by Written by Josh Wilbur, read by Christopher Raglan on (#5BMAY)
Jake Haendel spent months trapped in his body, silent and unmoving but fully conscious. Most people never emerge from ‘locked-in syndrome’, but as a doctor told him, everything about his case is bizarre by Josh Wilbur Continue reading...
Trials have claimed 86% efficacy, but Peru has suspended tests because of ‘an adverse event’ and there is concern about lack of transparencyRead all our coronavirus coverage hereTrials in the United Arab Emirates have shown that China’s Sinopharm vaccine has 86% efficacy. So what is the Chinese treatment, where is it being trialled and will it challenge the vaccines being developed in western countries? Continue reading...
From December 2019, when an unknown virus was found in China, to the release of vaccines for Covid-19 – here are the points where momentum shiftedFrom December 2019, when an unknown virus was found in China, to the release of vaccines for Covid-19, it has been an extraordinary year. Here’s how the momentum shifted Continue reading...
Logic with Santa’s little helpersHere’s a logic puzzle that was sent in to me by a (very smart) 12-year-old.Four elves Glarald, Mnementh, Virthana and Tinsel are each wearing tunics of a different colour. At least one of these elves is a liar. (A liar is someone who says only statements that are untrue). During a break at elf school, the following conversation is overheard: Continue reading...
Thecodontosaurus antiquus a nimble omnivore that ran on two legs, CT scans and 3D modelling suggestBritain’s earliest dinosaur was a nimble omnivore that ran around on two legs, unlike its later relatives brontosaurus and diplodocus, research suggests.Standing at about the height of a 10-year-old child, and 1.5 metres in length with a long thin tail, Thecodontosaurus antiquus roamed the Earth during the Triassic period, more than 205m years ago, when Britain consisted of many islands surrounded by warm seas. As well as being one of the earliest dinosaurs, it was also among the first to be discovered. It was unearthed by Bristol quarrymen in 1834, earning it the nickname “the Bristol dinosaur”. Continue reading...
Mission will record details about the composition of the astral bodies and could be launched in 2028British engineers are to start work on a new spacecraft that will lie in wait for passing comets then chase them down and map their surfaces in three dimensions.Appropriately dubbed the “comet chaser”, the mission will not only record details of the comets’ contours, but also the composition of the dust and and gases released as they hurtle through the heavens. Continue reading...
Part of the Galloway Hoard, found in 2014, the piece is so spectacular it may have belonged to a monarchA spectacular Anglo-Saxon silver cross has emerged from beneath 1,000 years of encrusted dirt following painstaking conservation. Such is its quality that whoever commissioned this treasure may have been a high-standing cleric or even a king.It was a sorry-looking object when first unearthed in 2014 from a ploughed field in western Scotland as part of the Galloway Hoard, the richest collection of rare and unique Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland, acquired by the National Museums Scotland (NMS) in 2017. Continue reading...
Vial used to give Margaret Keenan the first non-trial dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is among items being used to document UK’s response to pandemicThe vial of the first dose of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to be used outside a trial – administered last Tuesday to 90-year-old Margaret Keenan from Coventry – has been added to a collection of artefacts documenting the pandemic.The empty vial has been acquired by London’s Science Museum as well as “stay at home” signs from the daily Downing Street briefings, homemade masks and other items that curators believe will provide a record of the UK’s response to the disease. Continue reading...
Rejoice at the worldwide success of research and technology, but if we don’t follow the rules it could all be for nothingNearly a year after the pandemic started, it was a moment of hope when Margaret Keenan – a 90-year-old grandmother, and resident of Coventry for 60 years – received what she described as an “early birthday present”. She was the first person to receive an approved vaccine against Covid-19 and her name will rightly be recorded in the history books.This is also a moment to recognise the thousands of scientists and engineers behind the many vaccines that are now emerging, and the many thousands of volunteers who have selflessly taken part in clinical trials. Clinical trials are the way to find out what works and what doesn’t, for both vaccines and therapeutics, and are essential to our response. Continue reading...
Space party kicks off on Monday with the annual display, followed on Thursday by a once-in-a-20-year event when Jupiter and Saturn ‘kiss’Australian stargazers are set to be treated to a galactic display as planets align and shooting stars light up the night sky through the next week.The space party starts with the annual Geminid meteor shower on Monday morning when the Earth passes through the tail of an asteroid. Continue reading...
The Australian mathematician Samuel Blake describes how he and and two other cryptologists finally solved an encrypted message written by the unnamed serial killer 51 years ago.The FBI confirmed the code, cracked with help from a supercomputer called Spartan, is accurate, but they said it did not help with identification
When Chinese scientists alerted colleagues to a new virus last December, suspicion fell on a Wuhan market. What have health officials learned since then?
They’re loyal, diligent – and have unbeatable noses. Could dogs play a key part in the fight against the pandemic?A single-storey building in a lonely rural business park, a few miles from Milton Keynes on a grey autumn day. It looks like a location for a bleak thriller: where a kidnap victim is held, perhaps, or the scene of a final shootout. Inside, though, something kind of cool is happening.In a brightly lit room, four inverted metal cups have been placed on the red carpet, each containing a small glass jar. One of these contains a smell: a “training odour”. Into the room bursts Billy, followed by Jess. Billy is a labrador, and Jess his human trainer. Billy bounces about the place, clearly super excited. He sniffs at everything – furniture, people, the cups – wagging ferociously. When he sniffs at the cup that contains the smell, another trainer, Jayde, indicates success with a clicking noise. Billy is rewarded with his favourite toy, a well-chewed rubber ball, and a chorus of “good boy”. Continue reading...
