Government secures early access to those being developed by Novavax and Janssen

It is difficult for lefty snails to mate with normal snails because they have genitals on the opposite side of their headIt began when a retired scientist at the Natural History Museum in London told me that he had found a rare garden snail with a left-coiling shell. In 20 years of researching the genetics of snails at universities around the world, I had never found a “lefty” garden snail. My first thought was that this snail could be used to discover what makes most other snail shells coil clockwise. As with our previous work, in which we showed that snails and other animals may use the same genes to define left and right, perhaps the new snail might contribute to understanding human asymmetry. For example, we usually have our heart to the left, but rare individuals are reversed.The problem was that it is very difficult for lefty snails to mate, because they not only have a reversed shell but also genitals on the opposite side of their head to normal snails. Imagine trying to shake hands with your right hand with someone who insists on using their left. It doesn’t work. How could we understand the genetics if we could not get offspring from the lefty? Continue reading...

More than 170 teams of researchers are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine. Here is their progressResearchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, with more than 170 candidate vaccines now tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO). Continue reading...

Your questions answered on what type of mask to wear to cut the risk of getting or giving someone Covid-19

Some have suggested we’re now successfully treating Covid-19, or that ‘herd immunity’ has finally arrived. Neither is true

Blood-sucking maggots are bent on the deaths of these innocent creatures

Premier Daniel Andrews announces 372 new cases as chief health officer Brett Sutton says he is ‘confident’ Covid-19 outbreak has peaked

Channel Tunnel warns it doesn’t have capacity for extra travellers trying to get home before 4am on Saturday

Mystery had enthralled skywatchers since the star began to lose luminosity last October – with some suggesting it could explodeThe sudden dimming of one of the Milky Way’s brightest stars, Betelgeuse, could be due to a dust cloud spewing up from its surface, astronomers have said.The mystery has enthralled skywatchers since the star – part of the Orion constellation – began to lose luminosity last October, with some experts suggesting it could herald its explosion into a supernova. Continue reading...

UK move takes effect as of 4am BST on Saturday; Pandemic has killed three quarters of a million people; Germany case jump shows ‘unsettling trend’; Iraq reports record daily Covid-19 cases. This blog is closed

Analysis of ancient DNA from Siberia finds human hunting probably not to blameThe woolly rhino may have been wiped out by climate change rather than human hunting, researchers have revealed.Enormous, hairy and with a huge hump, the woolly rhino roamed northern Eurasia until about 14,000 years ago. The cause of its demise has been much debated, with remains found near prehistoric human sites raising the question of whether they were hunted to extinction. Continue reading...

Rob Delaney’s frank and funny account of his vasectomy revives memories for readers including Mike Cashman and the Rev Trevor SmithRob Delaney’s article about having a vasectomy (‘Could I feel what they were doing? Yes’, 12 August) brought back memories from when I had one because my wife and I did not want more children.The surgeon gave me a local anaesthetic and I was cut above my penis. All went well and I thought it was all over and how brave I had been when I realised he had only done one side and I was only halfway through the operation. Continue reading...

More than 900 healthcare workers have died in this pandemic. Many of those deaths could have been preventedHealthcare workers usually bear the brunt of an epidemic. Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel are in constant contact with people who may be infected. The cruel math of such potential exposures, multiplied over and over, inevitably takes a toll.Covid-19 is no exception. Lost on the Frontline, a new database from the Guardian and Kaiser Health News, shows that more than 900 American healthcare workers have already paid the ultimate price in the battle against coronavirus. Continue reading...

More than 170 teams of researchers are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine. Here is their progressResearchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, with more than 170 candidate vaccines now tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO). Continue reading...

Update to long-running study finds screening from age of 40 rather than 50 could save livesScreening women from the age of 40 for breast cancer has the potential to save lives, according to a study that will reopen the debate over the timing as well as the risks and benefits of routine mammograms.A group at Queen Mary University of London looked at data on 160,000 women between the ages of 39 and 41 who were randomly assigned either to annual breast screening or to wait until they were eligible for the usual NHS screening, offered every three years from the age of 50. Continue reading...

