Why is it that we are stronger when we are angry, but hardly have the strength to stand up when we laugh really hard?

REPORTS of pet cats and dogs catching covid-19 from their owners are mounting. They come as no surprise to virologist Gary Whittaker. For the past year, he has surveyed cats brought to a veterinary hospital around the corner from New York Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side, which was ground zero for covid-19 in the US last spring. His unpublished findings suggest that around 15 to 20 per cent of pet cats in the area have antibodies for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19. “Cats are easily exposed,” says Whittaker. Yet most of them are doing fine, as…

Great leaps are already being made in creating a super secure quantum internet. It could overturn the role of information in our lives and give us a globe-spanning quantum supercomputer

RARELY have seeds and fruits so closely resembled a work of art. These strikingly intricate images capture the fertilisation and reproduction of plants. The photos are taken from the book The Hidden Beauty of Seeds and Fruits: The botanical photography of Levon Biss, which showcases a branch of botany dedicated to the study of seeds and fruits called carpology. Carpology places a focus on the shape and structure of different fruits and seeds. Biss chose the most interesting specimens he could find in the carpological collection at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, UK, to photograph, all of which have been…

FOR all the talk about a mysterious big bang at the start of the universe, we actually don’t have to go back too far in history to see big bangs. Some stars, like our sun, will end their lives rather quietly, slowly blowing off layers, possibly destroying solar systems in their wake, and leaving behind beautiful structures that garnered the name “planetary nebulae” before we understood what they were. But other, more massive, stars will go out in a fabulous phenomenon called a supernova, where the outer layers of the star collapse onto its core, igniting an explosion. Supernovae are…

TWO seemingly disparate scientific disciplines have been drawn into each other’s orbits, set on a collision course. On one side is archaeology with its grimy earthiness, heavy with history and tradition; on the other is genetics, with its clinical brightness, brave and brash in its newness. Fusion can be difficult, but it can also create astonishing energy when it happens. At the forefront of this merging is a new sequencing project called 1000 Ancient Genomes. Led by Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London, it is the most ambitious ancient genomics project to date. The DNA it looks…

IT SEEMS that every time we think we are turning the tide in the coronavirus pandemic, another new variant emerges. The latest threat is the B.1.617.2 variant that is playing a large role in the terrible outbreak in India and is spreading in many other nations. The big question is, will existing vaccines work well enough to prevent major new outbreaks? We already know that several vaccines are somewhat less effective at preventing symptomatic infections by new variants. For B.1.617.2, the drop in efficacy appears to be small, but even a small drop matters when most people are only partially…

WHEN a powerful new technology comes around, people often split into two camps: those captivated by its benefits and those worried by the trouble it could unleash. This has happened with everything from knitting machines in the 16th century to artificial intelligence today. It is, of course, a false dichotomy. As physicist and artificial intelligence researcher Max Tegmark put it in this magazine: “Are you the kind of person who thinks fire can kill people or the sort of person who thinks that fire can keep people warm in the winter? Both things are true, obviously.” (18 July 2020) We…

A huge spiral carved into the ground in India covers almost 100,000 square metres, dwarfing other individual geoglyphs like those in the Nazca desert in Peru. The spiral is in a small cluster of geoglyphs discovered by father-and-son researchers Carlo and Yohann Oetheimer, who are based in Luriecq, France. Carlo searched Google Earth images of the Thar desert in India and identified eight sites with possible geoglyphs. In 2016, they flew a drone over them and found that four were furrows dug for failed tree plantations. One site was near the village of Boha. Using the drone there, the Oetheimers…

A beetle’s poisonous punch is helping to uncover how new types of cells can arise and co-evolve to create organs – and these mechanisms may apply to more complex organs in animals, including humans. A fundamental challenge that multicellular animals face is how to get different cell types to work together so that a higher-level function, such as that of an organ, emerges from their interactions, says Joe Parker at the California Institute of Technology. Yet biologists know relatively little about how this happens. Many organs that are common across animal groups are complex and evolutionarily ancient, making it hard…