The first known case of a functional cure for HIV happened 12 years ago, after US resident Timothy Brown received stem cell donations in Berlin. More recently, a patient in London received a bone marrow transplant from a virus-resistant donor and has been shown to be cleared of the virus Continue reading...

Extreme weather blamed for plunge in country’s olive harvest – the worst in 25 years – that could leave the country dependent on imports by AprilExtreme weather events have been the “main driver” of an olive harvest collapse that could leave Italy dependent on imports from April, a leading climate scientist has warned.A 57% plunge in the country’s olive harvest – the worst in 25 years – sparked protests by thousands of Italian farmers wearing gilet arancioni – orange vests – in Rome earlier this month. Continue reading...

I found something I never knew I wanted: fascinating mathematical concepts explained in a way that’s entertainingYouTube has long had a reputation as a hive of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and pseudoscience. All these accusations are, more or less, true — if you’re vulnerable to the wooing of Flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, the alt-right, and every other sort of lunatic fringe flourishing in 2018, they’re all there, waiting for you on YouTube.But as with all the other “platforms” that dominate the internet — Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc — YouTube is more than a morass of anti-scientific nutters. The site is also home to much of the web’s best and most compelling popular science content. Continue reading...

Man becomes second person in world to be cleared of virus after stem cell donationA London patient with HIV has become the second person ever to be free of the virus after a bone marrow transplant, raising hopes of a cure for Aids.More than a decade ago, Timothy Brown, the so-called Berlin patient who later went public, made history as the first person to be “cured” of HIV. Like the London patient, he had a bone marrow stem cell transplant to treat cancer. Continue reading...

The giants of the scientific publishing industry have made huge profits for decades. Now they are under threatScientific publishing has long been a licence to print money. Scientists need journals in which to publish their research, so they will supply the articles without monetary reward. Other scientists perform the skilled and specialised work of peer review also for free, because it is a central element in the acquisition of status and the production of scientific knowledge.With the content of papers secured for free, the publisher needs only find a market for its journal. Until this century, university libraries were not very price sensitive. Since academic careers depend on publication, the demand for scientific publications is unbounded except by the price that scholarly libraries can be forced to pay. Scientific publishers routinely report profit margins approaching 40% on their operations, at a time when the rest of the publishing industry is in an existential crisis. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific conceptsMy hair and nails grow about a quarter as fast as my wife’s, so I wonder: is this because I have a slow metabolic rate? And if I have, is it a good or a bad thing?Peter Hanson, Exeter Continue reading...

A computer-generated artwork is going to auction at Sotheby’s – but will AI art have staying power?Mario Klingemann, a German artist who uses AI in his work, has radical views on creativity. “Humans are not original,” he says. “We only reinvent, make connections between things we have seen.” While humans can only build on what we have learned and what others have done before us, “machines can create from scratch”.It’s an interesting perspective. Setting aside whether or not human creativity is limited and indeed what precisely creativity is, it’s certainly true that artificial neural networks being developed today work out the rules as they go along, rather than being taught. AlphaGo, the AI that defeated the Korean go grandmaster Lee Sedol, was fed thousands of games, but no rules. It worked out how to play go entirely by itself. Continue reading...

This month Starwatch will trace the progress of the moon through its full cycle, starting this week with the new moon and waxing crescentFor the next four weeks, Starwatch will trace the moon’s phases across a full lunar month and point out the objects of interest that our nearest celestial neighbour passes along the way. New moon occurs this week on 6 March at 16:04 GMT. It is the moment when the moon lies between the sun and earth. We seldom see this because it takes place in the glare of the sun. Only when the line-up is precise does it become visible because it causes a total solar eclipse. This month, our first good chance to see the young moon comes on the evening of 8 March. It is very difficult to see a young moon within its first 24 hours but by sunset on Friday, it will be just over two days old. Even so, the moon will be extremely low in the sky and just 4% of its visible surface will be illuminated. The chart shows the view looking west at 18:30 GMT on that evening. Look out each subsequent evening to watch the crescent grow larger and the moon climb higher into the sky. On 11 March, it will pass Mars and be 23% illuminated. Continue reading...

