Category Archives: Science

Coronavirus live news: Sweden’s cases pass 70,000; Tokyo confirms highest new case tally in two months

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Sweden records 947 new cases in a day; Russia cases pass 660,000; Indonesia reports record daily infections rise; Middle East at ‘critical threshold’ says WHO

US president Donald Trump celebrated a government report showing the country gained 4.8m jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 11.1% last month, when states began allowing businesses to reopen from strict shutdowns aimed at containing the coronavirus pandemic.

“Today’s announcement proves that our economy is roaring back,” Trump said, rattling off different sectors that saw job gains according to the monthly report.

Oman’s health minister said the sultanate has witnessed a “scary” surge in Covid-19 cases that required boosting hospital capacity, especially for intensive care units.

The country reported another 1,361 new cases of the coronavirus on Thursday and three deaths in the last 24 hours, to take its total count to 42,555 cases with 188 deaths.

In the last six weeks there has been a radical change which is very disturbing and scary.

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Coronavirus vaccine tracker: How close are we to a vaccine?

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More than 140 teams of researchers are racing to develop a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine

Researchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, with more than 140 candidate vaccines now tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO).

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Failings in Leicester are doomed to be repeated | Letters

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Readers respond to the reimposition of lockdown in the city after a surge in Covid-19 cases

Living and working in Leicester city centre we find ourselves in a new social experiment (Leicester forced into local lockdown to combat surge in Covid-19 cases, 30 June). We were all surprised to learn from Matt Hancock of an increased infection rate in a daily briefing on 19 June. Since then we’ve been the focus of speculation, and now of action. Our store opened two weeks ago, a Monday morning that saw two-hour queues snaking around the city-centre streets. Shops including ours are now closed again, and bars and barbers have put their reopening plans on ice. The community overall has patiently respected a sensible and cautious return of safe behaviours.

But there is a problem: Leicester has huge poverty and inequalities. Living and working conditions are extremely challenging for many families trying to do their best and follow guidance. Government financial support has not reached many as they fall through the gaps. National health messages just have not reached many BAME communities. All of this was only made worse by our own elected mayor breaking lockdown rules, and admitting he didn’t understand them, which only enhanced the Cummings effect. Did Leicester ever stand a chance? I think not.
James Hempsall
Director, Hempsall’s, Leicester

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Air pollution likely to make coronavirus worse, say UK government advisers

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Experts say further investigation of link is urgently required and may be relevant to managing pandemic

Air pollution is likely to be increasing the number and severity of Covid-19 infections, according to the UK government’s expert advisers.

In a report published on Wednesday, the experts said further investigation of the link between dirty air and the coronavirus pandemic was “urgently required” and may be relevant to how the pandemic is managed.

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Coronavirus live news: Brazil death toll exceeds 60,000; West Bank goes into lockdown

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Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn, says UN; Ryanair pilots take pay cut to avoid job losses; tourist flights to Greece resume; global cases pass 10.5m

The US has suffered 560 more deaths and registered another 43,644 cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said, taking the respective totals to 127,299 and 2,624,873.

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Coronavirus live updates: UK locks down city of Leicester as New Zealand PM dismisses calls to open borders

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Broadway theatres to stay closed until January 2021; Iran reports record daily deaths. Follow the latest news

Our UK coronavirus live blog is now up and running, with Aamna Mohdin at the helm:

Related: UK coronavirus live: Leicester lockdown tightened as infections rise

It is nomination day in Singapore ahead of the general election on 10 July. Here, the prime minister Lee Hsien Loong of the ruling People’s Action Party arrives at a nomination centre to formally join the contest.

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How do you deal with 9m tonnes of suffocating seaweed?

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Across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, scientists are developing alternative sustainable solutions to the golden tide of Sargassum

The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, first detected by Nasa observation satellites in 2011 and now known to be the world’s largest bloom of seaweed, stretches for 5,500 miles (8,850km) from the Gulf of Mexico to the western coast of Africa.

Millions of tonnes of floating Sargassum seaweed in coastal waters smother fragile seagrass habitats, suffocate coral reefs and harm fisheries. And once washed ashore on Mexican and Caribbean beaches, this foul-smelling, rotting seaweed goes on to devastate the tourist industry, prevent turtles from nesting and damage coastal ecosystems, while releasing hydrogen sulphide and other toxic gases as it decomposes.

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New swine flu with pandemic potential identified by China researchers

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G4 strain has already infected 10% of industry’s workers in China but no evidence yet that it can be passed from human to human

Researchers in China have discovered a new type of swine flu that is capable of triggering a pandemic, according to a study in the US science journal PNAS.

