‘That's a first': Ladybird swarm stops play at Lords
A swarm of ladybirds briefly interrupted the England versus India cricket test match at Lord's on Thursday, causing a pause in play. England's vice-captain Ollie Pope said: 'That's a first that the crowd have got that today.'
Ecologists, including Professor Helen Roy, confirm that many aphid-feeding ladybird species are appearing in high numbers this year due to abundant food and heat.
Experts like Professor Tim Coulson encourage the public to appreciate ladybirds, highlighting their crucial role as natural predators that control aphid populations.
Dr Peter Brown noted that the last significant ladybird boom year was during the hot summer of 1976, and the current increase should be viewed positively.
Why the UK is seeing an increase in ladybirds as swarm stops play at Lord's
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Daily Mail
2 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Huge breast cancer breakthrough as scientists discover key way to prevent deadly disease
Scientists have discovered how breast cancer spreads to other parts of the body—and it could revolutionise how the disease is treated in its earlier stages. Scottish researchers discovered that cancer changes the metabolism—the way cells make and use energy—of specific immune cells. They found that they release a certain sort of protein, called uracil, which can be used as a 'scaffold' by cancerous cells, allowing them to grow on other organs. Scientists were able to block the uracil-powered scaffold from forming in mice. This restored the ability of the creatures' immune systems to kill secondary cancer cells, and stop the cancer from spreading. The scientists achieved this by blocking an enzyme called uridine phosphorylase-1 (UPP1), which produces uracil. They hope that detecting uracil in the blood may help spot early signs the cancer spreading—and blocking UPP1 with drugs could stop the spread before it even starts. The findings of the study, which was carried out in the labs of Professor Jim Norman and Professor Karen Blyth, were published in the Embo Reports journal. Lead author of the study, Dr Cassie Clarke, said: 'This study represents a major shift in how we think about preventing the spread of cancer. 'By targeting these metabolic changes as early as possible we could stop the cancer progressing and save lives.' Meanwhile, Dr Catherine Elliot, director of research at Cancer Research UK, said: 'Metastasis—when cancer spreads—is a major factor in breast cancer becoming harder to treat, especially if the cancer returns months or even many years later. 'This discovery gives us new hope for detecting and stopping metastasis early and ensuring people have many more years with their families and loved ones.' The research may also help stop the spread of other cancers to other parts of the body, too added Simon Vincent, chief scientific officer at Breast Cancer Now. 'Now we need more research to see if this new insight can be turned into new drugs that stop secondary breast cancer, and potentially other secondary cancers,' he said. The team of researchers at from the Cancer Research UK Institute and University of Glasgow are now testing the ability of drugs to prevent cancer occurring. It comes amid an alarming prediction earlier this year that breast cancer deaths in the UK will soar by more than 40 per cent by 2050. By the same year, globally, another study estimated there will be 3.2million new cases and 1.1million breast-related deaths per year if current trends continue. The disease is far more prevalent in those over 50, which is the age women typically experience the menopause. It is the most common type of cancer in the UK, taking the lives of around 11,500 Britons and 42,000 Americans each year. Early signs of the disease are a lump in the breast, swelling or lump in the armpit, change in size or shape of breasts, discharge of fluid from the nipple. Others include dimpling, a rash or redness on skin, as well as crusting, scaly or itchy skin on the nipple. Despite years of pleas from cancer charities, more than a third of women in the UK still do not regularly assess their breasts. However, it should be part of your monthly routine, so you can notice any unusual changes, charity CoppaFeel previously said. You can check in the shower, when you are lying down in bed or in the mirror before you get dressed. Because breast tissue isn't just found in your boobs, it's also important that men and women check the tissue all the way to their collarbone and underneath their armpit. There is no right or wrong way to check your breasts, as long as you know how your breasts usually look and feel, says the NHS. Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world and affects more than two MILLION women a year Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world. Each year in the UK there are more than 55,000 new cases, and the disease claims the lives of 11,500 women. In the US, it strikes 266,000 each year and kills 40,000. But what causes it and how can it be treated? What is breast cancer? It comes from a cancerous cell which develops in the lining of a duct or lobule in one of the breasts. When the breast cancer has spread into surrounding tissue it is called 'invasive'. Some people are diagnosed with 'carcinoma in situ', where no cancer cells have grown beyond the duct or lobule. Most cases develop in those over the age of 50 but younger women are sometimes affected. Breast cancer can develop in men, though this is rare. Staging indicates how big the cancer is and whether it has spread. Stage 1 is the earliest stage and stage 4 means the cancer has spread to another part of the body. The cancerous cells are graded from low, which means a slow growth, to high, which is fast-growing. High-grade cancers are more likely to come back after they have first been treated. What causes breast cancer? A cancerous tumour starts from one abnormal cell. The exact reason why a cell becomes cancerous is unclear. It is thought that something damages or alters certain genes in the cell. This makes the cell abnormal and multiply 'out of control'. Although breast cancer can develop for no apparent reason, there are some risk factors that can increase the chance, such as genetics. What are the symptoms of breast cancer? The usual first symptom is a painless lump in the breast, although most are not cancerous and are fluid filled cysts, which are benign. The first place that breast cancer usually spreads to is the lymph nodes in the armpit. If this occurs you will develop a swelling or lump in an armpit. How is breast cancer diagnosed? Initial assessment: A doctor examines the breasts and armpits. They may do tests such as a mammography, a special x-ray of the breast tissue which can indicate the possibility of tumours. Biopsy: A biopsy is when a small sample of tissue is removed from a part of the body. The sample is then examined under a microscope to look for abnormal cells. The sample can confirm or rule out cancer. If you are confirmed to have breast cancer, further tests may be needed to assess if it has spread. For example, blood tests, an ultrasound scan of the liver or a chest X-ray. How is breast cancer treated? Treatment options which may be considered include surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone treatment. Often a combination of two or more of these treatments are used. Surgery: Breast-conserving surgery or the removal of the affected breast depending on the size of the tumour. Radiotherapy: A treatment which uses high energy beams of radiation focused on cancerous tissue. This kills cancer cells, or stops them from multiplying. It is mainly used in addition to surgery. Chemotherapy: A treatment of cancer by using anti-cancer drugs which kill cancer cells, or stop them from multiplying. Hormone treatments: Some types of breast cancer are affected by the 'female' hormone oestrogen, which can stimulate the cancer cells to divide and multiply. Treatments which reduce the level of these hormones, or prevent them from working, are commonly used in people with breast cancer. How successful is treatment? The outlook is best in those who are diagnosed when the cancer is still small, and has not spread. Surgical removal of a tumour in an early stage may then give a good chance of cure. The routine mammography offered to women between the ages of 50 and 71 means more breast cancers are being diagnosed and treated at an early stage. For more information visit or call its free helpline on 0808 800 6000 But one of the most popular methods online involves using the pads of your fingers. Examining your entire breast and armpit area, simply, rub and feel from top to bottom of the breast. You should also feel in semi-circles and in a circular motion around your breast tissue to feel for any abnormalities, according to a guide shared in a blog post by the University of Nottingham. Then look in the mirror for any visual lumps, skin texture and changes and changes in nipple shape or abnormal discharge. If you spot any changes, you should get it checked out by your GP. Women aged between 50 and 70 should also be attending routine breast cancer screenings.