High concentrations of the metal were detected in fluids passed through enFlow systemSeveral hospitals have withdrawn a widely used surgical device over fears that it could expose patients to dangerous levels of aluminium, the Guardian has learned.The device, called enFlow, is used to warm fluids to body temperature before they are infused into patients during surgery. But fluids passed through the device during tests were found to contain hundreds of times the recommended safe limit of aluminium. Continue reading...

Capsule is the first US-made, designed-for-crew spacecraft to dock in eight yearsSpaceX‘s new crew capsule has arrived at the International Space Station, completing its second milestone in just over a day.No one was onboard the Dragon capsule that launched on Saturday on its first test flight, only a dummy. Continue reading...

Following a successful launch on Saturday, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule has docked at the at the International Space Station. The new US space capsule, designed to shuttle astronauts, is the first to dock in eight years

Incurable and increasingly prevalent, Alzheimer’s has long puzzled the research community. Now scientists believe the human body may be the best line of defenceHalf a million people in the UK are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. And while the risks generally increase with age, thousands are afflicted under the age of 65. Inheritable genetic conditions can lead to familial Alzheimer’s, which can afflict people as young as 30.There is no known cure. Some medications can reduce memory loss and aid concentration, but these merely alleviate the symptoms or boost the performance of those neurons in the brain that remain unaffected. They do nothing to stop or slow down the killing-off of brain cells by this neurodegenerative condition Continue reading...

From playing hard to thinking hard, a southpaw bias can have a major impact on performanceResearch published recently concluded that left-handed people were overrepresented in a database of 10,000 boxers and martial arts fighters and had a higher win percentage. This confirms the “fighter hypothesis”: that despite the costs of being left-handed the trait has survived because of a competitive advantage in combat. Continue reading...

An innovative drug may soon offer new ways to fight this cruel inherited condition Matt Ellison was seven when his father was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease. The condition – which is progressive, incurable and invariably fatal – took 15 years to kill John Ellison.The impact on Matt’s life was profound. His father, who had inherited the disease from his mother, found he could no longer concentrate enough to hold down his job as an engineer at Jaguar. Later he began to lose the power of movement and, eventually, lost his ability to speak. At his local school Matt was mocked because of his father’s odd, uncoordinated gait. The taunting got so bad that Matt stopped attending. “I stayed at home and helped Mum look after Dad,” he recalls. Continue reading...

Intravenous therapy has taken off via social media after star names led the way. But its effects are unknown, doctors warnMadonna does it. Rihanna’s done it. Katy Perry, Rita Ora and Gwyneth Paltrow have been known to dabble and while there are no clinical studies to prove the benefits of intravenous vitamin therapy, the celebrity wellness trend appears to have gone fully mass market.In a gleaming west London clinic, with plump leather recliners and a TV tuned to Netflix, Yassine Bendiabdallah explains the benefits of his IV treatments. Customers, mostly wealthy and mostly women, visit him for courses of injections promising an array of anti-ageing, anti-stress, brain-boosting, energy-restoring properties. His most popular is the NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which costs £500 and can take up to three hours to administer. “It causes an uncomfortable tightening in your head and chest,” he explains, “but that’s normal”. Continue reading...

SpaceX’s success, culminating in an undamaged splash down in the Atlantic, will surely see the start of manned flights in Dragon spaceshipsThe Crew Dragon spacecraft currently in orbit round the Earth has a single occupant, a test dummy called Ripley, named after the astronaut heroine of the film Alien. As human presences go, it is not much. Yet the spaceship’s flight represents a milestone in US manned spaceflight.Almost eight years since its last astronauts flew on the space shuttle Atlantis, the US is now on the threshold of returning astronauts to space. Success with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon this week, culminating in an undamaged splash down in the Atlantic on Friday, will surely see the start of manned flights in Dragon spaceships. Continue reading...

