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The Independent
5 days ago
- The Independent
Why scientists fear climate change could help Covid to thrive
From Indigenous communities in the Amazon to the frozen continent of Antarctica, the Covid-19 virus has spread at an unprecedented pace to some of the world's most remote areas after it was first reported in Wuhan in December 2019. To date, more than 778 million cases across 240 countries have been reported by the World Health Organisation, with new variants continuing to emerge. While globalisation and international transport are well-known drivers of the rapid spread of the virus, emerging research suggests climate change can influence Covid-19 transmission, mutation, and human susceptibility to infection. Researchers believe that increased exposure to animals, that can carry viruses and transmit them to humans, may lead to a rise in cases. 'As we disturb natural ecosystems and bring wildlife, especially bats in the case of Covid, into closer contact with other animals and people, the risk of diseases jumping between species increases,' Dr Efstathios Giotis, Infectious Disease Research Fellow at Imperial College London, told The Independent. 'In fact, there is growing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 may have first jumped from bats to an intermediate animal, such as raccoon dogs, before eventually infecting humans.' After initial debate, there is now broad scientific consensus that bats were the so-called reservoir, where Covid pathogens existed and multiplied. Changing weather patterns and ecosystems have increased human contact with wildlife and created conditions conducive to viral survival. Extreme weather events further exacerbate exposure, susceptibility, and strain emergency responses. As noted by experts in The Lancet Planetary Health, the emergence of Covid-19 coincided with one of the hottest years on record, marked by notable climatic extremes. Record-breaking heat, rising sea levels, melting ice, and extreme weather reinforced evidence that the Earth is undergoing dangerous change for key climate indicators, according to the latest State of the Global Climate report. Last year was the first in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, with extreme weather events leading to the highest number of new displacements since 2008, the report said. Transmission Covid-19 is transmitted through tiny airborne droplets when an infected person breathes, speaks, sneezes or coughs. Rising temperatures and relative humidity help infectious particles survive longer and remain suspended in the air, influencing transmission, scientists explained in a paper published in Frontiers in Medicine. Increased rainfall, flooding, and climate-driven displacement forces people into close contact, boosting infection chances and contributing to higher prevalence in areas with high population density. Displacement also makes hygiene practices harder to maintain, the UNHCR emphasised. More widely, deforestation increases the risk of transmission for zoonotic diseases, passed from animal to human, and potentially new coronaviruses. 'The big issue of novel zoonotic disease is how we have eroded ecosystems and their natural regulation of disease transmission,' Dr Mark Everard, Ecosystem Services Professor at the University of the West of England told The Independent. Habitat loss and expanding roads into less degraded areas reduce the buffer natural habitats create from humans, Dr Everard explained. Mutation As habitat and buffer loss increases the chance of coronavirus jumping or 'spilling' from animals to humans, it increases the likelihood of mutations occurring. 'Climate doesn't directly change how fast pathogens mutate, but it can create more chances for mutations to happen,' Dr Efstathios Giotis told The Independent. 'For example, when climate events occur such as unusually warm temperatures or habitat changes (such as a bushfire), they can push animals into closer contact with other species or humans. 'In this way viruses like influenza or coronaviruses have more opportunities to jump or spillover between species. 'Each spillover event increases the chances for new mutations to develop.' Susceptibility Climate factors can also make people more susceptible to Covid-19. Dust from desertification damages the respiratory tract, giving the virus deeper access and increasing disease severity, research in Frontiers in Medicine explained. In the case of wildfires, tiny particulate matter, known as PM2.5, in smoke irritate and inflame the lungs, increasing the risk of infection. Measuring just 2.5 micrometers in diameter, PM2.5 enters the blood stream and lodges deep in organs. This risk increases for children, with small lungs, or people with pre-existing organ conditions, research in the The Lancet Planetary explained. 'Organisms stressed by heat, water, etc. have lower resistance to infections,' added Dr Everard, referring to plants, animals or humans who either carry infections or are infected. Emergency responses Climate hazards can interfere in the delivery of public services and staff mobilisation, research in The Lancet added. For example, power disruptions can affect health facilities and wildfires divert emergency staff attention. Contract tracing also becomes harder as, for example, people move and intermingle in response to flooding. While research into the links between climate and Covid-19 is still ongoing and some studies are inconclusive, the experts warned: 'Multiple risks can all affect health systems, leading to negative outcomes for people and locations with low capacities to respond to Covid-19.'
