Deal worth £118m covers design, manufacturing and testing of ESA’s first planetary defence missionThe European Space Agency has awarded a €129m (£118m) contract to the German space company OHB. The deal covers the design, manufacturing and testing of Hera, the ESA’s first planetary defence mission.Hera is the European contribution to an experiment called the asteroid impact and deflection assessment. The other component is Nasa’s double asteroid redirection test (Dart). Both spacecraft are designed to visit the double asteroid Didymos. Continue reading...

Upwards curvature means foot muscles do less work, potentially weakening them over timeThey may feel comfy, but wearing shoes that curve upwards at the front may be weakening your foot muscles and increasing your risk of injury.This curvature, known as a “toe spring”, is a common feature of many shoes, especially trainers. It helps the front part of the foot to roll forwards when walking or running, enhancing the comfort of thick and cushioned soles. But despite their ubiquity, the effect of toe springs on our foot muscles had not been well studied, until now. Continue reading...

Readers are unimpressed by the farcical nature of the UK’s test-and-trace systemThe NHS Test and Trace situation is now quite farcical (UK Covid testing system has ‘huge problems’, admits Boris Johnson, 16 September).It is silly to put so much emphasis on a test. Most infected people are asymptomatic, can’t or won’t get tested, or give a false negative result. The current test-and-trace system will not control outbreaks. Continue reading...

It’s easy to feel angry towards those who don’t follow Covid-19 guidelines. Yet empathy is the key to changing people’s minds

I understand visits must be restricted because of Covid, but why are families the ones to suffer?My husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease eight years ago. I vowed to look after him and never put him in a home.Three years on, after sleepless nights, mental and physical exhaustion, and the sensation that I was disintegrating, I faced the hard truth: I was not the best person to look after my husband any more. After a long and heartbreaking search I found my husband’s present care home, and shed tears of relief. Continue reading...

Tracers express their fears as infected people reveal multiple close contacts in multiple locationsIn the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Ireland’s contact tracers often made calls to people who were very sick, with some struggling to breathe.“In a lot of cases people were suffering extreme physical distress,” said Eamonn Gormley, a tracer at University College Dublin. “One person collapsed on the floor and we could hear them gasping for air. You got questions like: ‘Am I going to die?’ Some nights I had trouble sleeping.” Continue reading...

Boris Johnson and his ministers chose to ignore scientists and outsource their Covid response to big private companiesA friend texts: his five-year-old daughter is sick. On hearing the symptoms, the NHS helpline adviser says she must be tested for Covid. So he and his wife have been trying for two days straight to book her a test, with almost nothing to show for it. All they are offered is a 120-mile round trip to Gatwick ­– a long drive for a feverish child. Meanwhile the family stays in the flat, its walls throbbing with their worries about sickness and school and work.

Teams around the world are hard at work developing Covid-19 vaccines. While any potential candidate will need to be tested on thousands of volunteers to prove its safety and efficacy, some scientists have argued that the race to the finish line could be sped up by human challenge trials — where participants are infected with a special strain of the virus.Ian Sample delves into some of the misconceptions and hurdles inherent in this kind of research. In the second of two episodes, Ian explores the importance of rescue treatments, what happens if something goes wrong, and whether it would ever be morally permissible to deliberately infect those most at risk of Covid-19, like volunteer octogenarians Continue reading...

Average age of people infected with Covid-19 is coming down, says WHO expert; third-highest new caseload in France; local lockdowns in Madrid. This blog is now closed

The estimation runs counter to Donald Trump’s recent messaging that a vaccine will be available ‘in a matter of weeks’The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has told a Senate panel that he thinks it will take one year before a coronavirus vaccine will be “generally available to the American public”.That estimation contrasts with recent bullish messaging by Donald Trump, who on Tuesday repeated his assertion that “we’re going to have a vaccine in a matter of weeks” even though a successful vaccine has yet to be unveiled from ongoing US trials, and attacked the CDC director on Wednesday as “confused” about the timeline. Continue reading...

Volcanic eruptions drove global heating, causing mass extinctions and ushering in dinosaur eraA mass extinction event sparked by a sudden shift in climate more than 200m years ago reshaped life on Earth and ushered in the age of the dinosaurs, scientists claim.An international team reviewed geological evidence and the fossil record and found that enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now western Canada coincided with a global loss of plants and animals. Continue reading...

If there was a moment of true emergency in the fight to preserve our climate, it is now

Four decades ago, when I was a researcher getting to grips with the complexities of the politics and physics of plutonium for my PhD, I contacted Frank Barnaby, then director of the peace research organisation Sipri in Stockholm.With characteristic good humour he found time in his busy schedule to share his knowledge. His life’s work has made our planet a better and safer place, and I will be among many who will miss him. Continue reading...