Launch brings US plans to resume sending people into space in own spacecraft closerAstronauts could be flying again from US soil as early as this summer after the flawless launch of SpaceX’s privately built Crew Dragon capsule opened “a new era in American excellence”, according to the head of the space agency Nasa.Related: Spacewatch: Nasa to launch new crewed craft in 2019 Continue reading...

The biologist talks about the contentious Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technique, the merit of big pharma and the UK’s 100,000 Genomes ProjectA new technique to alter DNA is offering humans the ability to take control of food, disease and our own reproduction as never before. The workhorse of this technology is Crispr-Cas9, often described as a pair of “molecular scissors”, which can be directed to a specific part of a genome and used to make changes ranging from deactivating a gene to correcting a genetic typo or even inserting new genetic material.In her new book, Hacking the Code of Life, biologist Nessa Carey delves into the practicalities, ethics and controversies of the approach, including the recent claim that a Chinese researcher has applied the tool to human embryos, resulting in gene-edited babies who will pass their altered DNA on to following generations. Continue reading...

It’s a coercive and insidious form of psychological torture, but gaslighting can be recognised and stoppedGaslight was the play that made its writer Patrick Hamilton a very rich man. It opened in London in 1938 to exceptional reviews. Noël Coward was a fan. King George VI took his wife to see it. In 1940, it became a British film, followed four years later by the Hollywood version starring Ingrid Bergman. When domestic abuse was barely whispered, Hamilton shone a light on coercive control and marital manipulation. He caught it exactly.The play is set in the upper-class house of Jack and Bella. She tiptoes around him. He’s kind, then cold. He flirts with women, but when Bella objects, she’s told she “reads meanings into everything”. He hides her things so she questions her sanity. At night, he secretly visits the top floor of the house, turning up the lights, causing the downstairs lights to dim (hence the title). Continue reading...

An uncrewed SpaceX spacecraft launched as planned from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Saturday, on top of a Falcon 9 rocket and carrying a dummy pilot. The successful launch brings US plans to resume sending people into space in its own spacecraft closer

I have always had an ‘inner bastard’, but doing standup has made it worseAs a comedian, you are often subject to criticism: partly because comedy is so subjective and partly because social media means that any idiot with an internet connection has a direct line to you. Sometimes, the criticism can be imaginative as well as insulting, but most of the time it’s stuff like: “So you’re supposed to be a comedian?” or: “You’re about as funny as herpes,” or: “I hope you die in a fire.”I don’t mind any of this, really; it’s part and parcel of a job in the public eye. (At the same time, to be clear, I think all of these people are scum.) What I do object to is my inner voice – my harshest critic, and impossible to turn off. I like to be fairly relaxed about my work – in fact, in my life, I consider myself a member of the church of “passionate indifference”. And yet the inner bastard is ever present. Continue reading...

The February heat was unnatural. I used to find wild weather exciting, but now it evokes the apocalypse of climate changeThere was a time on these temperate islands when freak weather thrilled us with its bouts of exceptional heat, wind, rain or snow. Unless you were at sea in a gale, fear was a rare emotion. Even in 1987, when the so-called Great Storm hurtled through southern England and northern France on a night in mid-October, it was possible to be more awed than afraid. Crashing branches and tumbling slates woke people, but when they turned to each other in bed it was to exclaim about the wind’s strength – “Would you just listen to that!” – rather than to see it as a portent of something larger or more terrible. Thirty-odd years later, most of the people who lived through the Great Storm remember it mainly because a BBC weatherman got the forecast wrong.In England, the wind gusted at 120mph that night, and at least 22 people were killed on both sides of the Channel. But unless you were among the bereaved, or had a tall oak fall through the roof, nobody felt anxiety or despair. There was no prevailing gloom. Continue reading...