Named G4, it is genetically descended from the H1N1 strain that caused a pandemic in 2009.

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Coronavirus live news: global deaths pass 500,000 as ‘window closing’ in US on chance to curb Covid-19

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California governor closes bars in several counties; half a million confined in Beijing; cases worldwide top 10m; Follow the latest updates

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson will announce massive spending plans Monday to boost Britain’s coronavirus-hit economy, as pressure grows on the government over its handling of the crisis.

Johnson’s new package of measures is intended to meet the unprecedented challenge the pandemic has posed to the economy, and restore the government’s standing.

Beijing’s city government reported seven new Covid-19 cases for 28 June, down from 14 a day earlier as the Chinese capital seeks to contain an outbreak.

The city also reported one new asymptomatic case, a patient who has the coronavirus but is not exhibiting symptoms, compared with three such cases a day earlier.

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Coronavirus live news: pandemic is ‘not even close to being over’, warns WHO chief

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says pandemic is ‘speeding up’; India records 19,459 new cases; Iran records highest daily death toll; China’s military approves vaccine for use on its soldiers

Social distancing simply isn’t possible for the 1 million Rohingya refugees who live in Cox’s Bazar refugee camp, in southeastern Bangladesh.

Families live in close quarters inside flimsy bamboo shacks, using communal toilets and water facilities. Sometimes the most basic items, such as soap, are lacking.

Related: Cox's Bazar refugee camps: where social distancing is impossible

The US is to join with other major powers including China, India and the EU in formulating plans for a global green recovery from the coronavirus crisis, in the only major international summit on the climate emergency this year.

The idea of a green recovery to prevent a dangerous rebound in greenhouse gas emissions to above pre-Covid-19 levels has been gathering steam, but few governments have yet committed to plans.

Related: US to join summit on global green recovery from Covid-19 crisis

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Coronavirus live news: US cases pass 2.5m as Australia considers new lockdown in Melbourne

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Cases approach 10m; new Covid-19 clusters across world spark fear of second wave; UK NHS will take four years to recover. Follow the latest updates

The UK needs to maintain “constant vigilance” as it eases out of lockdown, a former government chief scientific adviser has warned.

When outbreaks occur they typically occur in clusters and we’re seeing certain work environments, for example, food processing factories, as being fairly common places for those clusters to rise.

The common denominator is really being indoors, being crowded, being there for prolonged periods of time, noisy environments where people are coughing and shouting, and so there’s more droplet transmission.

The total number of people to die from Covid-19 in Russia has increased by 104 to 9,073, according to the country’s coronavirus response centre.

Russia on Sunday also reported 6,791 new coronavirus cases in the past 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 634,437.

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Beyond Pluto: the hunt for our solar system’s new ninth planet

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Scientists think a planet larger than Earth lurks in the far reaches of the solar system. Now a new telescope could confirm their belief and change solar system science

You’d think that if you found the first evidence that a planet larger than the Earth was lurking unseen in the furthest reaches of our solar system, it would be a big moment. It would make you one of only a small handful of people in all of history to have discovered such a thing.

But for astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, it was a much quieter affair. “It wasn’t like there was a eureka moment,” he says. “The evidence just built up slowly.”

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‘We’ve bought the wrong satellites’: UK tech gamble baffles experts

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Bid for 20% of OneWeb to replace Galileo after Brexit ‘looks like nationalism trumping industrial policy’

The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs after Brexit.

The investment in OneWeb, first reported on Thursday night, is intended to mitigate against the UK losing access to the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.

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‘One in a 50m chance’: woman with two wombs carrying a twin in each

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Kelly Fairhurst found out about uterus condition when she went for 12-week scan

The case of a woman who discovered she had two wombs and was pregnant with a twin in each has been described as “one in 50m” by doctors.

Kelly Fairhurst, 28, only learned she had uterus didelphys, a condition where a woman has two wombs, when she went for her 12-week scan. She was also told she was carrying twins, one in each womb.

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Swedish exceptionalism has been ended by coronavirus | Erik Augustin Palm

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It has taken a shocking Covid-19 death toll to dent the national self-image of moral superiority. But dented it has been

“Haverist” is a Swedish word meaning “shipwrecked person”. During the course of Sweden’s shambolic response to Covid-19, dissent – whether from epidemiologists or journalists – has often been met with this insult, which implies the critics are fighting a losing battle. It’s telling of the way Sweden has handled its failure.

