Method of preserving 18th-century Austrian vicar has never been seen before, say researchers

The mystery of a mummy from an Austrian village has been solved, according to researchers who say it was embalmed in an unexpected way – via the rectum.

Intrigue had long swirled around the mummified body stored in the church crypt of St Thomas am Blasenstein. The remains were rumoured to be the naturally preserved corpse of an aristocratic vicar, Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, who died in 1746 at the aged of 37, gaining the mummy the moniker of the “air-dried chaplain�.

Anfield celebrations of Alexis Mac Allister strike caused tremor with peak magnitude of 1.74 on Richter scale

Labelling a win as “seismic� has become a lazy and overused term. But not in the case of Liverpool FC’s title-clinching win over Tottenham Hotspur when scientists recorded genuine Earth-shaking seismic activity triggered by celebrations at Anfield.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool’s department of Earth, ocean and environmental sciences were on site on Sunday to measure ground movement from the crowd throughout the match when the home team won 5–1 and claimed the Premier League title for the 2024-25 season.

Kosmos 482, weighing 500kg, was meant to land on Venus in the 1970s but it never made it out of orbit because of a rocket malfunction

A Soviet-era spacecraft meant to land on Venus in the 1970s is expected to soon plunge uncontrolled back to Earth.

It’s too early to know where the half-ton mass of metal might come down or how much of it will survive re-entry, according to space debris-tracking experts.

A ‘wetter farming’ project explores rehydrating peatland to help grow crops in boggier conditions while cutting CO2 emissions

“I really don’t like the word ‘paludiculture’ – most people have no idea what it means,� Sarah Johnson says. “I prefer the term ‘wetter farming’.�

The word might be baffling, but the concept is simple: paludiculture is the use of wet peatlands for agriculture, a practice that goes back centuries in the UK, including growing reeds for thatching roofs.

Ethel Caterham, who lives in a care home in Surrey and takes life in her stride, is first Briton to claim title since 1987

The secret of longevity is to do what you like, according to the 115-year-old British woman named the world’s oldest living person.

Ethel Caterham, born in 1909, is the first Briton to claim the title of world’s oldest person since 1987, when 114-year-old Anna Williams was the record holder.

The narrative of ancient tribes around the world regularly using ayahuasca and magic mushrooms in healing practices is a popular one. Is it true?

Beginning in 2001, the Austrian anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori spent six years living in the western Amazon. He first arrived as a backpacker, returned to do a master’s thesis on ayahuasca songs, and eventually did a PhD on the music of eight Indigenous peoples in the region. Along the way, he married a woman of the local Shipibo tribe and settled down.

“I did not have a lot of money,� he told me, “so I had to make my living there.� He became a teacher. He built a house. He and his wife had children. That rare experience of joining the community, he said, forced him to realise that many of the assumptions he had picked up as an anthropologist were wrong.

Blood from man bitten hundreds of times by deadly species is used to create most broadly protective antivenom yet

He has self-administered more than 850 doses of venom from cobras, mambas, rattlesnakes and other deadly species in pursuit of a singular quest: to develop immunity to snake bites in the hope of helping scientists create a universal antivenom.

Now the extreme 18-year experiment by Tim Friede, a former truck mechanic from Wisconsin, appears to have paid off. Scientists have used antibodies from his blood to create the most broadly protective antivenom to date, which could revolutionise the treatment of snake bites.

Focus on overuse contributes to antibiotics reaching less than 7% of people with drug-resistant infections in poorer countries, say researchers

Less than 7% of people with severe drug-resistant infections in poorer countries get the antibiotics they need, a new study suggests, with researchers warning that not only is this causing suffering and deaths, but is also likely to be driving antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

With AMR forecast to cause 1.9m deaths a year by 2050, they are calling for urgent action, akin to the fight earlier this century to get HIV drugs to Africa’s virus hotspots.

Oral medications are in development to provide alternative to injectables such as Wegovy that must be kept in fridge

Newly developed weight loss pills could have a big impact on tackling obesity and diabetes in low- and middle-income countries, experts have said.

Weight loss jabs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro, that contain the drugs semaglutide and tirzepatide respectively, have become popular in countries including the UK after trials showed they can help people lose more than 10% of their body weight. Medications containing semaglutide and tirzepatide can also be used to help control diabetes.

Maintaining a positive mood and eating more fruit may also help lower risk, researchers find

Drinking champagne, eating more fruit, staying slim and maintaining a positive outlook on life could help reduce the risk of a sudden cardiac arrest, the world’s first study of its kind suggests.

Millions of people worldwide die every year after experiencing a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), when the heart stops pumping blood around the body without warning. They are caused by a dangerous abnormal heart rhythm, when the electrical system in the heart is not working properly. Without immediate treatment such as CPR, those affected will die.

The health secretary has pledged to fight chronic illness, but experts say he risks increasing it with department cuts

The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, entered office with a pledge to tackle the US’s chronic disease epidemic and give infectious disease a “break�. In at least one of those goals, Kennedy has been expeditious.