Weather rather than pirates caused majority of sinkings, says culture ministry teamThe treacherous waters of the Americas had their first taste of Spanish timber on Christmas Day 1492, when Christopher Columbus’ flagship, the Santa María, sank off the coast of what is now Haiti.Over the following four centuries, as Spain’s maritime empire swelled, peaked and collapsed, the waves on which it was built devoured hundreds of ships and thousands of people, swallowing gold, silver and emeralds and scattering spices, mercury and cochineal to the currents. Continue reading...

Nicola Davis bids a fond farewell to the Mars rover Opportunity after Nasa declared the mission finally over, 15 years after the vehicle landed on the red planet.On 25 January 2004, a robot rover crashed through the atmosphere of Mars and bounced to a standstill on the surface of the red planet. The moment was greeted with scenes of jubilation as Nasa scientists celebrated the successful landing of their second rover, named Opportunity.The Opportunity rover far surpassed original expectations. It managed to send data back to Earth for nearly 15 years, significantly longer than the three months it was supposed to survive. Continue reading...

These painkillers don’t work against chronic pain. The UK must find alternatives to help sufferers in deprived areasPeople in Blackpool are twice as likely as the inhabitants of Wokingham to die before they are 70. A recent paper which measured the distribution of opioids not by the number of prescriptions, but in equivalent units of morphine, found that NHS prescriptions of opioid painkillers have been generally rising in England and Wales, but have risen most in the north of England and more in poorer areas. Blackpool, again, tops the list. In part this is because poverty is correlated with chronic physical pain: both men and women in the lowest income quartile report suffering chronic pain at rates much higher than those in the top quartile. That, in turn, reflects that fact that hard physical labour and unemployment are both bad for health in the long term.But the prevalence of pain can’t entirely account for the pattern of prescription. Many forms of chronic pain do not respond well to opioids. For lower back pain the Nice recommendation is not to treat it at all, except perhaps with ibuprofen, exercise and massage. It will go away on its own, or it will not. Figures suggest that only one opioid prescription in eight was written out for cancer pain in 2014. The others were written for conditions where is it much less obvious that they are the best possible treatment. Continue reading...

Research suggests link between disrupted sleep cycles and unbalanced metabolismHaving a good lie-in at the weekend might not make up for sleep loss during the working week, research suggests.Scientists have previously found that a lack of sleep increases the risk of obesity and diabetes. However, it was not clear whether sleeping more on the weekend could balance the books and prevent such an uptick. Continue reading...

Schools, bodies, relationships – this quest to be outstanding can be damaging, even to people who really are outstandingWe live in a society obsessed with being exceptional. Whether it is as workers, parents, students, lovers or cooks, we are expected to be outstanding. We must strive to be the best employee, craft an outstanding body, have an amazing relationship, all while being exceptionally happy. Even the most ordinary institutions also are expected to be nothing less than excellent. Companies want to be “world class”, schools have become “academies of excellence”, and humble local GP surgeries strive to be “outstanding”. Being good enough is seen as simply not good enough.Our quest to be excellent has many positive consequences, but it also can be damaging. Lionising excellence can create huge inequalities. When high performers are showered with rewards, the great mass of us who are average miss out. This can spark resentment in those who feel that they don’t measure up. But the obsession with being exceptional does just harm the great mass of average people. It can also do damage to people at the top as well. Continue reading...

Reishi, boletus, cordyceps and lion’s mane may sound like something you would take to clear up a patch of eczema – but now the fungi are appearing in snacksMy barista hands over a cup filled with grey-tinged milk and a few tiny pieces of fungus bobbing around in it. “Enjoy,” he says with a beaming smile. Enjoy might not be the first thing that springs to mind, but it might be time to get onboard as, over the past year or so, adding a handful of mushrooms to your hot drink, chocolate or energy bar has become an increasingly normal thing for people to do.Reishi, boletus, cordyceps and lion’s mane sound less like mushrooms and more like things you reluctantly take as a last ditch attempt to clear up a patch of eczema – and, indeed, high claims have been made for their supposed health benefits. Most sellers talk up their products’ antibacterial, antiviral and immune-enhancing properties, but don’t go so big on the fact that, say, cordyceps are parasitic fungi that grow on insects (mmmm, is that my stomach rumbling?). Continue reading...