The Guardian
40 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Edinburgh University's ‘skull room' highlights its complicated history with racist science
Hundreds of skulls are neatly and closely placed, cheekbone to cheekbone, in tall, mahogany-framed glass cabinets. Most carry faded, peeling labels, some bear painted catalogue numbers; one has gold teeth; and the occasional one still carries its skin tissue. This is the University of Edinburgh's 'skull room'. Many were voluntarily donated to the university; others came from executed Scottish murderers; some Indigenous people's skulls were brought to Scotland by military officers on expeditions or conquest missions. Several hundred were collected by supporters of the racist science of phrenology – the discredited belief that skull shape denoted intelligence and character. Among them are the skulls of two brothers who died while studying at Edinburgh. Their names are not recorded in the skull room catalogue, but cross-referencing of matriculation and death records suggests they were George Richards, a 21-year-old medic who died of smallpox in 1832, and his younger brother, Robert Bruce, 18, a divinity scholar who died of typhoid fever in 1833. Exactly how the Richards brothers' skulls came to be separated from their bodies, recorded as interred in the South Leith parish church cemetery, is unknown. But they were almost certainly acquired by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society to study supposed racial difference. Researchers believe their case exemplifies the challenging questions facing the university, which, it has now emerged, played a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of racist ideas about white superiority and racial difference from the late 1700s onwards – ideas taught to thousands of Edinburgh students who dispersed across the British empire. University records studied by Dr Simon Buck suggest the brothers were of mixed African and European descent, born in Barbados to George Richards, an Edinburgh-educated doctor who practised medicine on sugar plantations and who owned enslaved people – possibly including George and Robert Bruce's mother. Edinburgh Phrenological Society's 1858 catalogue records the skulls (listed as No 1 and No 2) as having belonged to 'mulatto' students of divinity and medicine. 'It can be assumed that the racialisation of these two individuals as 'mulatto' – a hybrid racial category that both fascinated and bewildered phrenologists – is what aroused interest among members of the society in the skulls of these two students,' Edinburgh's decolonisation report concludes. The brothers' skulls are among the roughly 400 amassed by the society and later absorbed into the anatomical museum's collection, which now contains about 1,500 skulls. These are held in the Skull Room, to which The Guardian was granted rare access. Many of these ancestral remains, the report states, 'were taken, without consent, from prisons, asylums, hospitals, archaeological sites and battlefields', with others 'having been stolen and exported from the British empire's colonies', often gifted by a global network of Edinburgh alumni. 'We can't escape the fact that some of [the skulls] will have been collected with the absolute express purpose of saying, 'This is a person from a specific race, and aren't they inferior to the white man',' said Prof Tom Gillingwater, the chair of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, who now oversees the anatomical collection. 'We can't get away from that.' The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by George Combe, a lawyer, and his younger brother, Andrew, a doctor, with roughly a third of its early members being physicians. Both were students at the university, and some Edinburgh professors were active members. Through its acquisition of skulls from across the globe, the society played a central role in turning the 'science' of phrenology, which claimed to decode an individual's intellect and moral character from bumps and grooves on the skull, into a tool of racial categorisation that placed the white European man at the top of a supposed hierarchy. George Combe's book, The Constitution of Man, was a 19th-century international bestseller and the Combe Trust (founded with money made from books and lecture tours promoting phrenology) endowed Edinburgh's first professorship in psychology in 1906 and continues to fund annual Combe Trust fellowships in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Phrenology was criticised by some of Edinburgh's medical elite for its unscientific approach. But some of its most vocal critics were nonetheless persuaded that immutable biological differences in intelligence and temperament existed between populations, a study by Dr Ian Stewart for the university's decolonisation report reveals. These included Alexander Monro III, an anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh medical school, who lectured 'that the Negro skull, and consequently the brain, is smaller than that of the European', and Robert Jameson, a regius professor of natural history, whose lectures at the university in the 1810s included a hierarchical racial diagram of brain size and intelligence. Despite the fact that phrenology was never formally taught at Edinburgh, and its accuracy was heavily contested by Edinburgh academics, the skull room, which is closed to the public, was built partly to house its collection by the then professor of anatomy Sir William Turner, when he helped oversee the construction of its new medical school in the 1880s. Among its reparatory justice recommendations of Edinburgh's investigation is that the university provide more support for the repatriation of ancestral remains to their original communities. This, Gillingwater suggested, possibly underplays the complexities involved – even for cases such as the Richards brothers. He regards the circumstantial evidence in their case as 'strong' but says it does not meet the forensic threshold required for conclusive identification. 'From a legal perspective, it wouldn't be watertight,' said Gillingwater. 'I would never dream of returning remains to a family when I didn't know who they definitely were.' Active engagement surrounding repatriation is taking place in relation to several of the skulls from the phrenology collection; more than 100 have already been repatriated to their places of origin. But each case takes time building trust with communities and in some cases navigating geopolitical tensions over which descendent community has the strongest claim to the remains. 'To look at perhaps repatriation, burials, or whatever, it's literally years of work almost for each individual case,' said Gillingwater. 'And what I found is that every individual culture you deal with wants things done completely differently.' Many of the skulls will never be identified and their provenance is likely to remain unknown. 'That is something that keeps me awake at night,' said Gillingwater. 'For some of our skulls, I know that whatever we do, we're never going to end up with an answer.' 'All I can offer at the minute is that we just continue to care for them,' he added. 'They've been with us, many of them, for a couple of hundred years. So we can look after them. We can care for them. We can treat them with that dignity and respect they all deserve individually.'
