Without urgent government funding and an increase in the number of doctors specialising in addictions, the numbers of people sleeping on the streets will only rise, writes Dr Jenny DrifeWhile discussions about the accuracy of the latest government figures for numbers of rough sleepers in England and Wales will no doubt continue (Homelessness: Ministry accused of under-reporting issue, 27 February), it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that even this estimate is an increase of 141% since 2010.We need to remain focused on interventions that will prevent people ending up on the streets, or help them back into stable housing as quickly as possible. Continue reading...

Up to 100 million people died in 1918-19 in the world’s deadliest pandemic. What can we learn?

Many have underlying conditions, making fight against Covid-19 more complex

The UK government encourages quarantine to limit the spread of coronavirus. For insecure workers, it may not be an optionCoronavirus isn’t just a disease – it’s a test of the systems that are part of our everyday lives. In the recent guidance it released to the public, the government said it would encourage self-isolation as the primary way to contain the spread of the virus. Yet for many of the low-paid workers in Britain who look after your parents, deliver your food or drive your Uber, self-isolation means forgoing wages in order to protect others from disease.Related: Explained: UK's coronavirus action plan Continue reading...

Researchers say it is the first time such skill has been shown outside of humans and great apesSome parrots weigh up probabilities to help them make choices, researchers have found, in a study that provides the first evidence of this skill outside great apes.Among previous studies, African grey parrots have been found to selflessly help their peers complete tasks and seem able to identify colours and count. Cockatoos meanwhile can keep track of an object’s location – even when it is hidden – and have been found to invent dance moves. Continue reading...

Chairman and chief executive of General Electric with a fearsome reputation who set the trend for ‘downsizing’

What the government’s measures to fight the spread of Covid-19 mean in practice

Putting Mike Pence in charge is proof that the White House wants to protect its political line, not protect Americans

It has been a bleak few weeks for Chinese business owners amid the coronavirus outbreak but there are signs of a revival

Almost 5,000 cases of Covid-19 recorded in South Korea as WHO chief says the world is in ‘uncharted territory’

Did the virus originate in a US weapons lab, or is it a plot to destabilise Iran? The ‘infection’ of social media by these stories is a deliberate strategyAs coronavirus continues to spread and scientists project how many people are likely to be infected, there has been much talk of contagion. It is easy to imagine red streaks that trace the path of illness extending across the globe like in a Hollywood movie.Predictably, conspiracy theories about coronavirus have spread alongside the virus itself. Thousands of social media accounts linked to Russia claim the US created the coronavirus to “wage economic war on China”, and a US senator repeated a rumour that it began in a Chinese bio-weapons lab and not an outdoor market. Continue reading...

Health officials suggest a wave, a pat on the back or even just a look in the eye are safer alternatives

Global survey finds average figure is higher than that caused by smoking tobaccoHumans are missing out on almost three years of life expectancy on average because of outdoor air pollution, researchers have found.However, the study reveals more than a year of life expectancy could be clawed back if fossil fuel emissions are cut to zero, while if all controllable air pollution is cut – a category that does not include particles from natural wildfires or wind-born dust – global life expectancy could rise by more than 20 months. Continue reading...

Six deaths now confirmed in America, as South Korea reports almost 500 new cases

Guardian readers say they are concerned about being forced to self-isolate at homeFood, medicines and other essentials are being stockpiled by people across the UK over fears the coronavirus outbreak may leave them house-bound or unable to buy necessities.As the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, Guardian readers said they were concerned about being forced to self-isolate at home, along with the prospect of city “lockdowns” limiting the availability of goods, and many are now taking matters into their own hands. Continue reading...

Chemical signatures in ancient ocean crust point to a planet without continentsScientists have found evidence that Earth was covered by a global ocean that turned the planet into a “water world” more than 3bn years ago.Telltale chemical signatures were spotted in an ancient chunk of ocean crust which point to a planet once devoid of continents, the largest landmasses on Earth. Continue reading...

UK on course to lose a quarter of its sandy coast because of human-driven erosionAlmost half of the world’s sandy beaches will have retreated significantly by the end of the century as a result of climate-driven coastal flooding and human interference, according to new research.The sand erosion will endanger wildlife and could inflict a heavy toll on coastal settlements that will no longer have buffer zones to protect them from rising sea levels and storm surges. In addition, measures by governments to mitigate against the damage are predicted to become increasingly expensive and in some cases unsustainable. Continue reading...

