Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Scientists set initial sights on creating elephant-mammoth hybrid, with first calves expected in six years
Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra.
The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed – seriously at times – for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality.
£200m project to eliminate avoidable blindness and disfigurement in Africa ends after funding is prematurely axed
A chandelier sparkling in the background, the grandeur of Downing Street gleaming behind him, Boris Johnson looks into the camera and speaks with solemnity. He is marking World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day, he says, to raise awareness of these “terrible afflictions … which impose an immense burden of suffering in developing countries”.
Huge progress has been made, he says, in the fight against the diseases, not least as a result of British aid to some of the poorest parts of the world. But there is more – much more – to be done: more than a billion people are still at risk, he warns, and that is why the UK “fully supports” the World Health Organization’s big elimination push over the next decade.
The calculations behind filling supermarket shelves are dizzyingly complex – but it all starts with the x and y you know from school
Nando’s put it succinctly on its Twitter feed last month: “The UK supply chain is having a bit of a mare right now.” Getting things on to supermarket shelves, through your letterbox or into a restaurant kitchen has certainly become problematic of late. It’s hard to know exactly where to pin the blame, though Covid and Brexit have surely played a part. What we can do is give thanks for algebra, because things would be so much worse without it.
It’s likely that you have mixed feelings about algebra. Even if you could knuckle down and manage it in school, you probably wondered why it was important to solve an equation involving x raised to the power of 2 or why you should want to find a and b when a + b = 3 and 2a – b = 12. You might even feel that your scepticism has been vindicated: the chances are that you have never done algebra in your post-school life. But that doesn’t mean that the jumble of letters, numbers and missing things that we call algebra is useless. Whether it’s supermarket groceries, a new TV or a parcel from Aunt Emily, they all reach your home through some attempt to solve an equation and find the missing number. Algebra is the maths that delivers.
The Liverpool site will work with other international centres to research the threat of emerging disruptive diseases
A new scientific institute which aims to prevent future pandemics may have been able to save thousands of lives by accelerating vaccine development had it existed before December 2019, its researchers believe.
Liverpool’s new Pandemic Institute will include a new human challenge facility, where volunteers will test new vaccines and treatments under controlled conditions.
The behaviour geneticist explains how biology could have an influence on academic attainment – and why she takes an anti-eugenics approach
Kathryn Paige Harden argues how far we go in formal education – and the huge knock-on effects that has on our income, employment and health – is in part down to our genes. Harden is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads a lab using genetic methods to study the roots of social inequality. Her provocative new bookis The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.
To even talk about whether there might be a genetic element to educational attainment and social inequality breaks a huge social taboo – particularly on the political left, which is where you say your own sympathies lie. The spectre of eugenics looms large, and no one wants to create a honeypot for racists and classists. To be clear, it is scientifically baseless to make any claims about differences between racial groups, including intelligence, and you are not doing that. But why go here? I wrote this book first for my fellow scientists, who haven’t necessarily seen the relevance of genetics for their own work or have been afraid to incorporate it because of these associations. There is a large body of scientific knowledge being ignored lest the eugenics genie be let out of the bottle.
Coming to terms with the loss of my friend Amy Winehouse, amid the media frenzy that surrounded her death, has taken me 10 years
God knows what I must have looked like: a bedraggled 25-year-old dressed as a psychedelic game hunter with glitter smeared across my face crying hysterically in a Cambridgeshire field. It was 4pm on 23 July 2011, and a friend of mine had broken the news to me: Amy was dead. I was totally inconsolable, while around me fellow-revellers danced.
It was the Saturday of Secret Garden Party and my friends had been deliberating among themselves how best to tell me. Their hands were forced when they realised it was about to be announced on the festival stage. In the end, a guy called Jamie opted for directness: “Amy Winehouse is dead.”
While other states are still lacking enough supply to vaccinate those under 60 with Pfizer, South Australia is opening up Pfizer access to those over 60, AAP reports.
The premier, Steven Marshall, made the announcement less than 24 hours after the Northern Territory confirmed over-60s in the Top End could get the Pfizer jab.
Victoria’s health minister, Martin Foley, is asked to weigh in on New South Wales’ decision to stop holding daily press conferences from Monday.
Foley says holding daily press conferences is not fun, but it is important, and Victoria has no plans on abandoning them at the moment:
We have no plans, sadly, other than to continue to come and share as we need to, because every day the message changes, every day we need to hear from people like Ryan, and every day we need to hear from people like we did from the other day from our ICU nurses.
We need to hear what this means in real lives. And what that means. And it’s not fun, having to do these things. This is a public health crisis, the likes of which we have not seen in a century. The fate of our public health system is on the cusp here. And it’s important that we use this every opportunity.
Scientists would make swifter progress in solving the world’s problems if they learned to put their egos aside and collaborate better, according to the leading researcher behind the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine.
Prof Katalin Karikó, the senior vice-president for RNA protein replacement therapies at BioNTech in Germany, endured decades of scepticism over her work and was demoted and finally kicked out of her lab while developing the technology that made the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines possible.
