Public Health England says number of daily new infections fell to 33,355 – down from 37,535 on Monday

Number of deaths at highest level since mid-May and UK toll at more than 25,000, figures show

A convoy of Spaniards and allies was ritually sacrificed in 1520 at Tecoaque – ‘the place where they ate them’ – before Hernán Cortés wreaked revengeNew research suggests Spanish conquistadores butchered at least a dozen women and their children in an Aztec-allied town where the inhabitants sacrificed and ate a detachment of Spaniards they had captured months earlier.The National Institute of Anthropology and History published findings on Monday from years of excavation work at the town of Tecoaque, which means “the place where they ate them” in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. Continue reading...

Crowdfunder led by schoolgirl raises £70,000 for sculpture of pioneering palaeontologist in Lyme Regis, DorsetA statue to Mary Anning, a fossil hunter and palaeontologist once “lost to history” but now considered a significant female force in science, is finally to be erected after a crowdfunding campaign by a teenage girl.Evie Swire, 13, was nine years old when she first heard of Anning, who was born into a humble family in 1799 near Evie’s Lyme Regis home in Dorset. The schoolgirl was outraged to discover there was no statue. Continue reading...

Minister will quarantine until Sunday after being contacted by NHS app

Minister who publicly drank syrup touted as coronavirus cure tests positive

When I damaged my vocal cords, I was forced to change the way I spoke – and discovered how much our voices reveal who we areSome years ago, I was invited by my then boss, Jann Wenner, the owner of Rolling Stone, to be the lead singer in a band he was putting together from the magazine’s staff. I had just turned 41, and I jumped at the opportunity to sustain the delusion that I was not getting old. “Sign me up!” I said.My chief attributes as a singer included impressive volume and an ability to stay more or less in tune, but I was strictly a self-taught amateur. I had, for instance, never done a proper voice warmup, and had certainly never been informed that the delicate layers of vibratory tissue, muscle and mucus membrane that make up the vocal cords are as prone to injury as a middle-aged knee joint. So, on practice days, I simply rose from my desk (I was finishing a book on deadline and spent eight hours a day writing, in complete silence), rode the subway to our rehearsal space in downtown Manhattan, took my place behind the microphone and started wailing over my bandmates’ cranked-up guitars and drums. Continue reading...

The emergence of more infectious variants of Sars-CoV-2 has raised questions about just how long our vaccines will remain effective for. Although there is little evidence that the current vaccines won’t work against the new variants, as the virus continues to mutate scientists are preparing themselves for having to make changes to the vaccines in response. Speaking to Dr Katrina Pollock, science correspondent Linda Geddes asks how we can tweak the vaccines against new variants, and how likely it is we’ll end up in a game of cat and mouse with the virus Continue reading...

BAME communities should be better protected as they are more at risk, say public health experts and MPs

Readmission rate for Covid patients 3.5 times greater, and death rate seven times higher, than for other hospital patients

The government’s libertarian bias may mean restrictions go too soon, with the majority forced to try their luck against Covid

A decade after an outbreak of Q fever killed 95 people in the Netherlands, scientists fear the emergence of a new diseaseIn early 2008, Jeannette van de Ven began to see a slightly higher rate of miscarriages among the goats on her dairy farm in the south of the Netherlands.

You don’t need a telescope to see the mighty hunter’s sword and its star-forming cloudThe mighty constellation of Orion the hunter is one of the greatest sights in the night sky. To those of us in the northern hemisphere, it is currently bolt upright in the south during the late evening. Orion’s right shoulder is marked by the red star of Betelgeuse, and his left foot is signified by the white star of Rigel. Continue reading...