A widespread halt in economic activity could put the viability of banks in question and spread financial disruption furtherThe first cases of coronavirus were recorded in China’s landlocked Hubei province, which has a population of about 59 million. Despite the Covid-19 virus and the respiratory disease it causes starting out as a local healthcare problem, it has become a global and an economic one because of the ways in which humans are profoundly interconnected through the world’s economy.The first kind of interconnectedness is the one epidemiologists study: the human travel network. How a disease spreads depends on the number of physical encounters, and the probability of the virus jumping from carrier to new host. These encounters, caused mostly by global air and sea travel, are the ones policymakers have been trying to stop, albeit belatedly. Continue reading...

World Health Organization recommends people take these simple precautions against coronavirus to reduce exposure and transmission

Global warming caused by humans as powerful as weather phenomenon, say expertsMany parts of the world are likely to experience above-average temperatures over the next few months, even without a natural El Niño effect, according to weather experts.The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said the signal from human-induced climate change was now as powerful as the natural phenomenon, which drives warmer temperatures. Continue reading...

South Korea reports 599 new cases and Indonesia confirms its first infectionsLatest coronavirus updatesThe global death toll from the coronavirus outbreak exceeded 3,000 on Monday as South Korea reported almost 500 new cases of the disease and a second person died in the US.Covid-19 has now infected more than 88,000 people and spread to more than 60 countries after first emerging in China late last year. Indonesia, which has so far claimed to be virus-free, registered its first two cases on Monday. Continue reading...

What are the symptoms caused by the virus from Wuhan in China, how does it spread, and at what point should you call a doctor?

A NSW health worker who has not travelled overseas in three months has been diagnosed with the disease along with a 41-year-old womanAustralia now has 30 patients who have been diagnosed with coronavirus, including the first confirmed cases of community transmission.On Monday afternoon the New South Wales health minister, Brad Hazzard, said a 41 year-old NSW woman caught the disease and that her case could be traced back to her 43-year-old brother who had returned from Iran. Continue reading...

Two women hospitalised in Jakarta, following mounting concern that world’s fourth most populous country is failing to identify cases

Watch out later this week as the moon, approaching full, passes the blue-white quadruple star system in the constellation LeoThis coming weekend, keep an eye out for the moon as it passes Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation of Leo, the Lion. Regulus marks the full stop at the bottom of the backwards question mark of stars, also known as the sickle, that makes up the Lion’s head and chest. Once identified, this asterism will be instantly recognisable on subsequent nights. Regulus appears as a blue-white star but is actually a quadruple star system. The chart shows the view looking east from London at 20:00GMT on 7 March. A day later, the moon will appear below Regulus but still close. From Sydney, Australia, the best view comes on 8 March. Look north-east in the evening sky, and the moon will be closer to the star. On 8 March, the moon will be effectively full and any mist or thin cloud could render the fainter sickle stars difficult to see. Regulus, however, should be unmistakable. Return the night after, find Regulus and then trace out the rest of Leo. Continue reading...

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The challenges of a potential pandemic will test Johnson’s leadership skills like nothing before it – and the early signs aren’t greatGive or take the prime minister’s recent 12-day withdrawal from public life, since his party’s victory at the election the government has largely been trading in performance, rhetoric and intrigue. Running through a great deal of what has happened has been the pantomimic presence of Dominic Cummings, showily quoting the animated kids’ series PJ Masks, stoking this or that controversy, and supposedly working on plans for a great national transformation whose practical details may never arrive.But all of a sudden, things have rather changed. If the ongoing floods have seemed to leave too many people at the top untroubled, the decisive arrival in the UK of the coronavirus has highlighted two things that were in danger of being forgotten: the most basic responsibilities of any government, and the necessity of seriousness. Continue reading...

Government lawyers look at postponing 7 May polls if outbreak continues to spread

The truth about the protective value of face masks and how easy it is to catch Covid-19

Brilliant theoretical physicist and mathematician whose far-fetched ideas for the future verged on the bizarreThe physicist Freeman Dyson, who has died aged 96, became famous within science for mathematical solutions so advanced that they could only be applied to complex problems of atomic theory and popular with the public for ideas so far-fetched they seemed beyond lunacy.As a young postgraduate student, Dyson devised – while taking a Greyhound bus ride in America – the answer to a conundrum in quantum electrodynamics that had stumped giants of physics such as Richard Feynman and Hans Bethe. As an author, guru and apostle for science, Dyson also cheerfully proposed that humans might genetically engineer trees that could grow on comets, to provide new habitats for genetically altered humans. Continue reading...

