Its enzymes degrade polyethylene within hours at room temperature and could ‘revolutionise’ recycling
Enzymes that rapidly break down plastic bags have been discovered in the saliva of wax worms, which are moth larvae that infest beehives.
The enzymes are the first reported to break down polyethylene within hours at room temperature and could lead to cost-effective ways of recycling the plastic.
Continue reading...Calls for more support after England research shows those diagnosed under 65 also at greater risk
People who have recently been diagnosed with dementia, or who are diagnosed with the condition at a younger age, are among those at increased risk of suicide, researchers have found. The findings have prompted calls for greater support for those experiencing such cognitive decline.
While previous research has explored a potential link between dementia diagnosis and suicide risk, the results have been inconclusive, with some suggesting a raised risk and others a reduced risk.
•In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
Continue reading...Svante Pääbo receives 2022 award in physiology or medicine for genome discoveries including Neanderthals
A Swedish geneticist has been awarded the 2022 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.
Svante Pääbo won the 10m Swedish kronor (£867,000) prize announced on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Continue reading...Poultry farmers from Arctic to Portugal reported 2,500 outbreaks in past year, with migrating birds taking avian flu to North America
The UK and continental Europe have been hit by an “unprecedented” number of cases of avian flu this summer, with 47.7m birds having been culled since last autumn, according to new figures.
Poultry producers from as far north as Norway’s Svalbard islands to southern Portugal have together reported almost 2,500 outbreaks of the disease since last year.
Continue reading...Space agency conducts Dart mission to learn whether asteroid’s trajectory can be diverted away from Earth
Six minutes to impact on what is one of Nasa’s coolest missions of recent history.
It has taken Dart 10 months and 470m miles to get here, since launch last year.
Usually Nasa spacecraft are intended to operate for many years, or even decades, but not Dart.
Dart was built to be destroyed. Dart is a mission of firsts, proving that a spacecraft can autonomously seek, find and approach a target in space that’s so far away we don’t even know what it looks like.
Continue reading...Bid to change asteroid’s course marks ‘new era of humankind’ as agency seeks to protect Earth from future disaster
A multimillion-dollar spacecraft collided head-on with an asteroid the size of a football stadium on Monday in an unprecedented test of Nasa’s capacity to defend Earth from a doomsday scenario.
Nasa’s craft successfully crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos 6.8m miles from Earth. The mission, known as Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), marked humanity’s first attempt at moving another celestial body, with the goal of seeing if a large asteroid hurtling toward our planet could be successfully diverted.
Continue reading...Discovery offers new support for the theory that life may have been seeded from outer space
Specks of dust that a Japanese space probe retrieved from an asteroid about 186 million miles (300m kilometres) from Earth have revealed a surprising component: a drop of water.
The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth may have been seeded from outer space.
Continue reading...David Deutsch, who proposed an as yet unbuildable machine to test existence of parallel universes, shares prize with three others
A theoretical physicist who has never had a regular job has won the most lucrative prize in science for his pioneering contributions to the mind-bending field of quantum computing.
David Deutsch, who is affiliated with the University of Oxford, shares the $3m (about £2.65m) Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics with three other researchers who laid the foundations for the broader discipline of quantum information.
Continue reading...Researchers think they may have solved enduring mystery of where Typhloesus wellsi sits on tree of life
The mystery of a bizarre creature dubbed the “alien goldfish”, which has baffled fossil experts for decades, may have been solved, according to scientists who say the animal appears to have been some sort of mollusc.
Typhloesus wellsi lived about 330m years ago and was discovered in the Bear Gulch Limestone fossil site in Montana in the late 1960s, with the remains of other species subsequently identified.
Continue reading...Archaeologists say find supports theory that drug was used in burial rituals, possibly to ‘enter ecstatic state’
Israeli archaeologists have discovered opium residue in 3,500-year-old pottery pieces, providing evidence to support the theory that the hallucinogenic drug was used in ancient burial rituals.
The joint investigation by the Israel Antiquities Authority and Weizmann Institute of Science began in 2012 when excavations in the central Israeli town of Yehud revealed a series of late bronze-age graves.
Continue reading...With stealth followed by speedy acrobatics, Euryopis umbilicata can successfully catch banded sugar ants twice its size
A mid-air cartwheel, the judicious use of sticky silk and a quick rappel down a tree, all in the blink of an eye: researchers have identified how the Australian ant-slayer spider captures prey twice its size.
