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 in Britain are examining whether smaller doses of Covid vaccine could be used as part of booster programmes, amid hopes that the approach could also increase the supply of jabs across the world.
The use of so-called “fractional doses” has been proposed as a way of ensuring that precious supplies can immunise as many people as possible in parts of the world where there are shortages, while still providing high levels of protection from the virus.
If Joe Biden’s security staff are up to the mark, a new report on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic will be placed on the president’s desk this week. His team was given 90 days in May to review the virus’s origins after several US scientists indicated they were no longer certain about the source of Sars-CoV-2.
It will be intriguing to learn how Biden’s team answers the critically important questions that still surround the origins of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Did it emerge because of natural viral spillovers from bats to another animal and then into humans? Or did it leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? And, if so, had it been enhanced to make it especially virulent?
Ministers are being pressed to reveal what contingency plans are in place to deal with a future Covid variant that evades current vaccines, amid warnings from scientific advisers that such an outcome could set the battle against the pandemic back a year or more.
Recent papers produced by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) have suggested that the arrival of a variant that evades vaccines is a “realistic possibility”. Sage backed continued work on new vaccines that reduce infection and transmission more than current jabs, the creation of more vaccine-production facilities in the UK and lab-based studies to predict evolution of variants.
Female cave lion cub named Sparta in Russia’s Yakutia region may even have traces of mother’s milk in it
Scientists have said that an astonishingly well-preserved cave lion cub found in Siberia’s permafrost lived 28,000 years ago and may even have traces of its mother’s milk in it.
The female cub, named Sparta, was found at the Semyuelyakh River in Russia’s Yakutia region in 2018 and a second lion cub called Boris was found the year before, according to a study published in the Quaternary journal.
Covid vaccines are expected to be offered to children in the UK aged 16 and 17, in line with many other countries, after a minister confirmed government experts will update their advice “imminently”.
Michelle Donelan, the universities minister, said the government was expecting an announcement from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on widening access to the coronavirus vaccine to more teenagers.
Insects have declined by 75% in the past 50 years – and the consequences may soon be catastrophic. Biologist Dave Goulson reveals the vital services they perform
I have been fascinated by insects all my life. One of my earliest memories is of finding, at the age of five or six, some stripy yellow-and-black caterpillars feeding on weeds in the school playground. I put them in my empty lunchbox, and took them home. Eventually they transformed into handsome magenta and black moths. This seemed like magic to me – and still does. I was hooked.
In pursuit of insects I have travelled the world, from the deserts of Patagonia to the icy peaks of Fjordland in New Zealand and the forested mountains of Bhutan. I have watched clouds of birdwing butterflies sipping minerals from the banks of a river in Borneo, and thousands of fireflies flashing in synchrony at night in the swamps of Thailand. At home in my garden in Sussex I have spent countless hours watching grasshoppers court a mate and see off rivals, earwigs tend their young, ants milk honeydew from aphids, and leaf-cutter bees snip leaves to line their nests.
China’s government has refused to cooperate with the second stage of an international investigation into the origins of Covid-19, labelling a proposal to audit Chinese labs as “arrogance towards science”.
Chinese health officials held a press conference on Thursday to respond to last week’s proposal by the World Health Organization that the second phase of its investigation into the origins of the pandemic include “audits of relevant laboratories and research institutions operating in the area of the initial human cases identified in December 2019”, meaning the city of Wuhan.
We should be suspicious of the role of the Chinese Communist party in the harvesting of genetic data from unborn babies, argues William Matthews
In her column (What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?, 10 July), Arwa Mahdawi suggested that the alleged involvement of the People’s Liberation Army (which is directly answerable to the Chinese Communist party) with BGI’s data-gathering (likewise answerable as a China-based company) is essentially equivalent to data-gathering by western companies. To suggest that the former case is worse, she argued, “smacks of Sinophobia”.
As a scholar of China, I cannot agree. While the harvesting of genetic data by any company is frightening and fraught with ethical issues, it should be obvious that this is a false equivalence. It is undoubtedly worse if genetic data is gathered by a company which must also comply with the rule of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and its military-industrial complex, a regime which harvests and aggregates data on its citizens on a massive scale and uses it directly to implement the most repressive system of social control on earth in Xinjiang.
Derogatory use of the “L-word” has increased during Covid and is said to be further marginalising people with the curable disease
Health campaigners are calling for an end to the use of the word leper, saying the language frequently used by politicians and others during the pandemic has made people with leprosy even more marginalised.
The metaphor of the socially outcast “leper” has been used often, whether in media reports on stigma against early Covid-19 patients or by politicians in Italy and Brazil complaining about being seen as “leper colonies”. Campaigners now want an end to the use of what they call the “L-word”.
The Press Association have written up warnings expressed by Sir David Spiegelhalter on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show today that life is likely to be “massively disrupted” by people being told to self-isolate as the number of coronavirus cases rises over the summer.
The statistician said it would make sense to get the rules “in proportion” today as vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi confirmed the Government was looking at ways to tweak the NHS Covid app.
Few people told to self-isolate actually have an infection, and especially if they’re vaxxed, and so I do think it makes sense to get this in proportion to actually ‘what are the benefits of this massive disruption
The team are looking at how we use that app in terms of alerting people to those around them who test positive.