A dangerous trip almost ended in disaster but the project was saved with some ingenuityWhat is the weather like up on Mount Everest today? Last year a bunch of daredevil scientists and Sherpas laboured in the “death zone” and installed the world’s highest weather station, perched at 8,430 metres, just 400 metres short of Everest’s summit. But it nearly didn’t happen.Having been stuck behind a queue of climbers heading for the summit, the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex expedition team were dangerously cold when they reached the location where the station was to be installed. “We paced back and forth, attempting to stave off frostbite as wind-chill temperatures hovered close to -30°C and our drill batteries became too cold to work,” said Loughborough University’s Tom Matthews on the Conversation. Luckily team member Phutasi Sherpa had enough body heat to warm up the batteries and get the drill going again, enabling the team to bolt their weather station to the side of the mountain. Continue reading...
by Michael McGowan (now), Nadeem Badshah, Helen Pidd on (#5BGNM)
Portugal registers highest daily deaths since pandemic start; London police blame rule breakers for high case numbers; Switzerland imposes 7pm curfew. This liveblog is now closed
The pandemic has made the necessity of relying on experts evident to all ... this is a rich exploration of lifelong learningBefore the Brexit referendum in 2016, Michael Gove announced that Britain had had enough of experts, depicting them as out of touch and elitist. This anti-intellectualism became commonplace in the UK and the US, despite some notable Tory U-turns. With the unprecedented public health crisis of Covid-19, the expert is back in fashion. Virologists, epidemiologists, statisticians, politicians and members of the public share a language of information about the coronavirus, ranging from social distancing, self-isolation and lockdown to covidiot, covexit and Barnard Castle. But whose knowledge and expertise counts?This question has a long and complex history that encompasses the meanings of “truth” as well as the evolution of the scientific method. The term “expert” comes from the mid-19th century, with its focus on objective truth, and the rise of the professions, especially as a white, male, scientific enterprise (and in contrast to feminised and “morally useful” art subjects). This hierarchy of science over humanities persists, though in the era of fake news, scientific expertise is apparently up for grabs since access to data is democratised. Continue reading...
New airlock and scientific experiments among cargo delivered to International Space StationThe latest SpaceX Dragon resupply spacecraft has delivered a new airlock, new scientific experiments and other cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).Launched on a Falcon 9 rocket at 11:17 EST (16:17 GMT) on Sunday 6 December from Nasa’s Kennedy space centre in Florida, the capsule docked with the ISS a day later. It is scheduled to remain at the space station for about a month. Continue reading...
Research shows people who have a dog with type 2 diabetes are 38% more at risk of having disease themselvesIt’s said that dogs resemble their owners, but the similarities may also extend to their risk of diabetes, research suggests. The same cannot be said of cat owners and their companions, however.Previous studies had hinted that overweight owners tend to have porkier pets, possibly because of shared health behaviours such as overeating or not taking regular exercise. To investigate whether this extended to a shared risk of type 2 diabetes, Beatrice Kennedy, of Uppsala University in Sweden, and colleagues turned to insurance data from Sweden’s largest pet insurance company, using owners’ 10-digit national identification numbers to pull their anonymised health records. Continue reading...
Recommendation signals formal FDA approval for Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in the US could be imminentAn advisory panel to the US Food and Drug Administration has recommended the emergency approval of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.The recommendation is expected to signal that the first approval of a Covid-19 vaccine for use in the US is imminent. That would mark a major milestone in a pandemic that has killed more than 285,000 Americans and 1.5 million people globally. Continue reading...
Greta Thunberg has warned the world is failing to tackle the climate emergency and is in a ‘state of complete denial’ nearly five years after the Paris agreement.Thunberg, 17, whose solo school strike in 2018 snowballed into a global youth movement, spoke out ahead of a UN event at which national leaders have been asked to increase their pledges on emissions cuts.In a video shared exclusively with the Guardian, she calls on leaders to account for failing to reverse rising carbon emissions, but concluded: ‘There is hope … we are the hope – we, the people’
Eminent physiologist who escaped the Nazis and demonstrated how the heartbeat is controlledIn 1955 the physiologist Otto Hutter, who has died aged 96, was studying the pacemaker cells to be found in the heart. These produce the electrical impulses that fire the muscle’s contractions. At the time it was not clear why these electrical impulses should fluctuate, but in a set of extraordinary photographs Hutter and his colleague Wolfgang Trautwein captured the trace from the pacemaker cells showing what happened when different nerves in the body were stimulated.The photographs, which became a standard feature in medical textbooks, showed that when the vagus nerve, running from the brain stem to the colon, was stimulated, the waves of electrical activity in the pacemaker cells died down, and when the sympathetic nerves, responding to stress, were activated, they increased. Continue reading...
Project hopes to influence policymakers at Cop26 UN climate change conference in GlasgowPeople around the world will have a chance to discuss responses to the climate crisis in a planned global citizens’ assembly to inform UN talks in Glasgow in 2021, organisers said on Thursday.The project aims to build on similar initiatives in individual countries such as Ireland, France and Canada, where citizens’ assemblies have given politicians a steer by generating ambitious proposals on divisive issues. Continue reading...
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...
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...
by Presented by Natalie Groverand produced by David W on (#5BF86)
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
by Damian Carrington Environment editor on (#5BEKT)
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...
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...
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...