Imperial College home testing programme suggests 13% of Londoners have antibodies

Your questions answered on what type of mask to wear to cut the risk of getting Covid-19

I use a ventilation machine at night and by early March, I could see that if I were to catch coronavirus, I’d be in serious troubleTowards the end of last year, I’d just got my life back on track after a long stay in hospital. I was discharged with round-the-clock care that transformed my life.I am disabled and the care package I was on before I was admitted to hospital didn’t provide enough support; I was admitted to a ward with problems associated with a lack of care, including malnutrition and serious pressure sores. But then I was given a personal health budget from my local authority, with responsibility for employing care workers, rotas, management, training and everything else you can think of. Continue reading...

The Science Weekly team are taking a summer break – well, some of them – and so we’re bringing you an episode from the archive. And not just any episode, one of Nicola Davis’s favourites. Back in 2017, Nicola sat down with with Dr Kathryn Harkup to discuss a shared love of crime fiction and the chemistry contained within their poisonous plots Continue reading...

Country struggling with surge in infections; Moscow rejects concerns over safety; Germans told to keep guard up against virus. This blog is closed

Inconsistencies in how fires are measured across the states leads to confusion over how much of the country actually burned, experts sayA group of bushfire scientists have used an article in one of the world’s leading scientific journals to call for Australia to establish a national agency to monitor the scale, severity and impacts of fires.The eight scientists from Australia and Spain say inconsistencies in how the scale and severity of bushfires are measured across the states had led to confusion over how much of the country actually burned. Continue reading...

Rising chorus of concern over Sputnik V vaccine stems from opaque development and lack of mass testing

Russia said on Wednesday the first batch of its Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine would be ready within two weeks and rejected safety concerns over its rapid approval as 'groundless'. The health minister, Mikhail Murashko, said the vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya Institute, would be administered on a voluntary basis. The vaccine has not yet completed its final trials. Only about 10% of clinical trials are successful and some scientists fear Moscow may be putting national prestige before safety

The alien is the least of the horrors in Egor Abramenko’s mostly gripping suspense, set in a dour 80s army facility with an unwanted visitor

More than 170 teams of researchers are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine. Here is their progressResearchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, with more than 170 candidate vaccines now tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO). Continue reading...

The actor and comedian decided it was time to have the procedure after he and his wife had had four children. Here he writes candidly about the experience, and why it was the kindest cut

New Zealand to conduct ‘tens of thousands’ of tests; 21 deaths recorded in Australian state of Victoria; US health secretary sceptical of Russia vaccine

Coronavirus updates: New Zealand records first new local cases in 102 days; global deaths likely to pass 750,000 this week, says WHO. This blog is now closed

Continue reading...

Research could pave way for cheap supercapacitor storage of renewable energyThe humble house brick has been turned into a battery that can store electricity, raising the possibility that buildings could one day become literal powerhouses.The new technology exploits the porous nature of fired red bricks by filling the pores with tiny nanofibres of a conducting plastic that can store charge. The first bricks store enough electricity to power small lights. But if their capacity can be increased, they may become a low-cost alternative to the lithium-ion batteries currently used. Continue reading...

Central to infectious disease control is tracking the spread of a pathogen through the population. In Cambridge, UK, researchers are looking at genetic mutations in samples from Covid-19 patients to rapidly investigate how and where hospital transmissions are occurring. Dr Estée Török tells Nicola Davis what this real-time pathological detective work can reveal about the origins of an outbreak Continue reading...

Your questions answered on what type of mask to wear to cut the risk of getting Covid-19

Finland imposes 14-day quarantine on those arriving from high-risk countries; Pakistanis flock to reopened gyms and restaurants; US halts upward trend in deaths. This blog is now closed

Ceres, believed to be a barren space rock, has an ‘extensive reservoir’ of brine beneath its surface, images showThe dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday.Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, massive enough to be shaped by its gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface. Continue reading...

Enhanced photosynthesis holds promise of higher yields in a drought-afflicted future

Physician who created the UK’s first liver transplant programme and worked with George Best to highlight the dangers of alcoholThe six-decade career of Roger Williams, who has died at the age of 88 after suffering a heart attack, lay at the heart of an astonishing transformation in liver medicine.In 1968, while a hepatologist at King’s College hospital in London, he teamed up with the Cambridge surgeon Roy Calne to form the Cambridge-King’s transplant programme and carry out the UK’s first liver transplant. Continue reading...

