New Scientist Australian Edition 7-Nov-20

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AS THE coronavirus began spreading through Europe in the spring, many scientists warned that worse could come in winter. Now, it seems they were right. The continent’s wave of second lockdowns (see page 7) has brought gloom, anger, fear and, in some countries, protests. In the UK, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has tried to offer his citizens some hope, telling them that everything will look much cheerier come 2021. Such offerings of hope should be treated with caution. Perhaps things will be better when spring returns to the northern hemisphere. But it isn’t immediately clear why that should be the case. It is possible that by then we will have a stopgap therapy to create immunity without a vaccine, but as Graham Lawton writes on page 12, the results…

ENGLAND has begun a second national lockdown, after weeks of regional restrictions failed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The UK government didn’t follow suggestions made by scientific advisers in September to institute a shorter lockdown weeks earlier, intended to halt the exponential growth of coronavirus cases. This new lockdown is needed to stop the spread of the virus, but it and similar efforts across Europe may be too late to prevent the second wave of covid-19 being worse than the first. “It’s pretty bleak,” says Paul Hunter at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He thinks the second wave will be more drawn out but will eventually lead to more deaths in the UK than the 44,000 seen in the first wave. “I think probably we…

HAILED as an example to follow for its initial coronavirus response, Germany is now struggling to curb surging infections amid Europe’s second wave. “We are now at a point where, on average nationally, we no longer know where 75 per cent of infections come from,” German chancellor Angela Merkel said during a press conference on 28 October. Unlike many nations, Germany didn’t have to build up its testing and contact-tracing infrastructure from scratch when the pandemic hit. During its first wave in the spring, the country’s 400 or so local health authorities facilitated rapid identification of source cases and tracing of their contacts. Ahead of a gradual easing of restrictions in early May, Merkel and German state leaders focused on expanding the country’s tracing capacity further, agreeing in April that…

FOR people who have survived covid-19, there is an opportunity to add another chapter to their recovery story: they could help save other people’s lives by donating blood. The plasma of people who have recovered from the disease contains precious antibodies that helped them fight off the virus, and could help others do the same, or even make them temporarily immune. Such antibodies are an increasing focus of research efforts to treat and prevent covid-19. According to senior US health official Anthony Fauci, antibody therapies could be a “bridge to a vaccine” – a stopgap to carry us safely to the promised land. The use of antibody-laden blood plasma was developed more than 100 years ago to treat diphtheria. It fell out of favour with the introduction of antibiotics, but…

RESEARCHERS have successfully tested a new £55 million nuclear fusion machine in the UK, which could provide vital insights for a future prototype power station. The Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire took seven years to build. Last week, the machine produced its first plasma, the state hydrogen reaches when heated to extremely high temperatures. Our understanding of how stars are powered by hydrogen fusing into helium dates back around a century, but efforts to harness clean energy from the reaction in a commercial power station still face many barriers – not least how to extract more energy than we put in. One key problem is the heat from the plasma, which reaches millions of degrees Celsius. This means it gradually…