India launches bid to vaccinate 300m people amid fears over efficacy of domestically produced vaccine

We’ve all lost so much through the pandemic, but by making sense of it we can look forwardDeath came early into David Kessler’s life. He was just 13 when his mother died, and her loss prompted his decision to forge a career working in palliative care. He went on to collaborate with psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a central figure in the field, who devised the five stages of grief. In lectures he would talk about his mother’s death and remind his audiences that no one is exempt from loss; and yet, he says today, in his heart he believed his personal experience of devastating grief was behind him, rather than ahead.And then, four years ago, another tragedy hit his family. Kessler was totally floored by it. He discovered it was one thing knowing the landscape of mourning, and quite another travelling through it. But his journey, hard and long as it was, had an important by-product: he realised that the seminal Kübler-Ross inventory was not complete. To the five stages of grief she described, he was able, with the permission of the Kübler-Ross family, to add a sixth. And now, in the midst of the pandemic, he believes that the sixth stage will be as important in our universal experience of grieving as it is in individual lives hit by loss. Continue reading...

Wooden sarcophagi discovered at site south of Cairo along with funerary temple of Queen Naert

My mother, Rebecca Sawtell, who has died aged 57 of toxic epidermal necrolysis, devoted her working life as a clinical psychologist to helping children who had been abused and had nowhere else to turn. Exceptionally empathetic, she seemed to possess a superhuman level of emotional intelligence, which was often shown in the way children would open up to her about their ordeals when no one else had succeeded in persuading them to talk.She was born in Sheffield, the third of four children of Roger Sawtell, a mechanical engineer and later company administrator, and his wife, Susan (nee Flint), an occupational therapist. Shortly after Rebecca began her primary education, the family moved to Northampton and while at Northampton School for Girls and then Weston Favell Upper school, she developed an interest in the burgeoning field of psychology. She studied for a degree in the subject at Brunel University, in Uxbridge, where she met Denis Salter, and after a number of years of living together they married in 1995. Continue reading...

Experts agree that the impact of the jab will vary regionally and among different groups

In the first of a new series, the leading Cambridge professor measures Covid-19’s impactHow many people have died because of the pandemic? How does this vary across countries? These are two of the most common questions I get asked and yet they are remarkably difficult to answer.We could start by looking at the number of Covid deaths listed on a website and compare countries by Covid deaths per million population. But this assumes the way countries record a death as “Covid” is consistent and ignores any deaths caused by lockdown measures and disruption to health services. It’s fairer to look at what has happened to the total number of deaths. Continue reading...

Engines of Boeing rocket fired for only a minute, potentially delaying push to return humans to the moon by 2024Nasa’s Boeing-built deep space exploration rocket has cut short a crucial test, after briefly igniting all four engines of its core stage for the first time.Mounted in a test facility at Nasa’s Stennis space centre in Mississippi, the Space Launch System’s (SLS) 64-metre core stage roared to life for just over a minute on Saturday, well short of the roughly four minutes engineers needed to stay on track for the rocket’s first launch in November. Continue reading...

Your internal monologue shapes mental wellbeing, says psychologist Ethan Kross. He has the tools to improve your mind’s backchatAs Ethan Kross, an American experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, will cheerfully testify, the person who doesn’t sometimes find themselves listening to an unhelpful voice in their head probably doesn’t exist. Ten years ago, Kross found himself sitting up late at night with a baseball bat in his hand, waiting for an imaginary assailant he was convinced was about to break into his house – a figure conjured by his frantic mind after he received a threatening letter from a stranger who’d seen him on TV. Kross, whose area of research is the science of introspection, knew that he was overreacting; that he had fallen victim to what he calls “chatter”. But telling himself this did no good at all. At the peak of his anxiety, his negative thoughts running wildly on a loop, he found himself, somewhat comically, Googling “bodyguards for academics”.Kross runs the wonderfully named Emotion and Self Control Lab at Michigan University, an institution he founded and where he has devoted the greater part of his career to studying the silent conversations people have with themselves: internal dialogues that powerfully influence how they live their lives. Why, he and his colleagues want to know, do some people benefit from turning inwards to understand their feelings, while others are apt to fall apart when they engage in precisely the same behaviour? Are there right and wrong ways to communicate with yourself, and if so, are there techniques that might usefully be employed by those with inner voices that are just a little too loud? Continue reading...