The acrobatic behaviour of the Australian ant-slayer spider, Euryopis umbilicata, as it hunts and eats banded sugar ants has been documented by scientists for the first time.
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Continue reading...Official Wu Zunyou also called for people to avoid ‘skin-to-skin contact’ with those who had been abroad recently, as well as ‘strangers’
A senior Chinese health official has advised people to avoid physical contact with foreigners to prevent possible monkeypox infection after the first known case of the virus on mainland China was reported on Friday.
“To prevent possible monkeypox infection and as part of our healthy lifestyle, it is recommended that 1) you do not have direct skin-to-skin contact with foreigners,” Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted on his official Weibo page on Saturday.
Continue reading...Experts revise initial assumption that sighting was space junk linked to Elon Musk’s satellite programme
A fireball seen over many parts of the northern UK has been confirmed as a meteor after a day of confusion about its identity.
The fireball was visible above northern England, Northern Ireland and Scotland as it blazed across the clear night sky just after 10pm on Wednesday night.
Continue reading...Researchers call on governments to implement national obesity strategy to help stem further rises in preventable cancers
The rate of obesity-related cancers in Australia has almost quadrupled in a few generations, new research suggests.
Researchers at the Daffodil Centre, a joint venture of Cancer Council New South Wales and the University of Sydney, analysed the rate of 10 obesity-linked cancers between 1983 and 2017.
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Continue reading...New Shepard rocket fails shortly after launch, but uncrewed capsule jettisons successfully
An uncrewed rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, failed shortly after launch in Texas on Monday morning, a potential setback for the Amazon founder’s wider ambitions of sending humans into orbit.
The malfunction of the New Shepard booster, a type of rocket that is similar to the one Blue Origin has used this year to send three crews of up to six people on suborbital flights, came 1min 4sec after launch and just as the vehicle was reaching its maximum dynamic pressure, known as “max q”.
Continue reading...Research shows Sydney residents devising increasingly sophisticated ways to keep highly intelligent but ‘bloody annoying’ birds out of household waste
Cockatoos and humans are locked in what Australian researchers have described as “an interspecies innovation arms race”.
Sydney residents are resorting to increasingly sophisticated measures to prevent sulphur-crested cockatoos from opening and raiding household wheelie bins, detailed in new research published in the journal Current Biology.
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Continue reading...Children aged 5-11 will no longer be offered Covid jabs, except those in clinical risk groups, UKHSA confirms
The decision to reduce the number of children who are offered Covid jabs has prompted outcry from parent groups and academics.
According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), children who had not turned five by the end of last month will not be offered a vaccination. The agency said the offer of Covid jabs to healthy 5-11-year-olds was always going to be temporary.
Continue reading...Milder winters could threaten crop yields as plant-eating insects spread northwards and become more voracious, researchers say
Agricultural pests that devour key food crops are advancing northwards in the US and becoming more widespread as the climate hots up, new research warns.
The corn earworm (Helicoverpa zea) is considered to be among the most common farm pests in the US, ravaging crops such as maize, cotton, soya and other vegetables. It spends winter underground and is not known to survive in states beyond a latitude of 40 degrees north (which runs from northern California through the midwest to New Jersey), but that is changing as soils warm and it spreads to new areas, according to research led by North Carolina State University.
Continue reading...Head of US space agency suggests maiden test flight will probably be delayed until the middle of October
Nasa called off its latest attempt to launch the groundbreaking Artemis 1 moon rocket on Saturday after failing to stem a fuel leak discovered during tanking. It was the second time in five days that technical issues had kept the spacecraft on the launchpad.
Mission managers at Kennedy Space Center waited until late in the countdown to scrub the liftoff after the failure of several workarounds to try to plug the leak of liquid hydrogen as it was being pumped into the core stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
Continue reading...Remains from Chad desert provoke rancorous dispute over whether species was earliest to walk upright
It is a dispute that has taken a long time to reach boiling point. Seven million years after an apelike creature – since nicknamed Toumaï – traversed the landscape of modern Chad, its means of mobility has triggered a dispute among fossil experts. Some claim this was the oldest member of the human lineage. Others that it was just an old ape.
The row, kindled by a paper in Nature, last week led scientists to denounce opponents while others accused rivals of building theories on “less than five minutes’ observation” .
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