We are exploring the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.This week, from 2020: After losing four pregnancies, Jennie Agg set out to unravel the science of miscarriage. Then, a few months in, she found out she was pregnant again – just as the coronavirus pandemic hit Continue reading...

Learning to feel OK with unpredictability can bring great rewards. Just ask the world’s scientists and artists who embrace doubts and the unknown We are experiencing now the greatest uncertainty humanity has ever known.” Nine years ago, this statement by Yuval Harari provoked explosive laughter from my teenage daughter. She whispered to me, “what about the blitz? The Black Death? Come on …” I was torn between embarrassment, as heads scowled at a young woman who clearly didn’t know her place, and pride in her critical thinking. That instinctive rejection of Harari’s generational...

The psychotherapist on body hatred, what’s changed since she wrote Fat Is a Feminist Issue – and the smell of her clientsSusie Orbach’s first book, Fat Is a Feminist Issue, a pioneering exploration of women’s relationship with eating and body image, became an instant classic when it was published in 1978. Orbach is one of the world’s best-known psychotherapists, lecturing internationally, advising organisations ranging from the NHS to the World Bank, and helping patients who have included Diana, Princess of Wales. The daughter of an American teacher and a Labour MP, Orbach grew up in...

A lack of equal male partners, rather than career or educational ambitions, is why more women are trying to prolong their fertilitySelfish career-driven women. Gullible dupes of the fertility industry. Victims of the patriarchy. When leading anthropologist Marcia C Inhorn first embarked on her decade-long study of why women freeze their eggs, the popular narrative was largely one of derision.“There was a lot of either blaming women or saying that they’re naïve, stupid and so forth,” says the Yale professor, from a red armchair in her home in New Haven, Connecticut. Continue reading...

There may not be many of them, but they can be very bright and fast, and viewing conditions look promisingThe Lyrid meteor shower will reach its peak in the early hours of 23 April. Created by dust from the tail of comet C/1861 G1 (Thatcher), the Lyrids are not usually vast in number – only about 18 an hour are expected – but they are often very bright and fast moving. Some of the more spectacular ones are known to burn up so brightly that they cast shadows.This year, viewing conditions are expected to be good because the moon has just 9% of its surface illuminated, so even faint meteors...

Excavation shows facility included luxurious dining rooms with views of fountains that gushed with wineOf all the Roman ruins that populate what is now a pleasant landscape of pine trees and meadows, under the distant gaze of the Alban Hills, the Villa of the Quintilii is perhaps the most impressive – almost a city in miniature, covering up to 24 hectares.Lying on the ancient Appian Way as it runs south-east from Rome, the villa had its own theatre, an arena for chariot races and a baths complex with walls and floors lined in sumptuous marble. Continue reading...

Scientists calculate 2022 eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano released 1,000 times more energy than Hiroshima bombA huge underwater volcanic event in Tonga last year was of a magnitude comparable with the most powerful nuclear detonation by the US, researchers have revealed.Scientists have used eye and earwitnesses accounts, along with data from tide gauges, satellites, evidence of broken windows and other sources, to calculate that the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, which occurred on 15 January 2022 and was felt around the world, likely involved five blasts...

The European Space Agency’s long-awaited Juice Mission is about to blast off for Jupiter’s moons. Its goal: to find out whether the oceans below their icy surfaces could be capable of supporting life. Madeleine Finlay speaks to Dr Stuart Clark about why moons are the new Mars for scientists seeking life, how magnetic fields can help us understand these mysterious lunar oceans, and what Juice might mean for our understanding of life beyond the solar systemClips: BBC News Continue reading...

Understanding why some animals are more susceptible to the disease could lead to improved screening for humansScientists are homing in on one of medicine’s most baffling mysteries: why some species avoid getting cancers while others are plagued by tumours that shorten their lives.Whales tend to have low rates of cancer but it is the leading cause of death for dogs and cats. Foxes and leopards are susceptible while sheep and antelopes are not. Bats are also relatively well protected against cancer but not mice or rats. In humans, cancer is a leading cause of death that kills around 10 million...

Despite the WHO declaring it eliminated in 1998, thousands of tea pickers have caught the diseaseAloka Gonju didn’t take much notice of the discoloured patch of skin on her left hand until her fingers began to stiffen and hurt. It became a struggle to pick leaves at the tea plantation where she works in Bangladesh.“I had no idea what was happening to me,” says the 47-year-old, whose wages support her husband, four children and three grandchildren. Continue reading...

Company’s own website down as well as internet inaccessible for many. Follow all our live coverage of business, economics and financial marketsAs of 8:30am BST, the Virgin Media website is back up, although in greatly reduced form, while some users are reporting being able to reconnect to the internet following a reboot of their router or modem.Others still have reported that the internet outage could be circumvented by connecting through a virtual private network (VPN), giving a hint of where the wider problems lie, and suggesting that Virgin Media’s outage, like that at Facebook in 2021...

