New Scientist International Edition 4-Dec-21

Virtual event Why is laughter funny? Despite being more like an animal call than human speech, laughter is an important form of communication. In this talk. neuroscientist Sophie Scott explores the history and neuroscience of laughter, explaining its role in socialising, play and the expression of emotion. Join us at 6pm GMT (1pm EDT) on 3 March 2022. Get your tickets online now. newscientist.com/ns-events Online Covid-19 daily update Stay on top of all the most crucial developments in the pandemic with our free news round-up, updated every weekday at around 12pm GMT. There are also links to our exclusive features and interviews. newscientist.com/coronavirus-latest Podcast Weekly This week, the team explains why the wet market in Wuhan, China, is back on top as the most likely place covid-19 originated. And if you want to improve your vision, forget carrots, all you…

ONE of the positives to come out of last month’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow was official recognition of the central role that climate science must play both in understanding and solving the problem. That might seem an odd thing to say – surely science has always been at the heart of the negotiations? Sadly, it hasn’t. At COP24 in Poland in 2018, for example, a report on the impacts of 1.5°C of global warming – specially commissioned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the meeting – was merely “noted” in the final text. On that front, the newly agreed Glasgow Climate Pact is a major improvement. The final text explicitly acknowledges the latest IPCC report and notes its findings “with concern”. One area where the science really cut…

THE omicron variant, which was designated a covid-19 variant of concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 26 November, has triggered travel restrictions, a race to accelerate booster vaccination programmes and renewed calls to address vaccine inequity. According to the WHO on 29 November, omicron poses a “very high” risk globally, and preliminary evidence suggests that it might be a more transmissible variant, which could lead to surges of infection. Countries including the UK, US and European Union member states have rushed to impose travel restrictions on southern African countries. Some went even further: Israel and Japan have effectively sealed their borders to foreign visitors. South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa said he was “deeply disappointed” by the responses, and that the country was being punished rather than rewarded for its genomic surveillance. Fears…

THE outlook for the covid-19 pandemic took a downwards turn last week, when the omicron variant was announced as a variant of concern (see page 7). But there is a cause for some optimism: emerging evidence on vaccine booster programmes reveals that a third dose can take people’s coronavirus protection to unexpectedly high levels. It has long been predicted that the covid-19 vaccines from Oxford/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech, which were designed as two-dose regimens, may eventually require a third shot. After studies suggested that vaccine effectiveness was waning, many countries began booster programmes, including the UK, which began offering third doses in September to people who are 50 or older and certain other groups. It later widened that to those aged 40 and over. There was disappointment that boosters were needed after only…

A MATERIAL inspired by the fractal-like nature of blood vessels can absorb 20 times more uranium from seawater than previous approaches. The team behind the technique believes it could provide a reliable energy source that could last thousands of years at current rates of consumption. Uranium is the most common fuel for nuclear power stations, but it is a finite resource. Earth’s seas are estimated to contain some 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium, 500 times as much as its land mass, but extracting it from water is more expensive than mining it from rock. Experiments have previously found that sheets of acrylic fibre can extract small amounts of uranium from water, but because seawater contains only about 3 parts per billion of uranium, it has been difficult to refine the process and…

CLIMATE change could see the Arctic switch from being dominated by snow to rain up to two decades earlier than previously thought, with major consequences that risk accelerating global warming and devastating local wildlife. Snow accounts for almost all current precipitation in the Arctic, but the region is warming faster than the rest of the world and is expected to become predominantly rainy this century. The transition has already begun: rain fell at Greenland’s highest summit this year, for the first time on record. Now, an international team has found that the switch from snowy to rainy conditions across the Arctic could happen in 2060 rather than 2080. “It is all linked to the whole climate crisis, which is contributing to a much greater increase in rainfall,” says team member Michelle McCrystall at…