‘Heart-wrenching milestone’ says UN chief; China reports 130 new cases in flare-up; India starts mass vaccination campaign

In a letter to the EU commission health and social affairs ministers of six states called the situation ‘unacceptable’

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As coronavirus cases rise across the UK, here are steps to take if someone falls ill in your household

Fossilised track dates back to period immediately following mass extinction 252m years agoFootprints believed to have belonged to a crocodile-like prehistoric reptile have been found in the Italian Alps in an extraordinary discovery that scientists say proves there were survivors of a mass extinction 252m years ago.The well-preserved fossilised track, made up of about 10 footprints, was found at an altitude of 2,200-metres in Altopiano della Gardetta, in the province of Cuneo in the western Alps. Continue reading...

Child was buried at beginning of first century surrounded by vases and animal offeringsFrench archaeologists have hailed the “exceptional” discovery of the 2,000-year-old remains of a child buried with animal offerings and what appears to have been a pet dog.The child, believed to have been around a year old, was interred at the beginning of the first century, during Roman rule, in a wooden coffin 80cm long made with nails and marked with a decorative iron tag. Continue reading...

Fixating on the actions of a handful of ‘covidiots’ will only undermine compliance among the population as a wholeThere is a paradox at the heart of this pandemic. Since before England’s first lockdown, politicians, media pundits and government advisers have voiced concerns that the public would be the weak link in controlling infections. Judging by polling and social media posts decrying lockdown violations and “covidiots”, the public also share this concern. Yet it always seems to be other people who are breaking the rules. A recent University College London study showed that 92% of people considered themselves to be adhering more than average to lockdown restrictions.The systematic evidence tells a different story. Whether you consider what people say in surveys, systematic observations of behaviour or analyses of transport use, the evidence suggests that adherence with lockdown restrictions is remarkably high. This was true in the spring, when early data showed that more than nine in 10 people were observing the spring lockdown – even though half of them were suffering significantly. It was true during the November lockdown, and remains true to this day. Indeed, recent analysis shows that, if anything, adherence to social distancing, mask wearing and hygiene measures is higher than ever. Continue reading...

The government has ordered sufficient doses to inoculate the entire population of the UK against Covid-19 but we are in for a long haul

Stamford, Lincolnshire: The trademark fingerprint of the wood-boring beetles is often hidden from sight“Contracted” is the word that springs to mind as I look closely at the log I’ve pulled from the pile in my garden. It’s cold with frost-shimmer, and as I study its micro-landscape of moss-forest and bark-gully, I find where the rind has flaked away … something on the bare wood beneath.I pick at the bark, like a scab. Beneath is a strange tattoo. At macro scale it resembles a labyrinth; all corners and spurs, tight-wound and interlocking, tortuous and confined. Zoom out and in form it’s like a weird fossil, outstretched wings or limbs or leaves, radiating out from a central spine or arm or trunk. Continue reading...

Drive to immunise 3.5% of the population in weeks comes ahead of the lunar new year festival and as three major cities are locked down

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Analysis: some say lateral flow tests could help cut outbreaks, but others argue they offer false reassurance

Production of new flu vaccine each year shows it should be possible to adapt to coronavirus variants if necessary

Latest updates: arrivals from Brazil, Argentina and the rest of South America, alongside Portugal, banned from Friday. This live blog is now closed - please follow the global live blog for the latest updates

The US hasn’t learned from past pandemics. The health of naturalized Americans is intertwined with that of immigrants

Rule requiring travellers to show negative test to come into force on Monday, not Friday as planned

