A "dedicated and loving" nurse with coronavirus has tragically died five weeks after first being placed on a ventilator.

Police say they are "fighting a losing battle" over enforcing the lockdown after "hundreds" turned out in parks across east London to enjoy picnics in the sunshine.

The UK's official coronavirus death toll has risen by 346 to 31,587.

The lead singer of U.S. rock band Guns N' Roses and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have engaged in an escalating social-media exchange that's gone viral

It's not hard-hitting journalism, says Chris Knight, but it gives fans lots of what they want

Comedian takes on air travel, restaurants, ball games and other pastimes of the distant past that was 2019

'Today, the world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend,' Siegfried Fischbacher said in a statement

'I was thinking two weeks of quarantine and then things would go back to normal, but we realized pretty quickly that was not the case'

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky described the global pandemic as the "most harrowing crisis of our lifetime" and said the coronavirus has cut the company's anticipated revenue in more than half.

The ride-hailing company is cutting 3,700 jobs. It's the latest U.S. tech company to turn to layoffs to deal with fallout from the coronavirus crisis.

We're used to thinking of DNA as a rigid blueprint. Karissa Sanbonmatsu researches how our environment affects the way DNA expresses itself—especially when it comes to sex and gender.

The world music duo on reinventing their 2011 track ‘Karpur Gauram’ with 17 musicians from nine countries

The post Maati Baani: ‘Music is A Powerful Medium for Peace’ appeared first on My Site.

Twin sisters Nishita and Atisha Lulla talk about recording a previous single in Mumbai, the country-folk influence and more

The post Indo-American Sister Duo LULLANAS Drop Debut EP ‘Before Everything Got Real’ appeared first on My Site.

Pianist-singer behind “Tutti Frutti,” “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Long Tall Sally” set the template that a generation of musicians would follow

The post Little Richard, Founding Father of Rock Who Broke Musical Barriers, Dead at 87 appeared first on My Site.

Air-burning plasma thruster may be competitive with jet engines.

The Raptor rocket engine burned for about 4 seconds.

They are among the earliest enslaved African people brought to the Americas.

Ex-official alleges cronyism, says warnings about supply shortages were ignored.

A solar-driven hydrogen-producing machine that makes more copies of itself.

China now has a capsule potentially capable of returning from the Moon.

Caddis fly larvae typically construct protective cases out of sand grains and silk.

Ahead of a new Patrick Leigh Fermor biography, our writer visits the Mani peninsula, home of the great man and unsung resting place of another British travel writing giant, Bruce Chatwin

To read an extract from Leigh Fermor's book, Mani, Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, click here

Old Mr Fotis turned my question over in his mind while sipping his morning coffee. Below the veranda some youths had been playing noisily on the harbour wall, but now they all dived into the turquoise sea and set off on the long swim to the rocky island in the bay. It had a fragment of crenellated wall on top of it, the ruins of a Venetian fortress. Fotis watched them go, half-smiling.

"We do seem to attract a lot of writers," said the old man eventually. "But that's a name I don't remember."

From Tashkent to Samarkand and Bukhara, travel writer Caroline Eden believes Uzbekistan offers a dazzling mix of traditional style and a modern outlook

Twenty five years after the fall of the USSR, it’s interesting how the Soviet-era hangover lingers in Uzbekistan. Hulking apartment blocks are gradually being upgraded, and while you won’t spot statues of Lenin (they’ve been replaced by the nomadic conqueror Tamerlane and celebrated medic Ibn-Sina) you will see plenty of samovars (Russian kettles) and Soviet military medals for sale in the markets. But you will also see master ikat weavers reviving weaving traditions, and many musicians and artists are now turning to their Islamic heritage for influence. This mix of Soviet legacy and Uzbek Islam is one of the things that makes the country so fascinating.

Despite much change, the Nepalese capital’s staggering views and warm memories are as vivid as ever for the veteran mountaineer and leader of 19 Himalayan expeditions

My first sight of Kathmandu and the Himalayas was in 1960 as part of Lt Col Jimmy Roberts’s expedition – we made the first successful ascent of Annapurna II. At 7,937 metres, it’s a superb peak that’s just short of what mountaineers see as the magical height: 8,000 metres.

Arriving in Kathmandu was extraordinary. There was only one hotel, the Royal, an old palace run by a wonderful, eccentric Russian called Boris. There was also just one guesthouse, and practically no tourists.

The 89-year-old naturalist and broadcaster is brimming with enthusiasm for his latest TV series, Great Barrier Reef, and the wonder of filming underwater in a submarine. The first of three shows starts on BBC1 on 30 December

The first time I visited the Great Barrier Reef was in 1957 when I was on my way to New Guinea. In those days, television didn’t have a lot of money so, when you got to the other side of the world, you took advantage of it as you never knew when you were going to get back again, and so I took in the Barrier Reef on the way.

It was right at the beginning of the era of underwater swimming. There had been a Viennese pair, Han and Lotte Hass, who had a show underwater called Diving to Adventure. Those of us who had television sets – our jaws dropped! This wonderful girl in this white costume just knocking sharks on the head with the camera. Amazing!