Research reveals Vikings were genetically diverse group and not purely ScandinavianThey may have had a reputation for trade, braids and fearsome raids, but the Vikings were far from a single group of flaxen-haired, sea-faring Scandinavians.A genetic study of Viking-age human remains has not only confirmed that Vikings from different parts of Scandinavia set sail for different parts of the world, but has revealed that dark hair was more common among Vikings than Danes today. Continue reading...

Study of fingerprints left at Los Machos site thousands of years ago reveal age and sex of artistsOne day, perhaps a little over 7,000 years ago, a man in his 30s and a younger companion dipped their fingers in ochre pigment and set about daubing the walls of a shallow cave in southern Spain with anthropomorphic, circular and geometric designs.Today, thanks to the fingerprints they left behind in the natural shelter of Los Machos in the province of Granada, researchers have been able to determine their sexes and ages. Continue reading...

One explanation for virus not behaving as expected could be previous exposure to other infections, experts tell MPs

Scientific American says Trump has damaged US ‘because he rejects evidence and science’In a break with its 175-year tradition, the prestigious US magazine Scientific American has for the first time endorsed a candidate in a US presidential election – the Democratic party nominee, Joe Biden.The magazine has taken the line because, it says, “Donald Trump has badly damaged the US and its people – because he rejects evidence and science.” Continue reading...

Robert Buckland admits government faces ‘real challenges’ over testing

Strides are being made towards an open access atlas that could predict where dangerous animal-borne viruses will next appear

Challenger: The Final Flight, a four-part docuseries produced by JJ Abrams, retells an infamous tragedy from those who were thereThe fourth and final episode of Netflix’s Challenger: The Final Flight, a JJ Abrams-produced documentary series on the defining space shuttle disaster, opens with anonymous home footage from a yard in Florida on 28 January 1986. A bright pillar of rocket combustion slices through the crisp blue of an unusually cold morning, then splits, forking outward. Like the thousands watching on the ground miles away at the Kennedy Space Center, the shaky cameraman at first can’t understand what he’s seeing – “Is that trouble, or not?” he asks. But as the paths keep winding upwards, divergent, arcing like two bug antennae, it’s apparent that something in the launch – a news event by then semi-routine to Americans, supposedly so safe a non-astronaut was onboard – had gone horribly awry. “They got trouble,” he concludes.Related: Breaking the color barrier: behind the long fight to diversify space Continue reading...

Chief epidemiologist puts low number of cases down to light-touch ‘sustainable’ approach

Concerns India figures don’t give full picture; Trump says Covid-19 will ‘go away’ because of ‘herd mentality’; pandemic only beginning, says WHO

Cabinet colleagues had earlier been told to restrict movements as a precaution; WHO chief warns of school closures’ effect on children. This blog is now closed

Project to revive climate-boosting wonder plant in Pembrokeshire could spur similar schemesSeagrass is a wonder plant but unrecognised and sorely neglected. This is a flowering plant with long ribbon-like leaves that often grows in the sea in lush underwater meadows.It is an unsung hero in the fight to clean up carbon dioxide and the climate emergency. Its credentials are astonishing: it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests, stores 10% of the annual ocean carbon storage across the globe and locks up that carbon in sediments that can stay out of harm’s way for millennia. Continue reading...

Readers express their frustration with the utter shambles of England’s test-and-trace regimeDespite what Matt Hancock says, there just aren’t enough tests available (Report, 15 September). There are still no routine tests for medical professionals and other frontline services. Paramedics I have spoken to in Liverpool have been tested only once in the past six months and attend emergencies not knowing whether they are virus-free. They have colleagues who have caught Covid and some have died. It is unacceptable to put them at risk like this.

Responding to coronavirus with an over-centralised and semi-privatised design was never going to turn out well

Experts warn the long-term effects of virus are causing an ‘epidemic in primary care’

The discovery of phosphine in the planet’s atmosphere is part of our long search to understand our place in the universeThe recent detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, the excitement around several spacecraft currently bound for Mars and discoveries of distant rocky Earth-sized exoplanets fuel an optimism about extraterrestrial life. However, despite the promise, there are good reasons to be cautious. We should be ready to embrace the possible discovery of a lack of alien life as a scientific triumph in our understanding of our place in the universe.Related: Scientists find gas linked to life in atmosphere of Venus Continue reading...

Covid has got experts thinking urgently about the risk of diseases passing from farmed animals to humans. We examine the major outbreaks of the past two centuries Continue reading...