A lonely computer scientist in the year 2038 secretly works on an android version of his wife who died in a car crash – is it romantic, or something more sinister?British illustrator and visual-effects director Gavin Rothery makes his feature debut with this artificial intelligence thriller: a tale of love, death and robotics that has some nicely creepy moments. Set in 2038, it centres on lonely computer scientist George Almore (Divergent’s Theo James), who is holed up in a remote research facility in Japan secretly working on an android version of his wife Jules (Stacy Martin); she has died in a car crash. His prototype, J3 (also played by Martin), is his closest yet to the real thing: a highly advanced humanoid with spookily pale skin who looks like she might be the ghost of his dead wife. Poor old J1 and J2, his earlier, clunkier prototypes: they look on bitterly as the newer, sleeker model gets all George’s attention.The movie opens with sweeping helicopter shots over a snowy forest. Inside the concrete bunker-like facility, Rothery works wonders with a modest budget (he was behind the look of Duncan Jones’s Moon), creating an ungimmicky nearish future that looks a lot like today. When George’s corporate bosses threaten to pull the plug on his research, he hurries to put the finishing touches to J3 – a task involving the contents of a fridge-like archive unit containing his dead wife’s consciousness. George is surrounded by the robot versions of Jules. J1 is boxy, non-verbal and baby-like. J2 is a little more advanced: she can speak, and behaves like a teenager, huffing jealously when George removes her legs to give to J3. Continue reading...

PHE found immunity from earlier infection provided 83% protection against reinfection for at least 20 weeks

Esprit module will supply communications and refuelling to international lunar stationThe European Space Agency (Esa) has signed a contract to begin building the module to supply communications and refuelling for the international lunar Gateway space station.The European System Providing Refuelling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications (Esprit) will consist of two separate units. The communications system will be used by astronauts to provide data, voice and video links to and from the lunar surface. It will be mounted on the Nasa Habitation and Logistics Outpost (Halo) module, which is scheduled for launch in 2024. Continue reading...

The new Covid variant, B117, is rapidly spreading around the UK and has been detected in many other countries. Although it is about 50% more infectious than previous variants, B117 does not seem to cause more severe disease or be immune to current vaccines. Yet it has raised concerns over how the virus may adapt to our antibodies and vaccines in the future. To explore these issues, the health editor, Sarah Boseley, speaks to Prof Ravi Gupta about how and why viruses mutate Continue reading...

Study finds macaques go for tourists’ electronics and wallets over empty bags and then maximise their profitAt the Uluwatu temple in Bali, monkeys mean business. The long-tailed macaques who roam the ancient site are infamous for brazenly robbing unsuspecting tourists and clinging on to their possessions until food is offered as ransom payment.Researchers have found they are also skilled at judging which items their victims value the most and using this information to maximise their profit. Continue reading...

Picture of wild pig made at least 45,500 years ago provides earliest evidence of human settlementArchaeologists have discovered the world’s oldest known cave painting: a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia.The finding, described in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday, provides the earliest evidence of human settlement of the region. Continue reading...

The prime minister is getting too comfortable with a pandemic regime that allows him to escape scrutiny and accountabilityEven in the most extreme emergency, the prime minister does not have the power to make law by himself, live on television. The pandemic has sometimes created the impression that something along those lines is happening when Boris Johnson announces new lockdown rules, but his words are mere guidance until parliament upgrades them.That constitutional process matters. Britain’s apparatus of Covid regulations is not reminiscent of East Germany, nor is it evolving into “something akin to a police state”, as Nigel Farage claimed last week. The comparison is proved false by the liberty Mr Farage enjoys to make it. Continue reading...

Shannon Turner feels the stay at home message is unclear when so many shops remain open, while Eric Thomas says the government must not use the public as a scapegoat for soaring Covid cases. Plus letters from Dr Stephen Battersby and Dr Michael QuigleyPerhaps if there were fewer shops open, the stay at home message might be more effective (Police in England say they won’t enforce masks in supermarkets, 11 January). At the moment I’m in a small rural town, and there are a considerable number of shops still legitimately open.People are out browsing cards, clothing, cosmetics, slippers etc. Surely none of these items are “essential”? If these shops are open they should only be able to sell items classified under a strict set of government guidelines that include the basic necessities to survive a lockdown. The rest should be blanked off or stored off the shelves. Continue reading...

Some evidence suggests spacing vaccination doses improves effectiveness

I understand why some pregnant women are nervous about the vaccine. But I looked at the research and feel confident in my decision