Category Archives: Science

When my husband died, mushroom foraging helped me out of the dark

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After losing all sense of hope and home, hunting in woodland with other mushroomers got me through my grief

I was a bright-eyed 18-year-old, just one month into an international study exchange in Stavanger in Norway when I met Eiolf. I stood next to him at a party and we spent the whole night talking. It helped that he was one of the few Norwegian students I met who could actually point to my home country of Malaysia on a map. After that night I’d hang around the library hoping to cross his path. Luckily, he had the same idea.

Eiolf was knowledgeable and read a lot, but he also had a goofy sense of humour. He was very kind, too, the sort of person who children and animals gravitate towards. I had assumed that at the end of my exchange I’d go back to Malaysia, but instead I relocated to Norway to be with him; it just felt right. Norway was very different to my homeland, but I settled there and enjoyed a fulfilling career as an anthropologist, while Eiolf became an architect. We were together for 32 years, and I never lost that sense of joy in our relationship. He made me a better version of myself.

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Voices for the Future: climate activism lights up the UN – in pictures

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The United Nations headquarters in New York plays host to an immersive art installation by artist Joseph Michael that features images of an iceberg and six young advocates including Greta Thunberg addressing hopes and fears around the climate crisis and the urgent actions that must be taken

  • Voices For the Future will be performed 7.30-10 pm EDT on Friday 20 September outside the UN building in New York
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Global climate strike: Greta Thunberg and school students lead climate crisis protest – live updates

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Millions of people from Sydney to Manila, Dhaka to London and New York will march for urgent action on climate breakdown

Glorious scenes in Edinburgh as thousands of children, parents, students and musicians gather at the Meadows for the Climate Strike.

“This is our Earth and our Future. We need to take care of it ,” said 11-year-old Leila Koita, pictures here with friends Eilidh Tedesco, Norah Turner, Tilly Torrie, Megan Berger and NaN Zhang.

Norah’s mum, Jo Spencely says she hasn’t been on a demo for decades but she is here to show support. “I’m massively concerned about their future. I almost can’t bear to read about the climate. It’s so scary.”

The march sets off at 11:30am and will pass through Edinburgh city centre and end with a rally in front of the Scottish Parliament. As in London, police have imposed restrictions, in this case by refusing permission for the marchers to walk down Princes Street.

As elsewhere, this is just the start of a week of climate action. On Saturday, activists will stage a “die in”, Monday will be a “day of disruption”, musicians will join a “Love the Planet Festival” on Wednesday, and there’ll be another rally outside parliament the following day.

Even Emmeline Pankhurst has joined in the protests in Manchester. A statue of the suffragette hero has donned a bright orange lifejacket and a placard that asks: “Ready for rising sea levels to reach this height?”

The stunt was the idea of Katie Bradshaw and Ryan Griffiths, both 31, who described themselves as first-protestors who felt the need to act today.

“Emmeline still carries that Mancunian spirit of standing up for what she believes in and great causes,” said Griffiths. “Climate change is so important and we think it’s something herself would be an issue she would be at the forefront of if she were around today.”

Bradshaw added: “We’ve got to do our bit and even if it’s just putting some signs up and making people realise we need to look after our planet. If she was around today she’d be supporting it.”

Emmeline Pankhurst showing the world the way in Manchester pic.twitter.com/Z1TFjYCAuN

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Climate scientists prepare for largest ever Arctic expedition

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Hundreds of researchers will spend year on ship improving understanding of sea ice

Researchers from more than a dozen countries are preparing to launch the biggest and most complex expedition ever attempted in the central Arctic – a year-long journey through the ice they hope will improve the scientific models that underpin our understanding of climate change.

In the €140m (£123m) Mosaic expedition, 600 scientists from 19 countries including Germany, the US, Britain, France, Russia and China will work together in one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet.