The US diseases expert has been spoofed by Brad Pitt and lauded as the ‘sexiest man alive’. Now the pop culture phenomenon is the focus of a documentary
Beer and bobbleheads. Candles, colouring books, cupcakes and cushions. Dolls, doughnuts, hoodies, mugs and socks. T-shirts and yard signs that declare “Dr Fauci is my hero” and “In Fauci we trust”.
Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old scientist, doctor and public servant, has become an unlikely cult hero for millions of people during the Covid pandemic.
Research from the more unusual realms of science is recognised every year at this alternative awards ceremony
Groundbreaking studies into how well beards soften punches to the face, the benefits of transporting rhinoceroses upside down, and orgasms as a nasal decongestant were honoured on Thursday night with one of the most coveted awards in science: the Ig Nobel prize.
Not to be confused with the more prestigious – and lucrative – Nobel awards, to be announced from Stockholm and Oslo next month, the Ig Nobels celebrate the quirkier realms of science, rewarding research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think.
Data suggesting 20.3% of people are unwilling or unsure on getting jab prompts call for new strategies to reach nation’s wary
Australians must be prepared to see the Covid vaccination uptake curve start to flatten in coming months, a leading vaccine communication expert has warned, due to the rate of hesitancy.
But she is calling for health policy to reach this group in order to stop their lives becoming too difficult or to drive them away from healthcare.
Glue and duct tape used to fit rat snakes with dosimeters and GPS movement trackers to help researchers understand long-term effects of radiation
Researchers have used snakes fitted with tracking devices and dosimeters to measure radiation levels in the area around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which suffered triple meltdowns in March 2011.
The meltdowns in Japan caused by a giant tsunami released more radiation into the atmosphere than any nuclear disaster except Chernobyl in 1986.
It might be repetitive to say, but I’ll take the good news anywhere. With that in mind, Western Australia and the Northern Territory have recorded zero new cases today. South Australia recorded one case in hotel quarantine, and zero locally acquired cases.
Warm-blooded animals are changing beaks, legs and ears to adapt to hotter climate and better regulate temperature
Animals are increasingly “shapeshifting” because of the climate crisis, researchers have said.
Warm-blooded animals are changing their physiology to adapt to a hotter climate, the scientists found. This includes getting larger beaks, legs and ears to better regulate their body temperature.
A third man has died in Japan after receiving an injection from one of three batches of Moderna vaccines since identified as contaminated, though authorities say no causal link has yet been found.
The 49-year-old man had his second shot on 11 August and died the following day. His only known health issue was an allergy to buckwheat, the health ministry said on Monday. As with the previous two deaths, the ministry said it had yet to establish if the latest fatality was linked to the vaccine.
The BBC reports that Scottish Labour will not support the Scottish government’s plans to introduce vaccine passports.
Anas Sarwar told BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show:
This is not opposition for opposition’s sake. Neither is this an ideological opposition to the principle of vaccine passports. This is about what works, and what’s going to make a meaningful difference. We all agree the vaccine is working in helping reduce hospitalisations and reduce deaths but there is a fear that using vaccine passports might actually entrench vaccine hesitancy rather than encourage uptake.
US officials have expressed optimism that Covid-19 booster shot delivery can start for all adults on 20 September, the goal set by President Joe Biden, as cases continue to rage across the country fueled by the highly transmissible Delta variant.
The officials insist, however, that boosters will not be rolled out without US health agencies’ authorisation, leaving open the possibility of delays.
Charlotte Northedge wrote a new novel in lockdown. She considers others who have realised the dreams of their youth
I wrote a novel in the last lockdown. To be clear, it wasn’t one of those creative outpourings some people had in between yoga with Adriene and baking banana bread. I had a deadline. Some days, I thought I’d never cut through the brain fog brought about by living through a pandemic. But gradually, as the initial panic subsided and the usual distractions of daily life fell away, I found the words did start to come, and the process of writing my second book was much more fluid and focused than my first.
Which is hardly surprising. I started my debut while on maternity leave with my second baby. I had dreamed of writing a novel since I was a child. I was one of those bookish kids whose weekly highlight was a visit to the library and who spent the best part of my teens squirrelling away short stories and beginnings of novels that never seemed to go anywhere. When I moved to London after my English degree, I joined a writing group and started a thriller.
The work day in Fangshan starts before dawn and finishes at midday, when fishers or farmers of mango and onion sit together in the shade, sharing a bucket of cooked prawns and bottles of Taiwan beer.
The hometown of Taiwan’s president, Fangshan’s borders encompass a long stretch of coast and four villages home to around 5,500 people, sandwiched between mountains and oceans. Quiet and picturesque, it’s left off most tourist trails, which instead focus on Kenting national park to the south.
Before we wrap up the live blog, let’s recap the main events of today.
It’s been another grim day. The NSW and ACT reported record case numbers. Victoria has warned of a NSW-style growth in its numbers.
Civil liberties groups have criticised a lack of safeguards and primary legislation accompanying an app being trialled in South Australia that uses facial recognition and geolocation data to enforce home quarantine.
SA is trialling the app, which the government developed, on a small number of volunteers who have returned from interstate. It requires them to answer a message within 15 minutes, using facial recognition and geolocation to verify their identity and location. If they fail to do so, the app alerts police.
It’s the usual thing, it’s done in a very half-baked way, and without all the necessary provisions about what you actually do with the information you’re collecting.