New Scientist Australian Edition 16-Jul-22

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YOU may have heard that the coronavirus pandemic is over. This narrative is common and covid-19’s ranking among international news agendas has fallen dramatically since the start of the year, displaced by a host of other stories, including war, Roe v Wade, food and energy crises, extreme heatwaves and a political soap opera in the UK government. And yet there are now more confirmed cases of covid-19 globally than there were at any point during the first two years of the pandemic, as the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants spread worldwide and contribute to the UK’s fifth wave of surging covid-19 infections (see page 7). Due to cutbacks in mass testing, it is perhaps more difficult than ever to get a clear picture of the pandemic’s current status. Fortunately, the…

ONE in 25 people in England, or nearly 4 per cent of the country’s population, were infected by the coronavirus in the week ending 29 June, according to the latest figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). The equivalent figures for the rest of the UK were 1 in 17 people in Scotland, 1 in 20 people in Wales and 1 in 19 people in Northern Ireland, with a total of around 2.7 million infections across the UK that week. The proportion of infections has roughly doubled across the UK since the start of June. The infections are mainly caused by a growing wave of the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of omicron, which were first detected in South Africa in January. These subvariants have now spread around the…

THE first deep-field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed galaxies we have never seen before. Released on 11 July, it is zoomed in further than any previous infrared picture we have taken of the cosmos. But the record won’t stand for long, as the telescope continues to push the limits of astronomical observation. As New Scientist went to press, four more images were scheduled to be released. “Being able to see so deeply into the universe will help astronomers understand the earliest stars” JWST launched from French Guiana at the end of 2021 and arrived in its final orbit around the sun in early 2022. Images with high enough quality to use for science have now started to beam down to Earth. US president Joe Biden…

ON MONDAY, US president Joe Biden unveiled “Webb’s First Deep Field”, the first full-colour image released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team (see main story, left). For Joseph DePasquale, the lead JWST image processor at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, the release was a moment of “relief” and “gratitude” after months of what he describes as, at times, an emotional task. He recalls working on one of the first images downloaded from the telescope – four more of these were due to be released as New Scientist went to press. “I got really deep into the details. Then, at one point, I took a step back and I pulled myself out of the pixel level and looked at the image as a whole. It was…

THE UK government is still preparing to leave the European Union’s €100 billion Horizon research programme, the largest collaboration of scientists in the world, after Boris Johnson’s resignation as prime minister last week. The UK’s participation in Horizon has been in doubt since it voted to leave the EU in 2016. Under the terms of the Brexit withdrawal agreement in 2020, it could still be included as an “associate member” like other nations, such as Norway and Israel, but the European Commission is withholding access amid a row on border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. At the end of June, the European Research Council (ERC) cancelled more than 140 UK-led grants awarded in its latest funding round as a result of the dispute. George Freeman, then the UK…