It’s important to look at that in a new context of this massive vaccination programme and make sure that it is fit for purpose for this new world including, for example, being able to take maybe five days, as we have piloted, of lateral flow tests and upload them to the system rather than having to self-isolate.
In Libya, Al-Wasat news is reporting that the country has recorded a record number of coronavirus cases.
The National Center for Disease Control announced the registration of 2,854 new cases of the “emerging corona virus”, in addition to 376 cases of recovery, and 8 deaths, in the highest number of infections since March 2020.
Black patterns used to attract mates can cause the insects to overheat in hotter climates
Male dragonflies are losing the “bling” wing decorations that they use to entice the females as climates get hotter, according to new research.
The results have led to the scientists calling for more work on whether this disparate evolution might lead to females no longer recognising males of their own species in the long run.
The skeleton of Titus, discovered in the US in 2018, makes its world debut at Nottingham museum
The first ‘real’ Tyrannosaurus rex to be exhibited in England for more than a century will go on show in Nottingham on Sunday.
The skeleton of Titus, discovered in the US state of Montana in 2018, will make its world debut at the Wollaton Hall Natural History Museum as part of a new exhibition on the dinosaur’s life and environment.
A scientific adviser to the government’s Covid-19 response has expressed fears England could be in danger of repeating “the mistakes of last summer”.
Prof Stephen Reicher, from the University of St Andrews and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) subcommittee on behavioural science, said the government may have to reimpose restrictions if the reopening leads to a surge in infections.
Having different Covid vaccines for first and second shots produces a strong immune response to the virus, according to research that will help improve the resilience of vaccine programmes around the world.
Scientists in Oxford looked at the impact of a mix-and-match approach to vaccinations where people were given either the standard two shots of Oxford/AstraZeneca or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, or a combination of the two.
Developed countries are seeing the benefits of quickly vaccinating their populations, but concerns remain about the unequal share of global vaccine supplies
New analysis by the Guardian has confirmed that a speedy Covid vaccination campaign pays off when it comes to escaping the worst of the pandemic.
As the chart below shows, countries such as Israel, the UK and the US have all seen deaths decline as vaccination coverage extended to the most vulnerable in their societies.
Remains with combination of Neanderthal and early human features date back 100,000 years
Fossilised bones recovered from an ancient sinkhole in Israel may belong to a previously unknown group of extinct humans that lived in the Levant more than 100,000 years ago.
Researchers unearthed the bones alongside stone tools and the remains of horses, fallow deer and wild ox during excavations at the Nesher Ramla prehistoric site near the city of Ramla in central Israel.
Condition also known as takotsubo cardiomyopathy is brought on by an acute emotional shock
Two molecules associated with high stress levels have been implicated in the development of broken heart syndrome, a condition that mainly affects post-menopausal women and is usually brought on by severe stress, such as the loss of a loved one.
The syndrome, formally known as takotsubo cardiomyopathy, is characterised by weakening of the heart’s main pumping chamber and was first identified in 1990 in Japan. It looks and sounds like a heart attack and is consequently often confused for one.
The scientist and broadcaster discusses the drawbacks of calorie-counting and BMI in measuring obesity, and how our growing understanding of genetics is leading to new treatments
Since the dawn of the 20th century, almost all weight loss guidelines have used calories as a simple measure of how much energy we’re consuming from our food. But according to Giles Yeo, a Cambridge University research scientist who studies the genetics of obesity, there’s one problem: not all calories are created equal. In his new book, Why Calories Don’t Count, Yeo explains that what really matters is not how many calories a particular food contains, but how that food is digested and absorbed by your body.
Can you explain why you feel calorie-counting is a flawed approach to weight loss? There was an American chemist in the 19th century called Wilbur Olin Atwater who calculated the calorie numbers for different foods, by working out the total energy intake you get from them. But his calculations never took into account the energy it takes our cells to metabolise food in order to use it. This is important. It’s why for example a calorie of protein makes you feel fuller than a calorie of fat, because protein is more complex to metabolise. For every 100 calories of protein you eat, you only ever absorb 70.
eBioAtlas programme aims to identify fish, birds, amphibians and land animals in freshwater systems from the Ganges to the Mekong
Concealed by the turbid, swirling waters of the Amazon, the Mekong and the Congo, the biodiversity of the world’s great rivers has largely remained a mystery to scientists. But now a multimillion-pound project aims to describe and identify the web of life in major freshwater ecosystems around the world with “gamechanging” DNA technology.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UK-based environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have launched a partnership to take thousands of water samples from freshwater river systems like the Ganges and the Niger delta to identify the fish, birds, amphibians and land animals that live in and around them.
In June 2020, as the first reports of long Covid began to filter through the medical community, doctors attempting to grapple with this mysterious malaise began to notice an unusual trend. While acute cases of Covid-19 – particularly those hospitalised with the disease – tended to be mostly male and over 50, long Covid sufferers were, by contrast, both relatively young and overwhelmingly female.
Early reports of long Covid at a Paris hospital between May and July 2020 suggested that the average age was around 40, and women afflicted by the longer-term effects of Covid-19 outnumbered men by four to one.