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Dust cloud sparked explosion in primitive life on Earth, say scientists

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Smashing of monster asteroid half a billion years ago thought to have caused mini ice age

An enormous dust cloud that swept through the ancient solar system sent Earth into a mini ice age that sparked an explosion in primitive life on the planet, scientists say.

The space dust was created when a monster asteroid was smashed to pieces in a violent collision somewhere between Mars and Jupiter nearly half a billion years ago.

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Caesarean babies have different gut bacteria, microbiome study finds

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C-section babies pick up more hospital bacteria than those born vaginally, research shows

Babies born by caesarean section have different gut bacteria to those delivered vaginally, the most comprehensive study to date on the baby microbiome has found.

The study showed that babies born vaginally pick up most of their initial dose of bacteria from their mother, while C-section babies have more bugs linked to hospital environments, including strains that demonstrate antimicrobial resistance. The findings could explain the higher prevalence of asthma, allergies and other immune conditions in babies born by caesarean.

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Experts warn world ‘grossly unprepared’ for future pandemics

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Dire risk is compounded by climate crisis, urbanisation and lack of sanitation, says global monitoring board

It sounds like an improbable fiction: a virulent flu pandemic, source unknown, spreads across the world in 36 hours, killing up to 80 million people, sparking panic, destabilising national security and slicing chunks off the world’s economy.

But a group of prominent international experts has issued a stark warning: such a scenario is entirely plausible and efforts by governments to prepare for it are “grossly insufficient”.

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Air pollution particles found on foetal side of placentas – study

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Research finds black carbon breathed by mothers can cross into unborn children

Air pollution particles have been found on the foetal side of placentas, indicating that unborn babies are directly exposed to the black carbon produced by motor traffic and fuel burning.

The research is the first study to show the placental barrier can be penetrated by particles breathed in by the mother. It found thousands of the tiny particles per cubic millimetre of tissue in every placenta analysed.

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The world has a third pole – and it’s melting quickly

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An IPCC report says two-thirds of glaciers on the largest ice sheet after the Arctic and Antarctic are set to disappear in 80 years

Many moons ago in Tibet, the Second Buddha transformed a fierce nyen (a malevolent mountain demon) into a neri (the holiest protective warrior god) called Khawa Karpo, who took up residence in the sacred mountain bearing his name. Khawa Karpo is the tallest of the Meili mountain range, piercing the sky at 6,740 metres (22,112ft) above sea level. Local Tibetan communities believe that conquering Khawa Karpo is an act of sacrilege and would cause the deity to abandon his mountain home. Nevertheless, there have been several failed attempts by outsiders – the best known by an international team of 17, all of whom died in an avalanche during their ascent on 3 January 1991. After much local petitioning, in 2001 Beijing passed a law banning mountaineering there.

However, Khawa Karpo continues to be affronted more insidiously. Over the past two decades, the Mingyong glacier at the foot of the mountain has dramatically receded. Villagers blame disrespectful human behaviour, including an inadequacy of prayer, greater material greed and an increase in pollution from tourism. People have started to avoid eating garlic and onions, burning meat, breaking vows or fighting for fear of unleashing the wrath of the deity. Mingyong is one of the world’s fastest shrinking glaciers, but locals cannot believe it will die because their own existence is intertwined with it. Yet its disappearance is almost inevitable.

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Ancient Australia was home to ‘strange’ marsupial giants, scientists find

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Researchers are building a picture of palorchestids, which had tapir-like skulls and large scimitar-like claws

The “strange” anatomy of a family of giant marsupials that roamed eastern Australia and Tasmania for much of the past 25m years has been revealed in a new study.

Scientists had already figured out that palorchestids had tapir-like skulls and large “scimitar-like claws”, but little was known about the limbs of one of the “strangest marsupial lineages to have existed”, according to the paper published by a group of Australian researchers.

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Black hole at centre of galaxy is getting hungrier, say scientists

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Scientists say Milky Way’s Sagittarius A* has been more active in recent months

Unseeable and inescapable, black holes already rank among the more sinister phenomena out in the cosmos. So it may come as disconcerting news that the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way appears to be growing hungrier.