The solutions to today’s hard onesEarlier today I set you the following puzzle:Six friends – Babs, Charles, Hattie, Joan, Kenneth and Sid – are going camping in France. They are travelling across the Channel on a magic carpet that can take only two people at a time. So, in order for everyone to get across there will need to be 9 trips in total from their starting point in England: 5 across carrying two people, and 4 returning carrying one person. (Magic carpets cannot fly empty, which is why one person needs to travel back. All the friends are able to fly alone on the carpet if need be.) Continue reading...

Research suggests 50% greater risk for children whose mothers report using cannabisChildren born to mothers who report using cannabis during pregnancy have about a 50% greater risk of developing autism, research suggests.While the team behind the work said more research was needed to unpick whether cannabis itself was behind the link, they said the results were concerning. Continue reading...

Sir, your puzzle is so hard!UPDATE: Solutions now posted hereToday’s puzzle is a seasonal update of a cherished gem of British culture: the river-crossing puzzle, in which people travel back-and forth across a stretch of water in a very small vessel. The earliest-known river-crossing puzzles appear in a manuscript by Alcuin of York in the eighth century.Another British cultural artefact from a distant age is the Carry On film. Not wanting to appear too parochial, however, today’s puzzle also includes an element from the Thousand and One Nights. Continue reading...

The Guardian’s Madrid correspondent on Spain’s response and how life as a reporter has changed

Our brightest and most reliable annual meteor shower will be affected this year by the proximity of the half moonThis week one of the most reliable annual meteor showers will be on show. The Perseids will reach their peak activity over the next few days. Start looking tonight, particularly in the early hours of the morning, then again tomorrow night and on Wednesday. The meteors are small particles of dust, left in space from the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, that burn up high above Earth. Each particle enters our atmosphere at a velocity of around 130,000 miles per hour. Continue reading...

Businesses already struggling with the fallout from Covid-19 will be forced to deal with a mountain of new bureaucracy in the middle of a deep recessionThe government did not quite achieve the Brexit breakthrough it was seeking on Friday, when there was hope that a fast-tracked trade agreement with Japan might be reached. But it seems likely that a deal, essentially replicating one signed by the EU and Japan last year, will be done by the end of the month. Some kind of morale booster for Britain’s battered and bruised businesses would certainly be welcome.As the clock runs down to the end of the transition period on 31 December, ministers are no longer bothering to offer the false hope of a relatively frictionless trade agreement with the EU. Even a Canada-style free trade deal will mean a vast infrastructure of compliance and checks: permits for lorry drivers to enter Kent, huge customs clearance centres and tracking apps are all in the mix. The government estimates that, from 2021, there will be over 400m extra customs checks a year on goods going to and from the EU. Continue reading...

The cosmologist, author and Twitter sensation on ‘heat death’, getting heckled by Stephen Hawking – and being name-checked on a No 1 albumKatie Mack achieves two improbable feats with her new book, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). First, she writes about the end of the universe with a jauntiness that makes it not actually that depressing. And second, she takes concepts in cosmology, string theory and quantum mechanics and makes them accessible. This gift for straight talking will be familiar to the 360,000 followers of Mack’s Twitter feed – @AstroKatie – through which the 39-year-old cosmologist and assistant professor at North Carolina State University has become one of the most popular voices on science.Why did you want to write about the end of the universe?

Contact tracing must improve to prevent resurgence in England, say care chief and top scientist

Survey sparks concern over misconceptions about vaccines and scepticism about science

Young people have been hugely affected by Covid-19. We must fight this rise in cases and make classrooms as safe as possible

As schools around the world prepare to reopen, new scientific evidence about children and coronavirus is coming to light

Tens of thousands demand better pay and protection as cases rise in the Philippines, Greece and Italy

Space agency says ‘certain cosmic nicknames are insensitive’ and vows to drop any reference to themNasa has signaled it is joining the social justice movement by changing unofficial and potentially contentious names used by the scientific community for distant cosmic objects and systems such as planets, galaxies and nebulae.In a statement last week, the space agency said that as the “community works to identify and address systemic discrimination and inequality in all aspects of the field, it has become clear that certain cosmic nicknames are not only insensitive, but can be actively harmful”. Continue reading...