Health secretary says options from closing schools, banning large gatherings and isolating cities being considered

Facing ageing and a new role was deeply uncomfortable – but robustness and hope helped me adaptI was 47, shaking and with tears streaming down my face as I held a perfect baby girl in my arms. My body was zinging with oxytocin, the bonding hormone, in response to her smell and touch, those little breaths – it felt as if she was my newborn baby. She wasn’t. She was my first grandchild. My daughter’s daughter. I’d become a mum at 21, she was 26…The following evening, for my best friend’s landmark birthday, I had made an effort –hair done, party frock, high heels – and I stepped confidently into the room. The first person I saw shouted: “Hi Grandma!” Continue reading...

What are the symptoms caused by the virus from Wuhan in China, how does it spread, and should you call a doctor?

People want reliable information and reassurance that their government has got a grip: the prime minister must be seen to leadThe coronavirus crisis has sparked a worldwide race against time to try to understand its nature, contain its spread and develop a vaccine. Only in a few remote corners of the planet do people appear to be nonchalantly confident that it can’t get to them. One of those cut-off places is Downing Street. On Friday, Number 10 announced that the prime minister would finally chair a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee, but not until Monday. Nothing must get in the way of Boris Johnson’s weekend. This is of a piece with his behaviour as the spread of the virus has escalated. He has elected to self-isolate indoors rather than take visible charge of the government’s planning and public messaging.Those rebuking his vanishing act include the prime minister’s old frenemy George Osborne, who complained: “The British government now needs to go on to a ‘war footing’ with the coronavirus: daily NHS press briefings, regular Cobra meetings chaired by the PM, ministers on all major media shows. The public is fearful, wants information and needs to know their leaders have got a grip.” You know you are in trouble when the former chancellor is giving advice on crisis management. Continue reading...

China reports 573 new cases with further travel bans and large gatherings restricted

Case establishes precedent for relatives’ right to know about serious conditions, lawyers sayDoctors treating individuals with serious ailments owe a legal duty of care not just to their patients but to third parties associated with the people they are treating.That is the key implication of a high court ruling last week in the case of a woman who had sued doctors because they failed to tell her about her father’s fatal hereditary disease, Huntington’s, before she had her own child. Had she known of the risks involved, she would have terminated the pregnancy, she argued. Continue reading...

Rishi Sunak’s job of drawing up his first budget in Brexit Britain was already complicated enough before coronavirus arrivedEconomic forecasting, at the best of times, is an uncertain task. For the purposes of forecasting the outlook for the British economy, this is not the best of times.Brexit uncertainty continues in that the negotiations on our future relationship with the EU are only just beginning. It is not obvious that any deal will be reached but, even if it is, the deal will be pretty thin. The economic consequences of such an outcome are disputed, in the sense that the vast majority of economists view this as a bad outcome for the economy and the government apparently doesn’t. Continue reading...

US confirms first death in Washington state and strengthens travel advice, raising Iran and Italy to a level three. Follow live news

The new antibiotic, effective against super-resistant pathogens, is proof that AI can do more than make tech giants richOne of the seminal texts for anyone interested in technology and society is Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology, the first of which says that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”. By this, Kranzberg meant that technology’s interaction with society is such “that technical developments frequently have environmental, social and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances”.The saloon-bar version of this is that “technology is both good and bad; it all depends on how it’s used” – a tactic that tech evangelists regularly deploy as a way of stopping the conversation. So a better way of using Kranzberg’s law is to ask a simple Latin question: Cui bono? – who benefits from any proposed or hyped technology? And, by implication, who loses? Continue reading...

When an oxygen tank blew during the 1970 Nasa moonshot, the successful rescue mission was thanks to Nasa organisation, not improvisationEighteen months ago, I was combing through the Apollo 11 mission logs, looking at the timelines and events for something unique that we might focus on to celebrate the 50th anniversary of humankind’s first landing on the moon. Last year, that idea became the BBC World Service podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon.As the series drew to a close, it became clear that there was unfinished business. Some of the flight controllers who had been present for the Apollo 11 landing had also worked on another, arguably more dramatic, endeavour – the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13. Continue reading...

World Health Organization recommends people take these simple precautions against coronavirus to reduce exposure and transmission

What are the symptoms caused by the virus from Wuhan in China, how does it spread, and should you call a doctor?

Striking findings contained in new study may broaden appreciation of unique stressors faced by gay and bisexual menThe persistence of mental health hardships among gay and bisexual men, which endure even as LGBTQ people gain greater acceptance and civil rights, can be explained at least in part by the corrosive effects of status consciousness, competitiveness and racism within the gay community itself.Related: 'Rick Scott had us on lockdown': how Florida said no to $70m for HIV crisis Continue reading...

US says three new cases are unrelated to travel, while UK authorities are racing to understand how Essex man became infected

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Man from Surrey is now in isolation unit at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in London