YOUR WEEKLY NEWS UPDATE
- A Covid therapy derived from a llama named Fifi has shown “significant potential” in early trials. It is a treatment made of “nanobodies”, small, simpler versions of antibodies, which llamas and camels produce naturally in response to infection. Once the therapy has been tested in humans, scientists say, it could be given as a simple nasal spray – to treat and even prevent early infection. COVID infected rodents treated with the new nanobody nasal spray fully recovered within six days.
- A team working in New Mexico has found scores of human footprints dated to between 23,000 and 21,000 years old. The discovery could transform views about when the continent was settled. It suggests there could have been great migrations that we know nothing about. And it raises the possibility that these earlier populations could have gone extinct. the footprints were formed in soft mud on the margins of a shallow lake which now forms part of Alkali Flat in White Sands.
- An estimated seven million people die prematurely each year from diseases linked to air pollution, the WHO says. Low- and middle-income countries suffer the most, because of their reliance on fossil fuels for economic development. WHO puts air pollution on a par with smoking and unhealthy eating. It is urging its 194 member states to cut emissions and take action on climate change, ahead of the COP26 summit in November. Decade by decade, the limits for what’s considered a safe amount of pollution are being ratcheted down.
- In 2023, the golf cart-sized vehicle will land near the western edge of Mobile Crater, a 73km-wide depression that is almost permanently in shadow. The Viper mission will support plans for human exploration of the Moon, because the ice could be mined for use as drinking water and rocket fuel. NASA wants to return astronauts to the lunar surface this decade. The space agency’s Artemis programme will see the first woman and the first person of colour land on the Moon. It could pave the way for a long-term human presence on Earth’s sole natural satellite.
- A novel way of delivering high-speed internet via beams of light through the air has successfully transmitted data across the Congo River. It means that citizens in Brazzaville and Kinshasa could get faster and cheaper broadband. Project Taara is one of Alphabet X’s (formerly Google X) so-called moonshot ideas. It grew out of Project Loon, a broadband project using balloons in the stratosphere.
- The British food industry will be forced to pay five times more for CO2 as part of a government deal with a US company to restart production in the UK. CO2 prices would rise from £200 per tonne to £1,000. The government has agreed to pay out tens of millions of pounds to CF Industries to reopen a plant in the UK. The closure had raised fears over food supplies and the nuclear industry. US-owned CF Industries recently shut two UK sites that produce 60% of the country’s commercial CO2 supplies, because of a sharp rise in gas prices.
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