New Scientist Australian Edition 27-Jun-20

Virtual events What happened at the big bang? Theoretical astrophysicist Dan Hooper reveals why recreating the conditions of the big bang is helping to uncover the biggest mysteries of the cosmos. Thursday 9 July at 6pm BST/1pm EDT and on demand. newscientist.com/events The art of statistics Leading statistician David Spiegelhalter reveals the essential principles we need in order to derive knowledge from data. Thursday 23 July at 6pm BST/1pm EDT and on demand. newscientist.com/events Podcasts Weekly Black Lives Matter and racism in science, preventing pandemics and suspended animation in people. Plus: an intergalactic space web and cultural habits during lockdown. newscientist.com/podcasts Newsletter Fix the planet Our free newsletter delivers a monthly dose of climate optimism straight to your inbox. newscientist.com/sign-up/fix-the-planet Video The many worlds of quantum mechanics Sean Carroll explores what may be the most jaw-dropping idea in quantum physics: that the world is constantly splitting in…

Virtual events What happened at the big bang? Theoretical astrophysicist Dan Hooper reveals why recreating the conditions of the big bang is helping to uncover the biggest mysteries of the cosmos. Thursday 9 July at 6pm BST/1pm EDT and on demand. newscientist.com/events The art of statistics Leading statistician David Spiegelhalter reveals the essential principles we need in order to derive knowledge from data. Thursday 23 July at 6pm BST/1pm EDT and on demand. newscientist.com/events Podcasts Weekly Black Lives Matter and racism in science, preventing pandemics and suspended animation in people. Plus: an intergalactic space web and cultural habits during lockdown. newscientist.com/podcasts Newsletter Fix the planet Our free newsletter delivers a monthly dose of climate optimism straight to your inbox. newscientist.com/sign-up/fix-the-planet Video The many worlds of quantum mechanics Sean Carroll explores…

THE UK has three, the US 11 and Australia 14. What are these? Covid-19 symptoms. That is according to advice from each country’s health body. How can the same disease affect people so differently in each country? The answer is: it doesn’t. The disparity is a reflection of how little we have known about the symptoms of covid-19, until now. What we initially thought of as a respiratory disease is in fact a much more formidable enemy. It can kill via a two-pronged attack, through provoking our immune systems and disrupting blood clotting (page 8). And for some people, covid-19 results in symptoms that can be strange, debilitating and long-lived (see page 34). The list includes exhaustion, numbness, diarrhoea, extreme weight loss, brain fog, muscle pain and rashes. That these symptoms don’t tally…

THE UK has three, the US 11 and Australia 14. What are these? Covid-19 symptoms. That is according to advice from each country’s health body. How can the same disease affect people so differently in each country? The answer is: it doesn’t. The disparity is a reflection of how little we have known about the symptoms of covid-19, until now. What we initially thought of as a respiratory disease is in fact a much more formidable enemy. It can kill via a two-pronged attack, through provoking our immune systems and disrupting blood clotting (page 8). And for some people, covid-19 results in symptoms that can be strange, debilitating and long-lived (see page 34). The list includes exhaustion, numbness, diarrhoea, extreme weight loss, brain fog, muscle pain and rashes. That these…

LAST month, UK prime minister Boris Johnson said England would have a “world-beating” contact-tracing system in June. But as non-essential shops began reopening in England, the past week has seen two major blows to contact-tracing efforts there. First, the UK government ditched an overdue National Health Service app designed to automatically detect possible instances of virus transmission between people, after a trial on the Isle of Wight found its use of Bluetooth failed to detect many iPhones running the app. The app was originally due to be rolled out across the UK in May. The UK government will now pivot instead to build a new app relying on software that will be baked into Google and Apple’s mobile operating systems, it was announced on 18 June – an approach being pursued by…

DEXAMETHASONE has become the first drug shown to lower the death rate from covid-19. The discovery of the benefits of this widely available steroid, which damps down an overactive immune system, was seen as a much-needed piece of good news. But we will need lots of other treatments to help us turn the tide of severe covid-19. Many of the coronavirus drug trials so far have looked at antiviral medicines that may stop the virus from replicating. While some of these appear to shorten the length of time that an infected person is ill, none has yet been shown to reduce mortality. To save the lives of those who are seriously ill, we need treatments that tackle the effects of severe covid-19, which occur after the virus has already replicated within…