Through a uniquely slack approach (seen by many as the largely debunked “herd immunity” approach, even if the government denies this), Sweden reached the highest Covid-19 deaths per capita in the world in May. It still circles around the top, with more than 5,200 deaths – five times as many as in Norway, Finland and Denmark combined. After months of a mainly one-sided debate, critical voices are mounting. Even Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, admits to fault. But this has not been enough to change his agency’s strategy, which a majority of Swedes still have confidence in – although that support has waned.

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Coronavirus live news: Bolsonaro says he may have had coronavirus as cases rise in 27 US states

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Mike Pence to hold first coronavirus task force briefing in weeks on Friday; Texas pauses next phase of reopening; Brazil registers 39,483 new cases; Follow the latest updates

Charlotte Graham-McLay reports for the Guardian from Wellington:

It was a case of “plenty of room at the inn” for a hotel in a New Zealand ski resort town during the country’s strictest weeks of Covid-19 lockdown, with eight babies born there due to a lack of local maternity facilities.

The hotel, the Ramada at Remarkables Park in Queenstown, accommodated parents, babies and their midwives free of charge while the births happened, according to the website Stuff.

“Our ‘Ramada babies’ will always be welcome here and we look forward to them visiting in future." - Ramada Suites by Wyndham Remarkables Park Queenstown Manager Suzanne Pentecost.#RamadaSuitesbyWyndhamRemarkablesParkQueenstown

Read more: https://t.co/JC22As58al pic.twitter.com/hUvKmxtXkE

Steven Morris, Helen Pidd and Archie Bland report:

A major incident was declared after tens of thousands of people defied pleas to stay away and descended in their droves on beaches in Bournemouth and other stretches of the Dorset coast.

Related: Major incident declared as people flock to England's south coast

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Coronavirus live news: global death toll exceeds 490,000; soldiers sent to Italian town amid tension over new outbreak

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WHO needs $31.3bn over 12 months for vaccines; France plans 1.3m tests to find ‘hidden clusters’; Mike Pence to hold first taskforce briefing in weeks

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has offered to help hospitals in other states struggling to cope with Covid-19 cases.

He also criticised states that reopened their economies before getting the virus under control, saying there was “undeniable, irrefutable evidence” those states made a mistake.

The global death toll has passed 490,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The figure has reached 490,632 with the US accounting for 124,509 fatalities, the highest of any country.

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Drain brain: Nasa offers prize money for best lunar loo design

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Agency hopes to attract novel solutions for its Artemis mission to the moon in 2024

“It certainly isn’t the prime focus of the mission,” said Nasa’s Mike Interbartolo. “We’re not going back to the moon so we can say we pooped on the moon, but we don’t want an Apollo situation either.”

Interbartolo, is project manager for the Lunar Loo Challenge, a Nasa competition launched on Thursday that hopes to attract new and innovative solutions to the problem of capturing and containing human waste in space.

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Coronavirus live news: cases surge in Europe since lockdown easing, says WHO

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Cases worldwide growing by 1m per week; Latin American death toll expected to reach 390,000 by October; Texas hospitals near capacity; volunteers receive first doses of experimental vaccine

Guardian analysis of coronavirus data, in combination with the University of Oxford’s coronavirus government response tracker, has identified that 10 of the 45 most badly-affected countries are also among those rated as having a “relaxed response” to the pandemic, underlining the mitigating impact of effective government public health policies. You can read the Guardian investigation here.

The countries include the US - which is experiencing its largest increase in coronavirus cases since April; Iran, Germany and Switzerland - two European countries where the R rate has risen above one this week [...]

A country has been classed as being “relaxed” if its stringency index score is under 70 out of 100, according to the latest data from the University of Oxford’s tracker. The tracker assesses countries’ public information campaigns, containment measures and closures to give them a score out of 100 on their stringency index.

More on the rise of cases in Israel.

With 532 new infections reported by the health ministry in the past 24 hours, Israel has seen the emergence of a number of hotspots including in the Sea of Galilee resort of Tiberias, as well as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem – the highest daily total in more than two months.

Related: Israel brings back tracking system amid surge in Covid-19 cases

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How Trump has defied science on coronavirus – video explainer

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Donald Trump told thousands of supporters at a rally in Oklahoma he wanted to slow down testing for Covid-19 – despite experts saying the opposite.

From masks to 'miracle' treatments, the Guardian's Maanvi Singh looks back at how the US president has long been contradicting and defying science during the coronavirus outbreak and the impact that has had on the country's handling of the pandemic

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