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

From samba to jazz and house, the DJ and founder of radio station Worldwide FM picks 10 tracks to transport you to Brazil

Originally released in 1980, this funky track from solo artist Cristina Camargo is pure “80s vibes”, Peterson says. “I’ve been loving this boogie tune, produced by Lincoln Olivetti and Robson Jorge, of late. It lifts the mood every time.” Olivetti and Jorge crafted Rio’s early-80s boogie sound, and produced classic albums by Brazilian disco legends in the mid-70s. “It reminds me of line dancing in Rio, particularly on a Sunday afternoon in Lapa, where sound systems play a mixture of this and classic British 80s cuts by the likes of Lisa Stansfield and Soul II Soul – very obscure!”

Elena Ferrante’s Naples, Umberto Eco’s medieval mysteries, EM Forster’s Tuscany … Italy comes alive through these great books
• 10 of the best novels about France

Long before Covid-19, there were always bad things in the press about Italy: corruption, mafia, bureaucracy. But, whenever I went, life seemed to work out even so. People may be poor but they still sit in the sun, drink and chat; music and culture are a birthright; the right seems in the ascendant but on the ground it feels blessed with far-seeing idealists – it has almost four times as much land under organic cultivation as the UK, for example. For now, my remedy to the withdrawal symptoms I feel is to visit via the written word. Many writers have set books in Italy – I was sorry to leave out Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Calabria), and Ali Smith’s How to be Both (Ferrara) – but here are my top 10 romanze italiane.

The travel industry has sifted through the BBC show’s many sex scenes to showcase shots of Ireland’s landscape

Promoting Ireland as a tourism destination used to be straightforward – just showcase the bucolic landscape and put a slogan on the end – but that was before Normal People turned a chunk of the Atlantic coast into Fifty Shades of Sligo.

The television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel features beautiful shots of Sligo’s beaches and mountains, plus Trinity College Dublin, but there is also sex. Lots of sex.

With no alternative but to explore the nature on their doorstep, three writers describe the joy of enforced slow travel

It is a place I’d discovered before the virus: a left-hand bend in a narrow stream, a couple of steps off the footpath. There is nothing remarkable there, or not at first glance. There are breeze blocks in the stream bed and plastic bags deeply embedded in the roots of an alder tree. With a few variations, it could be anywhere in Britain: the neglected corner of a city park, the back of a private garden, behind a national park cafe. It’s just one of those spots that no one ever thinks to stop at and, if not for Covid-19, I would not have begun visiting daily, pausing for a few breaths before continuing. I saw the first snowdrops appear there, followed by primroses; then they were swamped by wild garlic and wood anemone. One morning a weasel shot out of a hole under a root and sprinted up the opposite bank. It was the first of several surprises.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it has forged a new agreement with Vulcan Inc., the Seattle-based holding company created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, to share data on ocean science and exploration. The memorandum of understanding builds on an existing relationship between NOAA and Vulcan. “The future of ocean science and exploration is partnerships,” retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and deputy NOAA administrator, said today in a news release. “NOAA is forging new collaborations, such as the one with Vulcan, to accelerate our mission to map, explore… Read More

