Category Archives: Science

Daring Mars mission to send rocks back to Earth in hunt for past life

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Europe poised to join US in complex plan to find evidence of fossil microbes on red planet

Engineers plan to collect rocks on Mars and bring samples to Earth, in one of the most complex robot space projects envisaged. The scheme, being developed by Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa), will involve robot rovers finding rocks that might contain evidence of past life.

The samples would be blasted into space, intercepted by an unmanned spacecraft, and dropped by parachute in the Utah desert, with the 500g of Martian soil and rock shared with researchers round the world.

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Humans put into suspended animation for first time

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Groundbreaking trial in US rapidly cools trauma victims with catastrophic injury to buy more time for surgery

Doctors have put humans into a state of suspended animation for the first time in a groundbreaking trial that aims to buy more time for surgeons to save seriously injured patients.

The process involves rapidly cooling the brain to less than 10C by replacing the patient’s blood with ice-cold saline solution. Typically the solution is pumped directly into the aorta, the main artery that carries blood away from the heart to the rest of the body.

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Global heating supercharging Indian Ocean climate system

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Indian Ocean dipole events, linked to bushfires and floods, are becoming stronger and more frequent, scientists say

Global heating is “supercharging” an increasingly dangerous climate mechanism in the Indian Ocean that has played a role in disasters this year including bushfires in Australia and floods in Africa.

Scientists and humanitarian officials say this year’s record Indian Ocean dipole, as the phenomenon is known, threatens to reappear more regularly and in a more extreme form as sea surface temperatures rise.

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Scientists develop slippery toilet coating to stop poo sticking

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Spray-on surface could prevent bacteria building up and reduce household water use

The toilet brush need never leave its holder again. Scientists have created a super-slippery coating that helps usher excrement on its way without leaving traces behind.

The spray-on coating, which is slipperier than Teflon, reduces adhesion of even tenacious faeces by up to 90%, tests suggest, so far less water is needed to flush them away and leave the toilet clean.

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A psychedelic retreat proves a healing trip

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Exploring the therapeutic benefits of magic mushrooms at a ceremony in Amsterdam

I’m at a weekend retreat in a converted church near Amsterdam. There is soft, celestial music playing and I’m sipping fresh herbal tea while discussing my hopes and fears for tomorrow’s “ceremony”, which is retreat parlance for a psychedelic trip. Consuming the truffle parts of magic mushrooms is permitted in the Netherlands and my nine fellow guests and I will be eating a variety called Dragon’s Dynamite. We’re not taking recreational drugs, but rather using psychedelics as self-exploratory and therapeutic “plant medicine”. Welcome to the age of the psychedelic retreat.

Synthesis opened its doors in April 2018. It was co-founded by Martijn Schirp, a former poker player who found salvation through psychedelics. “I had my first mushroom trip nine years ago and that changed my life,” he says. “I was walking through this forest and it was so peaceful, it was like a fairy tale. I felt this huge self-critical voice lift off me.” He believes he’d still be estranged from his father if it wasn’t for the perspective psychedelics have given him. His entrepreneurial mind saw that what was missing was a retreat with “medical supervision, private one-to-one coaching and professional standards in a modern context”.

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Rabies breakthrough offers fresh hope in battle against deadly virus

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New research raises hopes of oral vaccine for dogs, the chief source of transmission to humans

Researchers have discovered a way to stop rabies from shutting down critical responses in the immune system, a breakthrough that could pave the way for new tools to fight the deadly disease.

Rabies kills almost 60,000 people each year, mostly affecting poor and rural communities.

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Who’s the daddy? Paternity mixed up in cities, study finds

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Illegitimacy more likely over past 500 years among urban poor, say geneticists

The Romans had a phrase that summed it up nicely: mater semper certa est, pater semper incertus est. The mother is always certain, the father is always uncertain.

Now, researchers have found that some people have more reason to doubt their fathers than others, or at least have had over the past half millennium.

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Climate change may be behind fall of ancient empire, say researchers

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Dramatic shift from wet to dry climate could have caused crop failure in Neo-Assyrian empire

The Neo-Assyrian empire was a mighty superpower that dominated the near east for 300 years before its dramatic collapse. Now researchers say they have a novel theory for what was behind its rise and fall: climate change.

The empire emerged in about 912BC and grew to stretch from the Mediterranean down to Egypt and out to the Persian Gulf.

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Two people diagnosed with pneumonic plague in China

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Authorities working to contain outbreak of disease that is worse than bubonic plague

Two people in China have been diagnosed with plague, the latest cases of a disease more commonly associated with historical catastrophe.

Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and can arise in three forms – a lung infection, known as pneumonic plague; a blood infection, known as septicemic plague; and a form that affects the lymph nodes, called bubonic plague.