Boy and girl, now four, are only the second case of ‘sesquizygotic’ twins recordedA pair of twins have stunned researchers after it emerged that they are neither identical nor fraternal – but something in between.The team say the boy and girl, now four years old, are the second case of semi-identical twins ever recorded, and the first to be spotted while the mother was pregnant. Continue reading...

Scientists develop GM strain that can produce cannabinoid compounds with addition of sugarScientists in California have developed a strain of yeast that can be used to brew cannabis extract rather than beer.With just the addition of sugar, the genetically modified yeast fermented to produce pure cannabinoid compounds including mind-altering THC and the non-psychoactive CBD, which is used medically to treat conditions including chronic pain and childhood epilepsy. Continue reading...

Scientists have studied the active brains of adolescents with psychopathic traits, and have consistently found particular structural abnormalities, writes Sally LlewellynVincent Lambe says he wants his film Detainment to open a conversation (‘I was told James Bulger’s killers were evil’, G2, 22 February). He also refers to “trauma and troubled childhoods” leading to children committing horrendous acts.In fact the conversation is already well under way among some neuroscientists. Enabled by the advent of brain MRI scans, these scientists have studied the active brains of adolescents with psychopathic traits, and have consistently found particular structural abnormalities. Continue reading...

The government’s ‘serious shortage protocols’ are a real danger to the British public’s health – and may be illegal

To create the year’s first must-see documentary, director Todd Douglas Miller worked with Nasa to restore fascinating unseen footage from 1969A man sips a beer, eyeing the horizon from a Florida parking lot. Nasa techs sit in a lobby as headlines blare of Ted Kennedy’s car crash in Chappaquiddick. They’re two of the many striking details – ordinary, recognizable moments amid one of humankind’s most extraordinary achievements – restored to full vitality in Apollo 11, an all-primary source documentary, meticulously restored. The 93-minute documentary, released for a limited time in the US on Imax before a wider release, and to be shown in museums later this year, captures the first moon mission and its spectators in the visceral, wide-lens color of cinema epics – an achievement in historical preservation that hinged on the discovery of long-unopened boxes idling in archives.Related: Apollo 11 review – eye-opening documentary is a five-star triumph Continue reading...

Along with owning too much stuff, we also pile unreasonable demands on our time. It’s time to limit our focusesThere’s growing evidence that a cluttered home or workplace is a stressful one. A recent DePaul University study found that physical clutter is linked with procrastination and, in turn, lower life satisfaction. Other research shows that clutter is associated with elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol.“We have taken our wants and been told they are needs,” Joseph Ferrari, the lead author in the DePaul study, recently told the New York Times. Continue reading...

Many cases in Asia and Africa are being missed and leading to children ‘dying at home’Almost half of children with cancer are going undiagnosed and untreated, according to a new global study.The research suggests that the situation depends on location: while only 3% of childhood cancer cases in western Europe and north America are thought to have been missed in 2015, the proportion rose to an estimated 49% in south Asia and 57% in western Africa. Continue reading...

New drug-delivery system could also be used to treat brain tumours and strokesPeople with Parkinson’s disease have been fitted with an implant that can deliver drugs directly to the brain through a port in the side of their head, in a pioneering study.The device was used to send a naturally occurring protein, which it is hoped may help restore cells damaged by the disease, to an affected part of the brain. Continue reading...

Unseasonably balmy February days can be pleasant, but scientists are increasingly linking extremes of heat, storms and other meteorological events to global warmingOver thousands of years, like humans everywhere, we became used to thinking of the sun, rain and wind as the backdrop to our lives – external entities over which we had no dominion. In the 21st century, this has become a delusion. The unpredictability of weather in the UK, particularly during summers that many wish were drier and sunnier, is associated by many people with what it means to be British. It has big variations – temperatures in the north of Scotland can be up to 20C lower than in southern England – and is characteristically unsettled due to the jet stream.Its unreliability may have aided those wishing to avoid the truth about global warming. But the evidence of our senses, as well as what meteorologists and other scientists tell us, is becoming overwhelming. While many people are enjoying this week’s record-breaking temperatures – 20.3C in Wales on Monday, and 21.2C in London on Tuesday, the hottest winter days on record – many of the same people are also worried. Extreme or unusual weather in the UK is becoming widely recognised as an indication that the climate is changing, though this realisation has been a long time coming. Continue reading...