Astronomers monitoring the colossal object, called Sagittarius A*, found that in the past year it appears to have consumed nearby matter at an unprecedented rate.

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Study of French postmen’s testicles is an Ig Nobel winner

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Nappy-changing machine and saliva calculation also triumph in annual science prize

There comes a time in a scientist’s life when the surest route to global fame involves a bevy of naked French postmen with thermometers taped to their testicles.

At least that is the case for Roger Mieusset, a fertility specialist at the University of Toulouse, whose unlikely studies have earned him one of the most coveted awards in academia: an Ig Nobel prize.

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Neanderthal footprints found in France offer snapshot of their lives

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Scientists find 257 prints that were preserved in wind-driven sand 80,000 years ago

Scientists have found hundreds of perfectly preserved footprints, providing evidence that Neanderthals walked the Normandy coast in France.

The prints suggest a group of 10-13 individuals, mostly children and adolescents, were on the shoreline 80,000 years ago.

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Philippines culls 7,000 pigs in outbreak of African swine fever

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Infected pigs found in two towns near capital Manila, as country becomes latest to be hit by disease

The Philippines has reported its first cases of African swine fever, becoming the latest country hit by the disease that has killed pigs from Slovakia to China, pushing up pork prices worldwide.

The virus is not harmful to humans but causes haemorrhagic fever in pigs that almost always ends in death. There is no antidote or vaccine and the only known method to prevent the disease from spreading is a mass cull of affected livestock.

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India moon mission: Vikram lunar lander found on surface

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Efforts are underway to establish contact, days after communications were lost during failed landing

The lander module from India’s moon mission has been located on the lunar surface, the day after it lost contact with the space station, and efforts are underway to try to establish contact with it, the head of the nation’s space agency said.

The cameras from the moon mission’s orbiter had located the lander, said K. Sivan, the chairman of the Indian Space and Research Organisation (ISRO) according to the Press Trust of India news agency. He added: “It must have been a hard landing.”

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‘It can kill you in seconds’: the deadly algae on Brittany’s beaches

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Activists say stinking sludge is linked to nitrates in fertilisers from intensive farming

André Ollivro stepped carefully down the grassy banks of an estuary in the bay of Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, not far from his beachfront cabin. The pungent smell of rotting eggs wafting from decomposing seaweed made him stop and put on his gas mask. It was a strange sight in what is usually a tourist hotspot.

“You can’t be too careful,” said the 74-year-old former gas technician, who is leading the fight against what has come to be known as France’s coastal “killer slime”.

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India’s moon landing suffers last-minute communications loss

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Prime minister Narendra Modi consoles scientists distraught as complex mission goes awry

India’s attempt to land an unmanned craft on the moon’s uncharted south polar region appears to have gone awry, when communication with the landing vehicle was lost moments before touchdown.

“Communications from lander to ground station was lost,” said Kailasavadivoo Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation early on Saturday. Data was still being analysed, he told a room full of distraught scientists at the agency’s tracking centre in Bengaluru.

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Dead Sea scrolls study raises new questions over texts’ origins

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Salts used on Temple scroll are not common to Dead Sea region, researchers find

The Dead Sea scrolls have given up fresh secrets, with researchers saying they have identified a previously unknown technique used to prepare one of the most remarkable scrolls of the collection.

Scientists say the study poses a puzzle, as the salts used on the writing layer of the Temple scroll are not common to the Dead Sea region.

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Loch Ness monster could be a giant eel, say scientists

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Otago University researchers confirm the loch contains no monster – or dinosaur – DNA

The Loch Ness monster could be a giant eel, according to a fishy new theory that will keep Highland tourists guessing.

In one of the biggest DNA studies of its kind, a team of scientists from New Zealand’s Otago University found the presence of about 3,000 species in the deep murky waters of the Scottish loch.

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