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Mouse deer species not seen for nearly 30 years is found alive in Vietnam

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Silver-backed chevrotain caught on camera after it was feared lost to science

A distinctly two-tone mouse deer that was feared lost to science has been captured on film foraging for food by camera traps set up in a Vietnamese forest.

The pictures of the rabbit-sized animal, also known as the silver-backed chevrotain, are the first to be taken in the wild and come nearly 30 years after the last confirmed sighting.

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Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’

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Statement sets out ‘vital signs’ as indicators of magnitude of the climate emergency

The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.

“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”

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Any amount of running reduces risk of early death, study finds

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Previous research suggested health benefits increased with greater volume of running

Any amount of running is good for you, according to research suggesting it is linked to a similar reduction in the risk of early death no matter how many hours you clock up a week or how fast you go.

According to the World Health Organization, about 3.2 million deaths each year are down to people not doing enough physical activity.

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Nasa’s Voyager 2 sends back its first message from interstellar space

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Nasa craft is second to travel beyond heliosphere but gives most detailed data yet

Twelve billion miles from Earth, there is an elusive boundary that marks the edge of the sun’s realm and the start of interstellar space. When Voyager 2, the longest-running space mission, crossed that frontier more than 40 years after its launch it sent a faint signal from the other side that scientists have now decoded.

The Nasa craft is the second ever to travel beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of supersonic charged particles streaming outwards from the sun. Despite setting off a month ahead of its twin, Voyager 1, it crossed the threshold into interstellar space more than six years behind, after taking the scenic route across the solar system and providing what remain the only close-up images of Uranus and Neptune.

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Meet Erika the Red: Viking women were warriors too, say scientists

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Researchers re-create the face of a woman buried with an impressive collection of weaponry for a National Geographic documentary

Think of a Viking warrior and you probably imagine a fearsome, muscular, bearded man. Well, think again. Using cutting-edge facial recognition technology, British scientists have brought to life the battle-hardened face of a fighter who lived more than 1,000 years ago. And she’s a woman.

The life-like reconstruction, which challenges long-held assumptions that Viking warrior heroes such as Erik the Red left their women at home, is based on a skeleton found in a Viking graveyard in Solør, Norway, and now preserved in Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History. The remains had already been identified as female, but her burial site had not been considered a warrior grave “simply because the occupant was a woman”, according to archaelogist Ella Al-Shamahi.

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To the moon and back with the eastern curlew

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Ultra-endurance athlete, aerodynamic wonder … and facing extinction. Why the bird who flies 30,000km a year needs Australia’s mudflats

• Vote for your favourite in the 2019 bird of the year poll

The ascent is vertical. Up, up and into the jet stream. If the conditions are not right up there it will come back down and wait. But if there is a good tailwind in the right direction it will begin an epic journey that will take it around the curvature of the Earth; from the Arctic Circle to the southern hemisphere.

Using the sun and stars as a compass, and navigating by the Earth’s magnetic field, recognising landmarks, the far eastern curlew will fly nonstop to the Yellow Sea, where it fuels up on the mudflats of north-east China.

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Quarter of world’s pig population ‘to die of African swine fever’

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World Organisation for Animal Health warns spread of disease has inflamed worldwide crisis

About a quarter of the global pig population is expected to die as a result of the African swine fever (ASF) epidemic, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

Global pork prices are rising spurred by growing demand from China, where as many as 100 million pigs have died since ASF broke out there last year. In recent months, China has been granting export approval to foreign meat plants and signing deals around the world at a dizzying rate. US pork sales to China have doubled, while European pork prices have now reached a six-year high.

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Antibiotic price drop could stop millions from developing tuberculosis

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New agreement secures 66% reduction in cost of rifapentine, which prevents ‘latent’ TB from becoming active

The price of a drug crucial to prevent tuberculosis is to be slashed by two-thirds in a deal that could stop millions from developing the disease.

TB is the leading cause of death from infectious disease worldwide, killing 1.5 million people a year, according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) global TB report.

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Risks of cannabis use for mental health treatment outweigh benefits

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New study shows evidence of positive outcomes is scarce while symptoms can be exacerbated

The use of cannabis medicines to treat people with depression, anxiety, psychosis or other mental health issues cannot be justified because there is little evidence that they work or are safe, according to a major new study.

A review of evidence from trials conducted over nearly 40 years, published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry,concludes that the risks outweigh the benefits. And yet, say the authors, they are being given to people with mental health problems in Australia, the US and Canada, and demand is likely to grow.

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Healthy diet means a healthy planet, study shows

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Healthier food choices almost always benefit environment as well, according to analysis

Eating healthy food is almost always also best for the environment, according to the most sophisticated analysis to date.

The researchers said poor diets threaten society by seriously harming people and the planet, but the latest research can inform better choices.

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