Answers to today’s kinship riddlesEarlier today I set you the following five puzzles.1) Anna’s father has four daughters. The names of the first three daughters are April, May and June. What’s the name of the fourth daughter? Continue reading...

Mystery shrouds ‘very faint’ planetary body that appears to be 140 times further from the sun than EarthA new object has been discovered in the distant reaches of our solar system and given the name FarFarOut, according to a prominent astronomer.At 140 times further away from the sun than our own planet is, the newly identified body – if its discovery is confirmed – will become the furthest known object in our solar system. Continue reading...

An exceptional, vibrant restoration of never-before-seen footage results in one of the most astounding films about space ever madeThe documentary Apollo 11 starts, as the famous mission did, in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Trucks ferry massive rocket props, machinery grinds as it would in any construction zone, the sky is a crystal blue. The scene is, in a word, vibrant — so startlingly alive that for the first few minutes, I wasn’t sure if I was watching footage from 1969 or a NASA promo shot from last year.Related: Greta review – Isabelle Huppert torments Chloë Grace Moretz in dim-witted thriller Continue reading...

Test your ken about kinshipUPDATE: Read the solutions hereFamily relationships have provided material for many classic puzzles since at least medieval times. They make for fun problems because they require no technical knowledge and often present entertaining or curious set-ups. Here are a selection of five of my favourites of the genre.1) Anna’s father has four daughters. The names of the first three daughters are April, May and June. What’s the name of the fourth daughter? Continue reading...

Venus and Jupiter dominate the south-eastern sky, but Saturn and the waning crescent moon augment the displayIt is definitely worth getting up early this week as an attractive string of bright planets sits in the south-eastern sky. The brightest will be Venus, appearing low and furthest to the east. Venus is the planet that comes closest to earth. It orbits closer to the sun than our planet, and its bright clouds reflect the sunlight, giving it an unmistakeable brilliance. Once you have located Venus, look south and the next brightest object you will see is Jupiter. It will be about twice the altitude of Venus. Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System. It too appears bright because its clouds are good reflectors of the sunlight. With these two planets as markers, Saturn can be located between them. It appears closer to Venus in the sky than Jupiter. In reality, Saturn is twice as far away as Jupiter from the sun, and this makes it appear considerably dimmer than the other two planets. On the 28th the trio are joined by a waning crescent moon. With just over 32% of its surface illuminated and the spreading light of dawn to the east, this will be a beautiful sight to see. The chart shows the view at 06:00GMT on 28 February. Continue reading...

Maybe the ancients saw a parallel between the stars and planets and the bluestones, writes Neil HornsbyProf Colin Richards fears that we may never know why the bluestones of Preseli warranted such reverence as to be transported from south-west Wales to Stonehenge (Report, 20 February). In fact the answer may well be staring us in the face. Stonehenge itself was clearly intended to connect with the heavens: the sun, the moon and perhaps particularly the stars. Maybe the ancients saw a parallel between the firmament and the bluestones? The bluestones comprise a range of igneous rocks, metamorphosed spotted dolerite being among the principal ones. This dolerite comprises a dark blue/green mass of small crystals in which are set larger, white and broadly round, but jagged-edged crystals of pyroxene – uncannily not dissimilar to stars, set in a fiery firmament. Heaven on Earth?