Perfect paths for pasting pawns Today’s puzzles are about pawns on a chessboard. They require no expertise at chess. All you need to know is that the queen can move in any direction, for any number of squares. (Usually the Monday puzzle is published on a Monday but these puzzles went live yesterday by mistake.)Here they are again with the solutions. Continue reading...

A meteor shower is the central mystery of a documentary set in the Moroccan desert that feels like a cinematic sleeping pillHere is an arthouse documentary from Morocco that moves at geological speed, demanding every single last shred of your attention. It’s a cinematic essay about the origins of human life, but for me many of the scenes felt too opaque and ponderous to really dig into the ideas.It begins in the bleak emptiness of the Moroccan desert, where a nomad shepherd called Mohamed describes watching a meteor shower: blue fire lighting up the sky followed by a noise so loud people...

Sarah Barley-McMullen says she felt unable to stay in her post as a senior academic as her employers were unwilling to accommodate her needsTwo-thirds of UK workers with long Covid have faced unfair treatment, says report“Long Covid has had an emotional, social, physical and professional impact on me,” says Sarah Barley-McMullen, 53, who felt forced to leave a job she loved, as a senior academic, when she was unable to negotiate a manageable working pattern.She caught the virus in January 2021, and more than two years later is still experiencing a battery of debilitating symptoms, including...

The journalist and academic says that the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societalMeredith Broussard is a data journalist and academic whose research focuses on bias in artificial intelligence (AI). She has been in the vanguard of raising awareness and sounding the alarm about unchecked AI. Her previous book, Artificial Unintelligence (2018), coined the term “technochauvinism” to describe the blind belief in the superiority of tech solutions to solve our problems. She appeared in the Netflix documentary Coded...

Device tested that can monitor and stimulate burns, diabetic ulcers and non-healing surgical woundsA smart bandage that can monitor chronic wounds and help them to heal has been developed by scientists who say the device could aid people with diabetic ulcers, burns and non-healing surgical wounds.According to figures from 2018, there are 2.2 million people in the UK with chronic wounds, costing the NHS £5.3bn a year. Continue reading...

Travel, meditation, training and exposure to culture have a greater effect on artistic outputFrom Hunter S Thompson’s infamous daily pre-writing routine of cocaine, Chivas Regal and acid to Vincent Van Gogh’s love for absinthe and Andy Warhol’s prescription drugs habit, the idea that drugs and alcohol produce great art is deeply culturally ingrained.Yet researchers have found this is likely to be myth – many drugs, including alcohol, amphetamines and psilocybin (magic mushrooms), do not inspire creativity. Instead, they say travel, exposure to culture, meditation and training programmes...

Between 2020 and 2021 cases of Candida auris doubled, with symptoms including antibiotic-resistant high fever with chills Potentially deadly fungal infections with Candida auris are spreading rapidly in US healthcare facilities, with cases nearly doubling between 2020 and 2021, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday.The number of cases rose by 44% to 476 in 2019, up from 330 in 2018, and subsequently by 59% to 756 in 2020 and by an additional 95% to 1,471 in 2021, the agency’s researchers reported on Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. Continue reading...

New moon will be the thinnest of all crescents with just 5% of its surface illuminatedA reward awaits those making their way home, or elsewhere, in the evening later this week. The chart shows the view looking due west from London at 18.50 GMT on Thursday 23 March. The tiny sliver of the new moon will sit between the brightly shining planets of Venus and Jupiter.The former will be high in the twilight sky and in “full bloom”, so to speak, for its spring apparition. The latter will be sinking ever closer to the sun, and hence will need to clear the western horizon to be visible. Continue...

All the Spiranthes on the Japanese mainland were thought to be a single species, but in fact there are twoIn Japan, a country with a rich and ancient history of horticulture, it is nowadays extremely rare for a new plant species to be identified. But the latest one has been growing under their noses, and it is exceptionally beautiful.Spiranthes hachijoensis, whose rosy pink petals bear a striking resemblance to glasswork, can be found in common environments such as lawns and parks, and even in private gardens and on balconies, and yet until now it had not been named. That is because until now...

No matter how bad I feel, I have to remind myself that the treatment is working to reducing my tumourNausea, diarrhoea, joint pain, fatigue, hair loss – the list of side-effects for most cancer drugs reads like symptoms of many illnesses in their own right. Before I had this disease, I would have considered making a GP appointment if I’d been suffering just some of the problems that I later came to just write off as simply the downside of being cured. The problem with all the side-effects the drugs have caused is that as they pile up, you can lose sight of why you are taking them.It’s not...

Ian Sample speaks to Guardian science correspondent Hannah Devlin about the latest developments and debates about gene editing to emerge from a summit at the Francis Crick Institute in London. The summit heard from the first person with sickle cell disease to be treated with a technique known as Crispr. He also hears from Prof Claire Booth about ensuring these cutting edge treatments are made available to everyone who needs themClips: Francis Crick Institute, BBC News Continue reading...

Ali Hussein Julood's father told the BBC his son's life was sacrificed for record profits.

Elon Musk's company SpaceX is building a ship that could transform space travel.

Ministers say the UK should have Europe's cheapest electricity by 2050, but critics call plans a "rehash".