Key government adviser cautioned PM against setting 10m daily testing target

You can’t just ‘solve’ big complex problems like coronavirus, they need steady and unshowy work. This narrative is just a distractionThere are some words that, when used with respect to technology, bring about a collective groan, slump of the shoulders and eye-roll from the broader tech community. It’s normally on stage at a big conference, or in a newspaper headline, or in an elevator pitch at the latest demo day. Such words and phrases include: “We are the Uber of [insert industry here]”, “growth-hacking”, “[coding / design / business] ninja”, and, of course, “moonshot”.They are shortcuts, they are hyperbolic, they are used to try to impress. But they also signify something unspoken to those in the know looking on. Something unintended by those making big claims. They signify laziness of thought and a lack of originality. Most of all, they suggest a complete lack of engagement with the current state of the science and technology industries. 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...

Mobile testing unit fails to show up in Bolton, despite highest infection rate in UK

Pandemic could result in a ‘lost decade’ for developing countries says co-chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in stark report

Would you be willing to have a dose of Sars-CoV-2 sprayed up your nose for medical research? For thousands around the world, the answer is yes. Eager volunteers have already signed up to take part in human challenge trials, where participants would be deliberately infected with the virus in order to better understand the disease, and rapidly develop a treatment or vaccine. But should such studies go ahead with a dangerous and relatively new virus?In the first of two episodes, alongside a panel of experts Ian Sample delves into some of the ethical questions of human challenge trials and asks where the balance of risks and benefits currently lies Continue reading...

Jordan to shut schools and places of worship; Panama allows men and women out on same day; 14 refugees test positive after Lesbos fire. This blog is now closed

Trials on mice show how sterile animals can produce sperm deriving from elite breedersScientists have used gene-editing to create pigs, goats and cattle that can serve as so-called “surrogate sires” – male animals providing sperm that carry the genetic traits of elite donor animals – in a bid to tackle global food insecurity.For thousands of years, farmers have selectively bred livestock to champion superior traits such as disease resistance and heat tolerance, but techniques such as artificial insemination are often limited by technical and logistical challenges. Continue reading...

Unlike endemic species, An. stephensi is adapted to urban areas, putting another 126 million people in dangerAlready grappling with the highest incidence of malaria with more than 90% of global cases, Africa should be wary of an Asian mosquito species that has the potential to spread the disease into the continent’s urban areas – subjecting an additional 126 million people to risk – a new analysis suggests.Unlike endemic mosquito species in Africa, which have made themselves at home in warm and wet climes in largely rural areas, this particular mosquito – An. stephensi – has made an appearance in African cities in recent years. Continue reading...

Phosphine, released by microbes in oxygen-starved environments, was present in quantities larger than expectedTraces of a pungent gas that waft through the clouds of Venus may be emanations from aerial organisms – microbial life, but not as we know it.Astronomers detected phosphine 30 miles up in the planet’s atmosphere and have failed to identify a process other than life that could account for its presence. Continue reading...

The doors of our surgeries may be locked but many have better access than ever. Let’s ensure this includes vulnerable people

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...

India reports more than 94,000 new cases; Israel the first to reimpose national lockdown; encouraging signs in Australian state of Victoria

Cost would be billions, but represents a huge saving on $11tn response to Covid-19, estimates show

More than 307,000 cases in 24 hours to Sunday; Israel imposes second national lockdown; Cases hit daily record in Czech Republic. This blog is closed

How to find the pole star, not the brightest star in the sky, but the closest to the pole – for now

Leaked documents reveal backlog of 185,000 swabs and tests sent abroad for processing

Managers say there have been delays in receiving test results for staff

Seeing meaning in the unexpected can help turn mistakes into opportunities, says researcher Dr Christian BuschDr Christian Busch has had a lucky life. He narrowly escaped a catastrophic car accident at the age of 18. The car was wrecked but he walked away without a scratch. It was just the wake-up call he needed. “I turned my life around. Before that I’d been a reckless teenager who lived in the moment, having fun. The accident instilled a sense of urgency to try to find meaning.”Luck continued to play a positive role in his life. An accidental coffee spillage in Starbucks led to romance and though the person in question is no longer his girlfriend they are still close. In his work as an entrepreneur, researcher and community-builder, he co-founded several social enterprises and teaches at both New York University and the London School of Economics – enjoying plenty of lucky breaks along the way. But Busch noticed that he wasn’t the only “lucky” one among his friends and colleagues. In fact, many of the most successful and happiest people he encountered also seemed to be on a permanent lucky streak. 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...