Experts said as Kennedy makes major cuts in public health in his first weeks in office, the infrastructure built to mitigate Covid-19 has become a clear target – an aim that has the dual effect of weakening immunization efforts as the US endures the largest measles outbreak since 2000.

US political scientists’ book argues aggressive Covid policies such as mask mandates were in some cases misguided

Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years?

A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.

As LRIs put pressure on health services, a Spanish-led study examines what role exposure to air pollution may play

The Covid crisis highlighted gaps in our understanding of the role that air pollution plays in infections.

A flurry of studies carried out during and after the crisis allowed a UK government advisory group to conclude that long-term exposure to air pollution may contribute to worse coronavirus symptoms. Later evidence included a study of more than 3 million people in Denmark that showed air pollution added to the risk of death or hospital admission with severe Covid, especially in the least well off.

Dr Peter Marks was seen as a guardrail against any future politicisation of the FDA’s approval of life-saving vaccines

A senior health official in the US, who was seen as a guardrail against any future politicisation of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of life-saving vaccines, has resigned abruptly, citing the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “misinformation and lies�.

Dr Peter Marks served as the FDA’s top vaccine official. He had been lauded by Donald Trump during the US president’s first term for his role in Operation Warp Speed, the initiative that developed, manufactured and helped distribute the Covid-19 vaccines.

Wealthy nations are slashing funding for essential services such as the HIV/Aids response, but poorer countries cannot absorb the impact overnight

Countries across the world are cutting aid budgets, abandoning the decades-old consensus that supporting health and development is both a moral duty and a strategic interest. But the end of aid cannot mean the end of global solidarity – because our global economy is stacked against low- and middle-income countries to such an extent that they simply cannot afford to respond to global crises alone.

Developing countries are drowning in debt, facing interest rates up to 12 times higher than wealthy countries. When interest rates shot up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the global south was worst hit. Low- and middle-income countries now pay $4 (£3) to the richest in the global north for every $1 they receive in aid. Thirty-four of Africa’s 54 countries spend more on debt than on healthcare.

Donald Trump ignited a scramble that is transforming space from shared frontier to private asset – raising questions about law, equity and ethics

In 2015, a rare moment of US congressional unity passed the Space Act – to mine asteroids as if they were open seams of ore and harvest planets like unclaimed farmland. Quietly signed by President Barack Obama, it now reads as a premature act of enclosure: staking titles in a realm we scarcely understand. Though some expressed concerns at the time, it was justified by the idea of inevitable progress. Such naivety evaporated with Donald Trump. Space had been humanity’s last commons, shielded by a 1967 Outer Space treaty. Mr Trump declared it dead in 2020, signing the Artemis Accords and enlisting 43 allies, including the UK, in the legalisation of heaven’s spoils. In March, Mr Trump vowed to plant the stars and stripes on Mars – and beyond. The age of celestial commons was brief, if it ever began.

A new report by the Common Wealth thinktank, titled Star Wars, warns that a powerful coalition – composed of private corporations, billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and “neoliberal� thinktanks – is working to extend earthly ownership structures to space. The report’s author, Durham University’s Carla Ibled, calls it “the transfer of shared resources into the hands of a few�. The 1967 treaty bans state exploitation of space, but is vague on private claims – a loophole now fuelling a tycoon-led scramble for the stars. The aim is obvious: to act first, shape norms and dare others to object.

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There is a cynical, ‘anti-space’ ideology emerging, especially on some parts of the left. But this is misguided

John F Kennedy once called space-faring “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked�. We go to space because, he said – like George Mallory said of his reason to conquer Everest – “it is there.�

While it is truer to say that the race for space between Washington and Moscow was driven as much by cold war competition as by humanity’s pioneering spirit and the imperatives of scientific exploration, billions of ordinary people around the world recognized as much at the time and still were able to marvel at our species’ accomplishments in the heavens regardless of the flag under which they were achieved, from Sputnik to the moon landing.

A new study of a sphere orbiting a red dwarf star 124 light years from Earth is raising hopes. Here’s why the evidence is inconclusive

• Nathalie Cabrol is director of the Carl Sagan Center at the Seti Institute

Astrobiology has entered an exciting new phase in recent decades. Since the 1990s, but accelerating in recent years, researchers have begun confirming the existence of exoplanets – that is, planets outside our own solar system – and studying their properties. We now know that planets are common, and a sizeable fraction orbit in the habitable zone of their parent star – suggesting they could have the conditions to sustain biological life.

Studies have also revealed entirely new classes of worlds we had no idea could exist. Hycean planets are unknown in our solar system, and are possibly some of the strangest planets discovered to date. They may be ocean-covered worlds with hydrogen-rich atmospheres and, as such, are promising candidates for the detection of biosignature gases – chemical products we associate with living things. But this is not the only possibility. Their discovery has expanded our concept of habitability and challenged our notions of what kinds of environments can sustain life – both as we know it and as we might not.