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Always provided a release': why Aliens is my feelgood movie
Amid a recent IVF crisis, I turned to my husband in A&E and said, 'We should put on a cosy movie when we get home, like Aliens.' Immediately my mind flashed to the film's iconic image of gooey eggs exploding under vigorous gunfire. It seemed faintly ridiculous that Aliens was the chill-out film for this particular moment, but we watched it and, as ever, it hit the spot. I've viewed Aliens at least once a year for the last decade. It is both an excellent and terrible movie. Helmed by James Cameron in place of the original Alien director Ridley Scott, this pumped-up-on-steroids 1986 sequel retains the grisly design of its predecessor. Its walls and ceilings are covered in wet gloop and fleshy tendrils, like the insides of a giant body. Its monsters bring to life the trailblazing designs of the Swiss 'fantastic realist' artist HR Giger. Almost four decades after its release, the film's world building remains chillingly authentic, as a group of marines – plus a villainous corporate executive, heroic android, feisty lone-survivor child and Sigourney Weaver's gun-toting yet wholesome protagonist Ellen Ripley – discover then attempt to escape a nest of parasitic aliens, their nightmarishly outsized mother and her lethal henchmen. The film's high stakes are rarely far from the action while it hits just the right balance between absurd terror and genuine emotion. Like many of Cameron's movies, it simultaneously sends up and fetishizes military power, though ultimately the characters that survive are head-smart first and trigger-happy second. Its cheesy humour stops the violence from descending into cold detachment. The blusterous self-assurance of Bill Paxton's Pte Hudson is repeatedly undermined by douchebag lines like 'We just got our asses kicked, pal!' I've watched it so many times, I can picture his exact look of wide-eyed incredulity. Al Matthews' cigar-loving Sgt Apone satirises the macho marine trope, admonishing his unit with 'All right sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed?' Aliens is a fast-paced, jump-scare-ridden scramble to violent demise or unlikely escape. Once it's been rewatched to death, there is a calm relief to its desperate fight for survival. I know who will live and who will perish; that the invasive titular form will ultimately not endure. In place of leaping out of my skin and hiding behind a cushion, viewing this movie now brings something else: the chance to process my own physical and emotional angst. When done well, the horror sci-fi genre functions on multiple levels, creating thrilling entertainment while also inviting its audience to digest real life experiences that are too painful or immediate to look at directly. The culturally deep-rooted terror of women's bodies and their functions is a central aspect of the movie. The young facehugger aliens attach to their victims' mouths to plant an embryo inside, which then grows in their hosts' bodies before bursting out the chest. There are undeniable parallels with the oft-unspoken horrors of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the unsettlingly sci-fi retrievals and implantations of IVF. The movie revels in a certain revulsion at hyper-fertility and the act of birth, but it also captures the natural fears and frustrations of existing in a body that can grow and explosively eject a living being in a manner that is richly cathartic. As a psychotherapist currently in the middle of Kleinian training, I am drawn to embracing the dark side of the body. The British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein addressed the feelings of violence, rage and disgust that can be a normal part of the embodied psyche. I can't help but see her ideas woven through Aliens, as Ripley relentlessly tears through a grotesque symbol of extreme motherhood. A romcom may distract me temporarily from the bodily dread of IVF needles, speculums and dearly longed for new life, but the visceral sight of exploding eggs and torsos hits something deeper and more real. Aliens, with its invasive, parasitic monsters, finds parallels with other psychological and bodily battles that are often repressed. Over the years, this film has always provided a release, whether working through rage, sexual trauma or long Covid. It strikes the perfect tonal balance that enables momentary relief without further traumatising. After Ripley settles Newt, Hicks and Bishop into their cryo-sleep, her final long rest is well-earned and beautifully peaceful. I, too, always sleep well after watching it, my nightmare-prone mind settled knowing the on-screen and internal big beasts have momentarily been vanquished. I just have to pretend Alien 3 was never made. Aliens is available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK and Australia