Why asking whether your brain is male or female is the wrong questionYou receive an invitation, emblazoned with a question: “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?” The question is your teaser for the “gender reveal party” to which you are being invited by an expectant mother who, at more than 20 weeks into her pregnancy, knows what you don’t: the sex of her child. After you arrive, explains cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon in her riveting new book, The Gendered Brain, the big reveal will be hidden within some novelty item, such as a white iced cake, and will be colour-coded. Cut the cake and you’ll see either blue or pink filling. If it is blue, it is a…Yes, you’ve guessed it. Whatever its sex, this baby’s future is predetermined by the entrenched belief that males and females do all kinds of things differently, better or worse, because they have different brains. Continue reading...

Shame on those scientists who are unwilling to embrace the importance of philosophersLast week it was revealed that Edinburgh University’s David Purdie had discovered a letter from Albert Einstein in which the great scientist notes the importance of 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume in developing his theory of special relativity.Without having reading Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Einstein wrote: “I cannot say that the solution would have come.” Continue reading...

Pioneering methods are being developed to find traces of tumours quickly in small blood samplesAbout seven years ago, researchers at the US DNA sequencing company Illumina started to notice something odd. A new blood test it ran on 125,000 expectant mothers looking for genetic abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome in their foetuses returned some extremely unexpected signals in 10 cases. Chillingly, it dawned on them that the abnormal DNA they were seeing wasn’t from the foetuses but was, rather, undiagnosed cancer in the mothers. Cancers of different types were later confirmed in all 10. “This was not a test developed for cancer screening,” says Alex Aravanis, then Illumina’s senior R&D director. “But it was evidence that it might be possible.”In 2016, Illumina created Silicon Valley-based spin-off company Grail, with Aravanis as chief scientific officer. Backed by more than $1.5bn in funding, including money from Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Grail is on a quest to detect multiple types of cancer before symptoms, via a single, simple blood test. The test looks at cell-free plasma to find fragments of so-called circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) sloughed off by cancer cells. Continue reading...

Scientists demand controls on private sales as celebrities help push cost of relics into the millionsLeading US palaeontologists are calling for a worldwide halt to the sale of vertebrate dinosaur fossils. The booming market for specimens, driven by their popularity with wealthy private collectors, including Hollywood stars, is pushing up prices and putting them out of reach of museums and scientists, they say.While the art market is organised around brand-name artists, dinosaur sales are all about celebrity species, with a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton fetching up to $10m, although the velociraptor is the most prized. The price tag for a triceratops’s skull is $170,000 to $400,000, and a diplodocus is $570,000 to $1.1m. Last year a complete egg of an aepyornis maximus, otherwise known as an elephant bird, sold for $130,000 – roughly five times what it would have gone for a decade earlier. Continue reading...

The cream of the new breed of craft heading for the moon and beyondLaunched on Friday by its operators Israel Aerospace Industries and SpaceIL, Beresheet is the first privately funded lunar landing mission. It will demonstrate a new landing technique of “hopping”, using its rocket engine, to a secondary landing spot. The rover will have a short lifetime of a few days, with plans to transmit imagery and measurements of the moon’s magnetic field, as well as depositing a “time capsule” celebrating Israeli art, music and history. Continue reading...

New techniques will help customs officers identify and seize wood that came from endangered speciesThe wooden blinds that lie crumpled in Peter Gasson’s laboratory in Kew Gardens are chipped and forlorn-looking. Their manufacturers had claimed they were made of pine but customs officers were wary. And their suspicions were well-founded. Gasson, Kew’s research leader on wood and timber, found the blinds were not made of pine but ramin.“All ramin trees, which grow in south-east Asia, are endangered and trade in their wood is illegal,” said Gasson. “On this occasion, we got lucky and stopped people profiting from this trade.” Continue reading...

The director general of Cern talks about discovering the Higgs boson, women in science and the next generation of collidersAn Italian particle physicist, Fabiola Gianotti, 58, has been the director general of Cern since January 2016. Previously she led a collaboration of around 3,000 physicists from 38 countries which co-discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. Last month Cern published plans for a €20bn successor to the Large Hadron Collider.What’s up with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)?