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Telegraph
The bizarre trees that ‘milk' clouds and start lightning storms
Thanks to Harriet Rix and her sublime book, The Genius of Trees, I have seen and relished the world the day before the Chicxulub asteroid hit. I have smelled its perfumes, and squelched through its hot boggy litters, and dodged its foot-long dragonflies. And I have seen the day after, too, 'when all was darkness and confusion, mushrooms and rot'. Rix's book explains how over millennia, trees have shaped the earth and been shaped by it. (They allowed for the existence of those monster dragonflies by saturating the atmosphere with oxygen, for starters.) Trees thrived before Chicxulub, Rix tells us, but afterwards, their 'green shade became a grey gloom' as a dust cloud blotted out the sun for two years. The Amazon became a death zone. Gymnosperms – meaning pines and monkey puzzles – were utterly outmanoeuvred by flowers, which could survive by bouncing light about themselves between water droplets. (Through Rix's luminous descriptions, I pictured this as a microscopic pinball game played with light, where the winner inherits the Earth.) Her book is a dazzling series of lectures which explore how trees shape water, soil, fire, air, fungi, animals and people. Like an early Robert MacFaralane narrator, Rix refuses to put herself much in the picture, but through the scenes we glimpse an Indiana Jones figure who is both an eminent, travelling scientist and a born writer. She describes the 'stately galliards' of coniferous trees taking over after the asteroid's destruction. To Rix, they arrive in 'a mass tango, angular and fluid'. On the Canary island of La Gomera, we encounter trees that not only make clouds, but farm and milk them, seeding the air with compounds which cause water molecules to cluster around them, 'until like a small planet, it falls as rain'. She also travels to the environs of Quetta to look at the Ziarat junipers, guarded by Balochi rangers in one of the world's deadliest zones of human conflict. Here, wild ephedra is easily and popularly synthesised into methamphetamine (do you prefer your Taliban on opium or speed?) Rix is completing a spreadsheet on juniper carbon capture when she's reassured that she won't be kidnapped, as long as she visits their food market twice. And by the time we have watched the beautiful Zelkova abelicea on Crete turn red when the first frosts fall, and have paddled up the Curicuriari, an Amazon river, to meet a rare duraka tree, it becomes clear that Rix's world is astounding. There are some mountains in deep, rural China where 18 species of tree are currently in a pitched brawl, using poison, shade, theft, disease, fire, misdirection, brute force and lighting on each other. This is normal tree behaviour, and it's a salutary experience, having been near woods most days of my life, to realise that I had little idea what I have been looking at. In their battles, trees lace the air with flammable gases, strew kindling, douse everything in the pyromaniac's molecule, oxygen, and gather clouds to encourage lightning strikes, which they have put up conductors to catch. Then, whoosh: their competition is vaporised, their insect pests barbecued, their fungi put in their place, their seed children pre-fertilised (lovely ash) and suddenly, there's a lot more sunlight to eat. When you see Greek islands scorched, know there is a pine or eucalyptus somewhere rubbing its roots together. Trees can change 'their entire habit of growing in one or two generations'. We know when the land-bridge between Britain and Ireland went (the sunken kingdom of Cantre'r Gwaelod under Cardigan bay) because lime trees, spreading slower than pioneer species, did not make it out of Wales. The climate in Ireland tipped from Arctic to temperate in just 10 years. The book is often alarming but Rix is also funny. Oak die-back happens, in Rix's eyes, when the trees' 'farthest fungi' have 'lost their love of adventure, their passion for the quest'. You feel delightedly child-like, and not just while being shown how a member of the avocado family seeds a cloud with a hexagonal ring of carbon. The mysteries stalking science and Rix's pages are telling. We still do not know how trees' roots appear to be able to 'hear' or sense water. It might be vibration. What's the real evolutionary relationship between the Joshua Tree of the Mojave Desert, the giant sloth with the mushroom-alcohol body odour, and the sloth's on-board moth? Only time, and Harriet Rix, can tell. Non-fiction rarely sees a debut like The Genius of Trees. It is a true masterpiece.
