New Scientist Australian Edition 8-Jan-22

Virtual events Nutrition and mental health Strange as it may sound, the bacteria that live in our guts have a crucial influence on our mental health. And since what we eat controls the balance of these microbes, the right dietary choices could potentially boost our mood and reduce anxiety. In this online talk, microbiome expert Ted Dinan explains how this happens and doles out some practical advice on eating yourself happy. Join us on 27 January from 6pm GMT (1pm EST). Brain power What does it mean to have a healthy, happy brain? In this virtual event, New Scientist’s head of features, Catherine de Lange, will unpack the latest understanding of how sleep, diet, exercise and our social lives are imperative for keeping our brains in good shape. Join us on 3 February from…

WHAT a difference a month makes. In November, when we commissioned our retrospective on the amazing scientific endeavour that has characterised the covid-19 pandemic over the past two years (see page 10), life in certain parts of the planet was inching its way back to some semblance of normality. Then came the curveball, omicron. No one should have been surprised. A variant such as this was predictable, as World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (interviewed on page 15) has pointed out. Countries can expect more of the same in the year to come. As long as cases remain high around the world, other variants will follow. And while recent analyses suggest that omicron is more transmissible but less severe than delta (people with omicron seem about half as likely…

AFTER a nail-biting launch on Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has begun its mission to image the birth of the universe. The JWST blasted off from French Guiana at 12:20 GMT on 25 December on top of an Ariane 5 rocket, folded into a compact cuboid. About 27 minutes later, it separated from the rocket and deployed its solar array, which powers its propulsion and communication systems, as well as scientific instruments. Its next big manoeuvres were two course-correction burns, firing rocket thrusters to nudge the space telescope towards its correct orbit around the sun, at a gravitationally stable location called L2 about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. The two burns used less fuel than anticipated thanks to the accuracy of the Ariane 5 rocket, which means the JWST will…

ON 31 December 2019, Chinese authorities informed the World Health Organization (WHO) about a cluster of “viral pneumonia” cases of unknown cause in the city of Wuhan. Two years later, the coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in at least 5.4 million deaths. As the world awaits the full impact of the new variant omicron, New Scientist looks back at the phenomenal scientific endeavour across the pandemic, and at how much we now know about the virus and how to fight it. Where did covid-19 come from? In March 2021, a group tasked by the WHO to investigate covid-19’s origins concluded that SARS-CoV-2 is most likely to be an animal virus that moved into humans through contact with an animal host, either at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a live animal…

Two years on, several key questions about the virus are yet to be resolved, including the virus’s origins. Although evidence suggests it began in a market in China and that it derives from a bat coronavirus, it isn’t clear how it spread to humans. We don’t know the dose of SARS-CoV-2 needed to transmit infection. To work this out, several human challenge trials are under way, in which volunteers are given varying viral doses in controlled conditions. We also need to identify the level of antibodies needed to prevent infection, which is helpful for assessing how effective vaccines are and also for rapidly deciding whether they need to be changed. Researchers met in December 2021 to discuss data on antibodies for all the variants of concern, to reach an agreement on what…

WHILE the pandemic is unlikely to fully end in 2022, we can hope to see some positive changes: more vaccine coverage, improved treatments and reduced mortality. But mitigation measures, such as mask wearing and social distancing, will remain crucial for controlling outbreaks and restricting the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead on covid-19 at the World Health Organization (WHO), dislikes the phrase “learning to live with the virus”. She says: “I don’t think we should learn to live with it. There are lots of things we can be doing to stop the virus from spreading. No level of death from covid-19 is acceptable to me.” The next year will unfold how we allow it to, she says. “How we use the vaccine going forward among those…