Nathalie Cabrol is director of the Carl Sagan Center at the Seti Institute, and author of The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life

Authorities are still trying to understand what triggered the massive power outage that left the majority of the Iberian Peninsula without electricity on Monday. To understand what might have been at play, and whether there’s any truth to claims that renewable energy sources were to blame, Ian Sample hears from Guardian energy correspondent Jillian Ambrose. And Guardian European community affairs correspondent Ashifa Kassam explains what it was like to experience the blackout and how people reacted

‘Shipwrecked in the 21st century’: how people made it through Europe’s worst blackout in living memory

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Just Stop Oil, the climate activism group behind motorway blockades, petrol station disruption and tomato soup attacks on major artworks, has disbanded after staging a final action in London this weekend. To find out why the group has decided to hang up the famous orange high-vis, Madeleine Finlay hears from our environment correspondent Damien Gayle who has been covering Just Stop Oil since its inception. He explains how policy wins and policing crackdowns combined to bring the movement to a close, and what the future of climate activism could look like in its wake

What next for climate activism now Just Stop Oil is ‘hanging up the hi-vis’?

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The American biotech company Colossal Biosciences recently made headlines around the world with claims it had resurrected the dire wolf, an animal that went extinct at the end of the last ice age. But does what the company has done amount to ‘de-extinction’ or should we instead think of these pups as genetically modified versions of the grey wolves that exist today? Science correspondent Nicola Davis tells Madeleine Finlay about the process that created these wolves, how other companies are joining the effort to use genetic modification in conservation, and why some experts have serious ethical questions about bringing back species whose habitats no longer exist

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Meteorite falls are extremely rare and offer a glimpse of the processes that formed our world billions of years ago. When a space rock came to an English market town in 2021, scientists raced to find as much out as they could

By Helen Gordon. Read by Sasha Frost

Intriguing advances hold out the possibility – but first we have to agree on what ‘life’ means

“Creation of Life�, read the headline of the Boston Herald in 1899. “Lower Animals Produced by Chemical Means.� The report described the work of the German-American marine biologist Jacques Loeb, who later wrote: “The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as a creator, even in living nature.�

In fact, Loeb had merely made an unfertilised sea urchin egg divide by exposing it to a mixture of salts – he was not even close to creating life in the lab. No scientist has ever done that. But that ancient dream hovers today over the discipline called synthetic biology, the very name of which seems to promise the creation of artificial life forms. Take one of the most dramatic results in this field: in 2010, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institutes in Maryland and California announced they had made “the first self-replicating synthetic bacterial cell�.

Is Anthony Albanese charismatic? Peter Dutton? Charisma has been linked to electoral victory (just ask Bob Hawke), but defining it can be difficult

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For all the gen Z slang that has been thrown around by politicians in recent months, one term has been largely absent from the election campaign: “rizz�. Oxford University Press’s 2023 word of the year is defined as “style, charm or attractiveness�; in gen Z parlance it refers specifically to romantic appeal.

On the campaign trail, neither major party leader, thankfully, has deployed the term to cringeworthy effect. But a trait to which rizz is inextricably linked – charisma – has historically been linked to electoral victory.

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The solutions to today’s puzzles

Earlier today I set you these puzzles about straws. Here they are again with solutions.

1. Lift-off

Riddles with long paper cylinders

UPDATE: To read the solutions click here

The most heated puzzle about the drinking straw is “does it have one hole or two?� (This debate periodically goes viral and for those who want to suck up its delicious complexities I recommend this chat with mathematician Jordan Ellenberg.)

Today’s puzzles are also about straws, but are much less controversial.

The answers to today’s puzzles

Earlier today I set three number puzzles. Here they are again with solutions.

1. Well balanced

Three, two, one…

UPDATE: read the solutions here

Today, we’re down with the digits. Here are three elegant number puzzles, each nudging your brain to think creatively in different ways.

1. Well balanced

Don Pettit became a septuagenarian as he landed back on Earth after a seven-month mission onboard the International Space Station. Pettit and Russian cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner touched down in a remote area south-east of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 6.20am on Sunday. The astronauts spent their time on the ISS researching areas such as water sanitisation technology, plant growth under various conditions and fire behaviour in microgravity, Nasa said

• Nasa’s oldest astronaut celebrates 70th birthday with return to Earth

Six women, including the pop star Katy Perry and the morning TV host Gayle King, have safely completed a trip into space. They used a rocket owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon co-founder and commercial space flight entrepreneur. His fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, was also on the flight

• Blue Origin crew including Katy Perry safely returns to Earth after space flight

In his first news conference since returning home, Nasa astronaut Butch Wilmore said he holds himself partly responsible for what went wrong on the space sprint-turned-marathon and – along with Suni Williams – said he would strap into Boeing's Starliner again. SpaceX recently ferried the duo home after more than nine months at the International Space Station following their bungled mission. The astronauts ended up spending 286 days in space — 278 days more than planned when they blasted off on Boeing’s first astronaut flight on June 5

• ‘We weren’t stuck’: Nasa astronauts tell of space odyssey and reject claims of neglect