state of the UK’s climate almost 4,000 years ago.The beetles were donated to the collection in the 1970s, by an East Anglian farmer who found them inside a piece of old wood he had dug up in one of his fields, and was splitting for firewood. Alarmed by their size, and curved long, threadlike antennae, and concerned that his farm might be infested with wood-boring insects, he contacted the museum for advice. Continue reading...

The terrible scale of the tragedy cannot be attributed to misfortune. It is a product of negligent governmentIn Soho, central London, stands a replica of a 19th-century public water pump without a handle. The missing part is not a result of vandalism but a tribute to John Snow, the physician who correctly surmised that the pump, supplying contaminated water, was a super-spreading device for cholera. Snow mapped case data and lobbied the local parish authorities for the pump’s deactivation.The coronavirus is a different kind of pathogen (cholera is a bacterial infection), but our understanding of today’s pandemic owes a debt to Snow’s methods. Boris Johnson and his ministers claim to have been led by science over the past year, and mostly they have, but often too late, as well as grudgingly and inconsistently. When evidence has clashed with ideology, the latter has frequently prevailed. Mr Johnson’s fear of upsetting Tory MPs has often seemed stronger than his care for good public health policy. Continue reading...

ONS survey finds people more likely to have cough compared with old variants, though loss of taste or smell less likely

Research finds people stay up later and sleep less before full moon, and do the opposite before new moonFolklore has saddled the moon with major responsibilities: moods, spikes in crime and even psychosis are blamed on the Earth’s only constant natural satellite. But could the “lunar effect” interfere with sleep?Scientists have long understood that human activity is facilitated by light, be it sunlight, moonlight or artificial light. But a study suggests our ability to sleep is distinctly affected by the lunar cycle, even when taking into account artificial sources of light. Continue reading...

The latest research into the fans of rival football teams indicates what I’ve long suspected – adversity has a surprisingly powerful bonding effect

Scientists say temperatures globally at highest level since start of human civilisationThe planet is hotter now than it has been for at least 12,000 years, a period spanning the entire development of human civilisation, according to research.Analysis of ocean surface temperatures shows human-driven climate change has put the world in “uncharted territory”, the scientists say. The planet may even be at its warmest for 125,000 years, although data on that far back is less certain. Continue reading...

Healthcare and police chiefs also say online activity is channelling hatred against NHS staff

Scientists are working to find out how to stop the transmission of mutations that started in England, South Africa and Brazil

Doctors call for extra efforts amid signs black people and those in poor areas are less likely to receive jabs

The UK needs to learn from the lessons of the past year and come up with a concrete plan to avert a disastrous third wave

Method can increase detection rate among infected people, senior Beijing doctor tells state TV

Should I worry about my addiction to 1,000-piece brainteasers? Not according to the scientists

Forecast predicts handful of developed countries fully vaccinated by late 2021 while others race to catch up

Priti Patel to announce plans in House of Commons after ministers reject blanket policy

European Medicines Agency approval could stipulate age range, says Emer Cooke

Latest updates: prime minister says he takes full responsibility for everything government has done after another 1,631 deaths reported. This live blog is now closed - please follow the global coronavirus live blog for updates

Politicians say project, halted after disappointing trials, a ‘national humiliation’ and a ‘sign of decline’

Commission president says firms must deliver on orders after AstraZeneca warns of shortfall

Ten of the world’s most infectious diseases identified by the WHO not being catered for by drug firmsThe world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms are little prepared for the next pandemic despite a mounting response to the Covid-19 outbreak, an independent report has warned.Jayasree K Iyer, executive director of the Netherlands-based Access to Medicine Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation funded by the UK and Dutch governments and others, highlighted an outbreak of the Nipah virus in China, with a fatality rate of up to 75%, as potentially the next big pandemic risk. Continue reading...

Report said ministers expected EU regulator’s assessment to show jab was only 8% effective among over-65s

There are worries about the change in the vaccination schedule. However, a longer gap between jabs has its advantages too

Canines in Hungarian study appear to pick up unfamiliar terms through playWhether you can teach an old dog new tricks might be a moot point, but it seems some canines can rapidly learn new words, and do so through play.While young children are known to quickly pick up the names of new objects, the skill appears to be rare in animals. Continue reading...

Ever since Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine for smallpox there have been opportunistic people willing to spread misinformation. As the Covid-19 vaccines are administered, what’s the best way to counter them?Sarah and her brother Benjamin (not their real names) have never seen eye to eye. She’s a professional scientist, he – according to Sarah’s description – is someone who is susceptible to conspiracy theories. They maintained an uneasy truce until a few weeks ago. Tensions came to a head when Sarah was on the phone to her mum, talking her through the online procedure to book a slot for her Covid-19 vaccination.If she was still having trouble after they rang off, Sarah suggested, she could ask Benjamin to come over and help. Mother and son live close by and a long way from Sarah; they’ve shared a bubble this past year. “There was a silence,” Sarah says. “And then she replied that he didn’t want to. He’s against the vaccine. Well, that was it for me. You can’t help your 77-year-old mum do something that might save her life? I’m sorry, that’s wrong.” Continue reading...

What did London really smell like during the great stink of 1858? What odours wafted through the Battle of Waterloo? Were cities identifiable by the lingering aromas of the various commodities produced during the industrial revolution? It may not be possible to literally go back in time and give history a sniff, but a new project is aiming to identify and even recreate scents that would have assailed noses between the 16th and early 20th centuries. To find how to decipher the pongs of the past, Nicola Davis speaks to historian Dr William Tullett and heritage scientist Cecilia Bembibre Continue reading...

One in eight people who get coronavirus also have first psychiatric or neurological illness within six months, research finds

The answers to today’s micro puzzlesEarlier today I set you 12 micro puzzles. (There’s an extra one at the bottom of this article.)The first six were ‘equatum’ puzzles: Continue reading...

Moderna says its vaccine works against UK and South Africa variants but it is developing new form to be used as boosterUS scientists are preparing to upgrade Covid-19 vaccines to address variants of the coronavirus now circulating in the UK and South Africa, Dr Anthony Fauci said on Monday. At the same time, Moderna said that though its Covid vaccine worked against the variants, it was developing a new form to be used as a booster shot.Related: Fauci says he was the 'skunk at the picnic' in Trump's Covid team Continue reading...

Country will be first in EU to use antibody cocktails after government buys 200,000 dosesSpecialist clinics in Germany will this week become the first hospitals in the EU to treat Covid-19 patients with expensive and experimental antibody cocktails used to treat the former US president Donald Trump after he caught the virus last October.“Monoclonal antibodies will be used in Germany as the first country in the EU, initially in university clinics,” the health minister, Jens Spahn, told Bild am Sonntag newspaper, confirming that his government had bought 200,000 doses for €400m (£355m). Continue reading...

Trades unions say mortality rates expose ‘huge inequalities’ and call for increase in sick pay