Metro
7 days ago
- Metro
This horny book adaption's cast guarantees we'll all be obsessed with the film
A fresh casting announcement has absolutely thrilled fans and convinced me that the film in question could end up as one of the most popular and anticipated movies in years. It could also signal the early era of another rom-com giant, à la Richard Curtis, or the coming of a film about love with the power to impact pop culture like When Harry Met Sally or xx. I am, of course, talking about the announcement via Deadline of Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman to play the romantic leads in the movie adaptation of Ali Hazelwood's best-selling novel (and – I cannot stress this enough – actual BookTok sensation) The Love Hypothesis. For those who haven't been wrapped up in the quite astounding way TikTok has revived the publishing industry since lockdown, even garnering its own name for that corner of the social site, The Love Hypothesis was one of the platform's biggest breakout successes following the novel's formal publication in 2021. But what has now shifted this film up a notch in terms of anticipation is how the casting has seemingly leaned into the famous early inspirations of Hazelwood's book. And it's this which makes me confident everyone's obsession is about to go stratospheric. The Love Hypothesis follows PhD student Olive Smith (Reinhart), a rising star in Stanford University's biology department, who ends up in a classic fake dating situation with a hotshot professor, Adam Carlsen (Bateman). Everything kicks off when she does the totally normal thing of panic kissing him at the lab to convince her best friend she has a boyfriend. And he does the totally normal thing of agreeing afterwards to maintain the lie for… reasons. However, The Love Hypothesis actually began in 2018 as Head Over Feet, a piece of Star Wars fan fiction published online by Hazelwood, which was inspired by the 'Reylo' shipping many fans did between the characters of Rey (Daisy Ridley) and antagonist Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). This is a romance that actually almost bore fruit in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – and it's one that now has another fascinating link to The Love Hypothesis, for Bateman in the role of Adam is Rey actress Ridley's husband in real life. Although some were holding out for Driver to take on the role his character inspired, many are tickled pink by this meta casting move – 'I'm cackling' posts are littered across social media – whether it was deliberate or not. 'The concept of playing the love interest in fan fiction about your wife is kind of insane, I think Tom Bateman won in life,' tweeted Alysa, while @rejectedcarebear wrote on Reddit: 'This is actually the best part of the entire movie.' 'They had a chance and they took it for sure haha!' added another fan, while @pertifty shared: 'I love this timeline we are living. I wonder why she didn't want to play Olive if her husband is playing Adam??' (As many then explained, there is such a thing as too on the nose.) The excitement alone that's been drummed up by the casting announcement of two semi well-known actors – Reinhart made her name on Riverdale and Bateman appeared in Da Vinci's Demons as well as Sir Kenneth Branagh's star-studded Murder on the Orient Express – confirms this is a watershed moment for TikTok and cinema. Because now we've gone from mild interest that this adaptation is happening to fully seated for it. And Reinhart is a canny operator, fueling fan excitement with lots of fun posts about the film on – where else – but TikTok. Yes, there have been popular BookTok adaptations previously, such as Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue and Robinne Lee's The Idea of You. Both, co-incidentally, star Nicholas Galitzine and were made for Amazon's streaming service Prime Video. The Love Hypothesis is going a step further, being produced by Amazon MGM Studios. This suggests the company's confidence in the movie's cinematic success but also means its streaming home will likely end up being Prime Video too. Could this company be the next rom-com powerhouse, snapping up the major romance book titles that capture the zeitgeist? @lilireinhart Olive Smith 🩷 #thelovehypothesis ♬ Lover – Taylor Swift And let's not beat around the bush, The Love Hypothesis will be bigger than those previous films anyway because it's hornier – don't let the cartoon humans on the book's front cover fool you, Hazelwood likes a lot of detail in her sex scenes. Many audience members will be pulled in simply by curiosity over how that might look onscreen; let's call it the Fifty Shades of Grey factor. If The Love Hypothesis does well, there's also several other Hazelwood novels ripe for adaption – from Love on the Brain to Problematic Summer Romance and Deep End (for the uninitiated, that one will truly have you blushing). More Trending Hazelwood, a real-life former neuroscience professor has made a name for herself as a 'STEMinist' author thanks to her female characters often being in science and tech fields and academia, drawing upon her own experience. She's also an expert at the genre's tropes of pining and misunderstandings but puts them in modern workplace settings. This could easily be what the next wave of rom-coms looks like if they're inspired or directly drawn from the pen of Hazelwood. We'd be moving on from Richard Curtis's bumbling, British and sweary romances to Hazelwood's quirky, introverted and often American heroines. And I think the world of onscreen rom-coms is more than ready to embrace The Love Hypothesis as the start of its next phase. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Shadow Labyrinth review – Pac-Man meets Metroid MORE: I visited Prague's 'narrowest street' to see if it lives up to the TikTok hype MORE: Influencer Emilie Kiser's husband facing child abuse charge after toddler son Trigg's pool drowning
