Science | The Guardian

In some US states, bars are already packed again and you can even get your nails done. Will lockdown boredom lead to a dreaded second wave?

Deputy chief scientific adviser suggests track-and-trace stopped in March due to lack of capacity

Nicola Davis asks mathematician Kit Yates how useful global comparisons are when it comes to the coronavirus outbreak, given the huge differences in demographics and public health responses. And, as per a question from a listener, what the best metric is when doing such comparisons?

Canada-US border to remain closed; Barcelona beaches to reopen as Spain death toll below 100 for third consecutive day. This blog is now closed

Legal claim launched to help fund Covid-19 response in South American country

Drug taken by Trump being acquired in case it proves effective against coronavirus

As the spats continue, the Commons science and technology committee paints a more nuanced picture of what went wrong

The president has announced he is taking hydroxychloroquine to fight coronavirus. Perhaps he has also been injecting bleach in front of Fox NewsHow is Donald Trump still alive? Seriously, it defies science. The man reportedly drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day, appears to exist purely on Big Macs and doesn’t do any exercise because he thinks the human body is like a battery and working out depletes it. On top of all this, it turns out the 73-year-old is popping pills with potentially fatal side-effects for reasons that make no medical sense.We learned on Monday that the president has been taking the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to ward off Covid-19. This goes against the advice of his own government. After Trump repeatedly championed the drug as a “gamechanger”, the Food and Drug Administration stressed that it hasn’t been shown to work as a coronavirus treatment or preventive and should only be administered in hospital or research settings due to the risk of potential heart problems. As Nancy Pelosi bluntly noted, taking unapproved drugs is particularly dangerous for people in Trump’s “age group and his, shall we say, weight group”. Continue reading...

We were second in the world for preparedness. Then Boris Johnson et al deliberately de-prepared us

US president claimed WHO too willing to accept Chinese explanations over coronavirus outbreak

Latest figures from public health authorities on the spread of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom. Find out how many confirmed cases have been reported in each of England’s local authorities

Public Health England must give scientific reasoning, MPs say in letter to Boris Johnson

Outbreaks don’t follow a straightforward pattern. To minimise risk, we must limit mass gatherings and deploy proper testing

Maybe it was because she was a healthcare worker and a mother whose family could not be there when she died

Newly released footage captures the last known moving images of the evasive thylacine (Tasmanian tiger). Shot in 1935, the footage has been released to the public after it was digitally restored by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Unseen for 85 years, the 21 seconds come from a 1935 travelogue, Tasmania the Wonderland, believed to be shot by Sidney Cook. The vision captures 'Benjamin', the last-known surviving thylacine at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. Confirmation the video was shot in 1935 makes it the most recent moving images of the animal, after the previous last-confirmed footage was shot in December 1933. 'Benjamin' died in 1937, 18 months after this footage was captured

Ian Sample talks to Prof Kate Jones about whether the current coronavirus pandemic is part of a wider picture of increasing animal-to-human virus transmission. Are we are looking at a future where outbreaks of new infectious diseases become more common? Continue reading...

We now know people and megafauna overlapped by up to 20,000 years, until changes to vegetation, water and fireWhen people first arrived in what is now Queensland, they would have found the land inhabited by massive animals including goannas six metres long and kangaroos twice as tall as a human.We have studied fossil bones of these animals for the past decade. Our findings, published in Nature Communications, shed new light on the mystery of what drove these ancient megafauna to extinction. Continue reading...

Southern European countries ease lockdowns; South Africa reports highest daily increase; global infections pass 4.7 million. This blog is now closed

Eight initial volunteers in US produced an antibody response from Moderna’s RNA vaccine

Health secretary Matt Hancock says anyone with symptoms – now including anosmia – over the age of five can be tested for Covid-19

Public health experts not convinced of plastic shields’ benefits for general users

Staff turned backs on prime minister in protest during weekend hospital visit

The public deserves to know what happened in the secretive scientific debates that have informed government policy

The solutions to today’s puzzlesEarlier today I set you three sudokus: an anti-knight sudoku, a non-consecutive sudoku and the Miracle sudoku. To read more about these puzzles click here, and to go to a printable page click here. The solutions are below:Anti-knight: Continue reading...

UK direction for those with anosmia to isolate and seek test was overdue, say scientists

Residents also testing positive more than 30 days after showing first symptoms

Art lovers may have to give 1910 version space due to damaging effect of humidity on impure paintIt is a masterpiece that seems to speak to the later horrors of war in the 20th century and even the anguishes of the 21st. Now Edvard Munch’s The Scream has another claim on modernity, after it emerged that an oversight by the artist means the 1910 version of the work needs to practise some physical distancing.An international consortium of scientists seeking to identify the main cause of deterioration of the paint in the canvas has discovered Munch accidentally used an impure tube of cadmium yellow which can fade and flake even in relatively low humidity, including when breathed upon by crowds of art lovers. Continue reading...