Amid the historic quarter’s busy streets, a thousand workshops maintain centuries-old craftmaking traditions. These workers’ ancient skills are celebrated in a new exhibition at London’s Royal Geographical Society

“Whatever manufactured items there are in the world,” wrote the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi in 1671, “the poor of Cairo get hold of them, set them out and trade in them.” Nearly 350 years later, this tradition lives on in al-Darb al-Ahmar. This neighbourhood of 100,000 people, south-east of central Cairo, is said to be home to a thousand workshops. The place teems with artisans crafting everything from tents, books, boxes and brass lanterns to glass bowls and silk carpets.

Our project to document communities undergoing irreversible change took us to the frozen Zanskar river, which connects Ladakh and Zanskar in northern India.

Michał and I began our Before its Gone project at the start of 2017, with the aim of identifying, visiting and documenting locations and communities that are experiencing rapid (and irreversible) changes. The idea is to notice these changes so they can be remembered – and learned from.

Our first expedition was along the frozen Zanskar river that links Ladakh and Zanskar in the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. When the temperature drops to -30C and mountain passes get covered with metres of snow, the Zanskar region becomes inaccessible for the winter, and the frozen river the only route connecting it with the rest of the world. For hundreds of years villagers across the mountains have used Chadar (the ice road trek) to get to school, work or to see a doctor. But that will change soon, as the Indian government plans to build a new road here. However, as our translator Stanzin Tundup told us, the road may not be the biggest engine for change.

A new virtual exhibition, What the Traveller Saw, the first of its kind by the Royal Geographical Society, marks the centenary of the birth of the writer and former Observer travel editor

Map-makers insert fake towns or trap-streets to catch out plagiarists, but Agloe, in New York state, took on a strange life of its own

In 2008, Argleton village in west Lancashire appeared on Google, complete with weather reports, a job site and an estate agent advertising houses for sale. Argleton vanished two years later. While its site was – and still is – a damp field in the middle of nowhere, it’s worth noting that Argleton is an anagram of G Not Real. Although Google never admitted to having created it, Argleton was a phantom settlement, planted as a trap.

In the world of digital mapping and cartography, snares to catch unwary plagiarists take the form of fake roads or places, known as “trap streets” or “paper towns”. For some, such as Lye Close or Noereal Road, the clue is in the name. (A real alleyway in Cardiff that served as a trap street in the 2014 Dr Who episode Face the Raven may, conversely, be the world’s only fictional fictional street.)

The 5,100 sq km behemoth which broke away from Antarctica in 2017 drops its own large chunk of ice.

The health of insect populations globally is far more varied than previous research suggested.

Surviving trees growing near to an active volcano face an uncertain future for several years after an eruption, a study suggests.

The veteran telescope celebrates three decades in orbit with a colourful image of star formation.

UK scientists provide a new estimate for the amount of space rock falling to Earth each year.

How African researchers are using the continent's languages to help spur innovation in Artificial Intelligence.

US space agency satellites follow the melting trends in Antarctica and Greenland over 16 years.

Bill Gates has been big on vaccines since before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but in a new blog posting, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist says the only way to end the pandemic for good is to offer a vaccine to almost all of the planet's 7 billion inhabitants. That's big. "We've never delivered something to every corner of the world before," Gates notes. It's especially big considering that a vaccine hasn't yet been approved for widespread use, and that it may take as long as a year to 18 months to win approval and start distribution. Some… Read More

NASA has selected teams led by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX to develop lunar landing systems capable of putting astronauts on the moon by as early as 2024. "We want to be able to go to the moon, but we want to be a customer," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters today during a teleconference. "We want to drive down the costs, we want to increase the access, we want to have our partners have customers that are not just us, so they compete on cost and innovation, and just bring capabilities that we've never had before." Fixed-price contracts totaling… Read More

Mediterranean sediments are shown to have up to 1.9 million tiny plastic pieces per square metre.

A satellite mission that bounces laser light off the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland has found that hundreds of billions of tons' worth of ice are being lost every year due to Earth's changing climate. Scientists involved in NASA's ICESat-2 project report in the journal Science that the net loss of ice from those regions has been responsible for 0.55 inches of sea level rise since 2003. That's slightly less than a third of the total amount of sea level rise observed in the world's oceans over that time. To track how the ice sheets are changing, the ICESat-2… Read More

For the first time, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane flew free in the skies over New Mexico's Spaceport America, its new base of operations. The SpaceShipTwo plane, known as VSS Unity, has made rocket-powered flights beyond the 50-mile space milestone during tests at California's Mojave Air and Space Port, but today's unpowered test flight was the first to be flown from Spaceport America. "Today's VSS Unity flight is another exciting milestone for Virgin Galactic's progress in New Mexico," Dan Hicks, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, said in a news release. "We are extremely happy and proud of… Read More

Everything is in readiness for the first mission to send humans into orbit from U.S. soil since NASA retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011 – from the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that will take two astronauts to the International Space Station, to the parachutes that will bring them back down gently to an Atlantic Ocean splashdown, to the masks that NASA's ground team will wear in Mission Control. The fact that the launch is coming in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has added a weird and somewhat wistful twist to the history-making event. "That certainly is disappointing," NASA… Read More