On Monday, officials in Los Angeles County released preliminary results of a study that suggest roughly 4.1% of the county's adult population has already had the coronavirus, which translates to between 221,000 and 442,000 people, factoring in adjustments for statistical margin of error.That's a much higher number than confirmed case counts indicate. (As of early Tuesday, the county had 13,816 cases.)"We haven't known the true extent of COVID-19 infections in our community because we have only tested people with symptoms and the availability of tests has been limited," Neeraj Sood, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California and lead investigator on the study, said in a statement.Dr. Barbara Ferrer, LA County's public health director, said in a statement that the early results pointed to the possibility that many people may have been unknowingly infected.The study relies on rapid antibody tests, which have faced concerns about accuracy.And as The Mercury News reported, a Stanford study that also showed higher rates of infection in Santa Clara County drew criticism, although that was largely from statisticians over the study's methodology.Still, experts have emphasized that more studies will help develop a clearer picture of the virus's true prevalence.In any case, officials say it's crucial to continue to adhere to public health orders for many reasons, including that if more people are infected but asymptomatic, they could unknowingly spread the virus.______A change to the USNS Mercy's assignmentOn Monday, my New York Times colleague John Ismay and I spoke with leaders aboard the Navy hospital ship Mercy. Here's our dispatch about how their assignment has changed:In the weeks since the Mercy arrived at the Port of Los Angeles from San Diego, the hospital ship's mission has been clear: Serve as a crucial relief valve for patients who have not been infected with the coronavirus as hospitals fill up with patients sick with COVID-19.In recent days, the work has shifted, but that underlying goal has remained the same, the commanding officer of the ship's medical facility told us."FEMA, after having made an assessment of the situation and the local needs, has changed our assignment," said Capt. John Rotruck, the medical treatment team's commanding officer.The Mercy has sent 40 medical staff members -- two family practice doctors, 16 nurses and 20 corpsmen, including two respiratory technicians -- to help care for patients who do not have COVID-19 at a state-run skilled nursing facility in Orange County."We're essentially augmenting their staff," Rotruck said, as the anticipated surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations has, for now, been held at bay.The capacity onboard will decrease to 250 beds from 1,000, in large part as a result of that staffing shift -- although officials emphasized that leaves more than enough space at the rate the Mercy has been taking in patients.At the same time, leaders aboard the Mercy said that most of the military crew is moving off the ship to stay at nearby hotels to make it possible for crew members to keep their distance from one another as they work, eat and sleep.Sailors will be bused from their hotels to work their shifts aboard the ship.The move, which will decrease the number of crew members staying aboard the ship to roughly 140 from more than 800, came as the number of crew members who may have been exposed inched upward.By Monday, Rotruck said that nine crew members had tested positive for the coronavirus and that about 130 people were in quarantine because they had come into what federal officials define as close contact with at least one of those nine. All of those in quarantine tested negative.All nine who have COVID-19 were outpatients as of Monday -- meaning their cases were not severe enough to warrant being hospitalized -- and their conditions are being closely monitored.Rotruck said that moving crew members off the Mercy was unusual but not unprecedented.During a previous mission, for instance, some medical staff members flew to Vietnam to provide medical care to patients on the Mercy, although they did not sleep on the ship.However, Rotruck added, "We have not done it to this scale," with the vast majority of the ship's crew members living ashore.A spokesman said Friday that the crew aboard the Navy hospital ship Comfort, which is docked in New York City, recently moved most of its crew to hotels ashore as well.Rotruck said that the Mercy was ready to care for coronavirus-negative seniors living in nursing homes, as the governor has previously announced, but none had been transferred yet.Such nursing home patients may be moved to the Mercy for care through the typical intake process, if, for example, a facility needed to free up space to care for COVID-19 patients.As of Monday evening, the ship had taken in 65 patients total since it docked in San Pedro, and its crew had performed 22 surgeries. There were 13 patients still being treated onboard, meaning that 52 had been discharged.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

The impact on human health of an invasive ragweed plant may be "seriously underestimated".

Swarm Technologies has struck an agreement with California-based Momentus for the launch of a dozen telecommunication satellites, each the size of a slice of bread, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December. The December rideshare mission is the first of a series that Momentum plans to execute for Swarm, continuing into 2021 and 2022. Swarm plans to have 150 satellites launched over the next couple of years for a communication network in low Earth orbit. The first 12 SpaceBee satellites covered by the agreement announced today will be deployed into orbit from the Falcon 9. The inch-thick satellites fit… Read More

Scientists map ancient underwater landslides in the region chosen for Jakarta's replacement.

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

One month after the debut of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19, the database of coronavirus-related research papers has doubled in size – and has given rise to more than a dozen software tools to channel the hundreds of studies that are being published every day about the pandemic. In a roundup published on the ArXiv preprint server this week, researchers from Seattle's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Research and other partners in the project say CORD-19's collection has risen from about 28,000 papers to more than 52,000. Every day, several hundred more papers are being published, in… Read More

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.

NASA has awarded a $2 million grant to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, The Aerospace Corp. — and Xplore, a Seattle-based space venture — to develop the design architecture for a far-out telescope array that would use the sun's gravitational field as a lens to focus on alien planets. The Phase III award from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC, would cover two years of development work and could lead to the launch of a technology demonstration mission in the 2023-2024 time frame. Xplore's team will play a key role in designing the demonstration mission's spacecraft, which would be… Read More

New techniques are being used to transform images from Hubble into spectacular 3D visualisations.

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

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

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

Scientists are working on better solar cells that will turn more of the sun's rays into electricity.

The space agency announces the companies that will work on landers to return astronauts to the Moon.

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

Native woodlands can resist the spread of invasive species if they block light reaching the ground.

Scientists predict the explosive behaviour of two supermassive black holes almost to the hour.

One of the hardest tasks in Earth observation is tracking tiny changes in the shape of the ground.

An unseen object is found to be lurking in a double-star system a mere 1,000 light-years from Earth.

NASA has awarded the University of Washington a $499,864 grant to develop a competition that calls on students to turn a simulated lava tube into a habitat suitable for harboring humans on the moon or Mars. The exploration and habitation skills competition will be funded as part of NASA's Artemis Student Challenges program, which plays off the themes of the Artemis moon program to inspire the next generation of explorers and engineers. The competition will involve navigating a rover through a facsimile lava tube and surface structures, generating maps, identifying valuable resources and deploying an airtight barrier to seal the… Read More

The third time's the charm for the Allen Institute for Brain Science's 3-D atlas of the mouse brain. Version 3 of the atlas, known as the Allen Mouse Brain Common Coordinate Framework or CCFv3, is the subject of a research paper published today in the journal Cell. It builds on a partial brain map that focused on the mouse cortex and was released in 2016. Previous versions of the atlas were rendered with lower-resolution 3-D maps. The latest high-resolution maps are fine enough to pinpoint the locations of individual brain cells — which is crucial for interpreting datasets that contain thousands… Read More

Certain habitats can help dampen the spread of ash dieback, which threatens ash trees.