The dismissal of coronavirus expertise, the pitting of ‘elites’ against ‘the people’ – it’s Brexit all over again for the high-profile contrariansWithin days of Boris Johnson announcing lockdown restrictions in late March, Toby Young – self-appointed general secretary of the Free Speech Union – had his own take on the government’s tripartite slogan. “Stay sceptical. End the lockdown. Save lives.”Scepticism has a long and venerable history. From Descartes’s musings on metaphysics to Carl Sagan’s “fine art of baloney detection”, sceptics are unafraid to ask unpopular questions. Even if it means being branded a heretic. Continue reading...

Latest figures from public health authorities on the spread of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom. Find out how many confirmed cases have been reported in each of England’s local authorities

Many of the people I support in Kinshasa have no money, no soap, no water – and when they are struggling to breathe, no ventilators

Millions tune in to watch British puzzlers solve the Miracle and other spectacular gridsIt may not be as hair-raising as Formula 1, nor as dramatic as Premier League football, but Sudoku solving is acquiring a niche following as a spectator sport.It’s surprisingly thrilling, believe me. Just ask fans of the puzzle-solving YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic, which has seen its viewing figures shoot up over the last two months. Its top Sudoku video has had more than 3 million views. Continue reading...

A summary of the biggest developments in the global coronavirus outbreak

CCTV footage shows man strolling through exhibits at closed Australian Museum and posing for selfies with head inside mouth of T-Rex skullA Sydney man will face court on Monday after allegedly breaking into Australia’s oldest museum and snapping selfies with the dinosaur exhibit.The man broke into the heritage-listed Australian Museum in Sydney’s CBD just after 1am on Sunday 10 May, and was captured on CCTV cameras wandering around the exhibits for around 40 minutes, according to New South Wales police. Continue reading...

Centre will allow manufacture to begin this summer before it is known whether vaccine works

UK researchers believe blood markers may help them identify those most at risk

Dr Michael Browning is concerned by the limitations of the Roche antibody test, while Dennis Sherwood is worried about the reliability of self-administered swabsPublic Health England’s report on its validation of the Roche Covid-19 antibody test (which the government is promoting for widespread use) reveals a number of limitations that were not mentioned in the public briefings (Public Health England approves Roche test for coronavirus antibodies, 13 May). The test showed inadequate levels of sensitivity for detecting antibodies to Covid-19 until 40 days after the onset of symptoms, so will only be useful from six weeks after the start of infection, and cannot be used for the diagnosis of acute infections; the validation process did not include controls from patients with other coronavirus infections (eg Sars/Mers) to exclude potential cross-reactions with these; it did not address how long antibodies persist following infection; and does not inform whether an individual is protected against reinfection, and therefore does not indicate whether they are safe to return to work, nor whether they are suitable for an “immunity passport”.While the availability of antibody testing undoubtedly represents an important step in the fight against Covid-19, limitations such as these mean that these tests are not as clinically useful as the public has been led to believe.

Hospital in Wolverhampton believed to be first in NHS to resort to in-house production

Latest figures from public health authorities on the spread of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom. Find out how many confirmed cases have been reported in each of England’s local authorities

Exclusive: academics’ data on excess deaths shows peak in England was higher than Italy’s

Discovery of a single vertebra of an elaphrosaur in Victoria hugely expands known range of the group, which had teeth as juveniles but beaks as adultsA dinosaur relative of T. rex and Velociraptor with an unusually long neck, and which may have transitioned from predator to plant-eater as it reached adulthood, has been unearthed in Victoria.The elaphrosaur was a member of the theropod family of dinosaurs that included all of the predatory species. It stood about the height of a small emu, measuring 2m from its head to the end of a long tail, and had short arms, each ending in four fingers. Continue reading...

As grey roots appear, imagine the plight of a wary partner asked to stand in for the experts… A cautionary taleRecently, my wife has started walking towards me and bowing her head, as if in penitence. In fact, she’s showing me the roots of her hair. “Howdsit look?” she asks.Yesterday, she sent me an email from her “office” in the kitchen to mine in the converted loft upstairs. This contained a web link, with no explanation. I clicked the link. It took me to a very long article in American Vogue, “How Hair Salons Will be Transformed by the Global Pandemic”, about what hair salons might be like in the future: face masks, nobody getting too close, that kind of thing. It could have been summarised in a paragraph, but this being Vogue it went on and on and on. I’m sure it was brilliant. Just not for me, and I didn’t finish it. Continue reading...

Where did the virus come from? And can hydroxychloroquine treat it? Some answers to fight the misinformation out there

Some studies show pupils are less likely to become ill if infected, while others show they are as infectious as adults

In Amsterdam, 102 members of one choir fell ill, and cases have been reported in Europe, America and the UK. But scientists cannot agree on the cause

Charity raises concerns over ‘hidden victims’ in a socioeconomic group known to be reluctant to seek help

Children’s Covid symptoms are usually mild, but a lack of education can be severe

Researchers hope llama antibodies could help protect humans who have not been infected

Russia records highest daily fatalities; German football gets back under way; French child dies of Kawasaki disease. Follow the latest updates

Facility to open next summer, with earlier deployment possible to make coronavirus vaccine

‘Following the science’ is a disingenuous policy because mathematical reckoning and human judgments are very different things