The following is a brief roundup of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. A new antibody test is highly accurate at determining whether people have been infected with the novel coronavirus, according to a study published on Friday in The Journal of Clinical Microbiology. Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine found the test, manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, had a specificity rate of 99.9% and a sensitivity rate of 100%, suggesting little chance of incorrectly diagnosing a healthy person as having been infected and virtually no chance of a false negative readout.

Scientists usually find black holes by detecting X-rays they emit as they devour nearby stars. But this one was quietly hidden 1,000 light-years away.

The ancient Roman city’s House of the Lovers has reopened to the public 40 years after it was severely damaged in 1980 by an earthquake

• Pompeii’s House of Lovers reopens to public

The largest, brightest full moon in nearly seven decades started to show on Tuesday evening over Europe, Latin America, the US and the Middle East. This year, the supermoon was expected to come nearer to Earth than at any time since 1948, astronomers have said. A supermoon occurs when the timing of a full moon overlaps with the point in the moon's 28-day orbit that is closest to Earth, and about every 14th full moon is a supermoon. If skies are clear, this time the full moon will appear up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than usual, according to Nasa

Australian photographer Christian Bowman from Queensland was among Australians waking up before the sun rose to capture images of the Eta Aquarids meteor shower

• Australians told to look to the skies early Wednesday for best views

Friends and colleagues pay tribute to gifted polymath whose achievements spanned biology, physics and public policy

• Lord May of Oxford obituary

Pioneering Australian scientist Robert May, whose work in biology led to the development of chaos theory, has died at age 84.

Known as one of Australia’s most accomplished scientists, he served as the chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom, was president of the Royal Society, and was made a lord in 2001.

Hannah Devlin speaks to Prof Sabra Klein about why women are much less likely to become seriously ill or die from Covid-19, and what the implications of this knowledge for future treatments might be

With false information linking the coronavirus to 5G telecoms or Chinese labs being widely shared on social media, Ian Sample speaks to social psychologist Dr Daniel Jolley about why the pandemic is such fertile ground for conspiracy theories

As hay fever season approaches, Nicola Davis asks Prof Stephen Durham about the differences between the immune response to an allergen, such as pollen, and a pathogen, like Sars-CoV-2. Should those with allergies should be concerned about Covid-19?

Lawyers say failure to provide adequate PPE may amount to corporate manslaughter

• Coronavirus – latest updates
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The deaths of more than 50 hospital and care home workers have been reported to Britain’s health and safety regulator, which is considering launching criminal investigations, the Guardian has learned.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which investigates the breaking of safety at work laws, has received 54 formal reports of deaths in health and care settings “where the source of infection is recorded as Covid-19”. These are via the official reporting process, called Riddor: Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences.

Sage told widespread use of antibody tests could lead to criminal behaviour, papers reveal

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Downing Street’s scientific advisers feared people might intentionally seek to contract coronavirus and that a black market in fake test results could emerge if employers allowed workers to return only when they had a positive antibody test.

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, known as Sage, was warned last month by its behavioural psychology subgroup that the widespread introduction of antibody tests could lead to a range of potentially dangerous and even criminal “negative behavioural responses” if not handled well.

Studies have examined some of the more unusual signs of Covid-19

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The World Health Organization lists the most common symptoms of Covid-19 as fever, tiredness and a dry cough. Others include a runny nose, sore throat, nasal congestion, pain, diarrhoea and the loss of sense of taste and/or smell. But there are also other more unusual symptoms that patients have presented.

As the coronavirus outbreak continues to be our focus on Science Weekly, we also want to try look at other science stories. In this episode, Nicola Davis speaks to Dave Krause about the 66-million-year-old fossil of a cat-sized mammal dubbed ‘crazy beast’. A giant in its day, we hear how this now extinct branch of mammals – known as Gondwanatherians – offers new insights into what could have been

Official figures show that wide disparity not just due to health and economic differences

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Black people are more than four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than white people, according to stark official figures exposing a dramatic divergence in the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in England and Wales.

The Office of National Statistics found that the difference in the virus’s impact was caused not only by pre-existing differences in communities’ wealth, health, education and living arrangements.

Researchers say cannibalistic tendency may help explain why the invasive creatures thrive

When the going gets tough, most parents try to protect their offspring. But the warty comb jelly takes a different tack: it eats them.

Despite initial appearances, comb jellies are not jellyfish but belong to a different group of animals, ctenophora, which swim using tiny hair-like projections called cilia.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford dropped by his cottage last month, days after asking the province’s residents to stay away from theirs. His office says Ford "drove alone" and was there for less than an hour to check on construction.

A man whose wife was killed in the April mass shooting in Nova Scotia is the plaintiff named in a proposed class-action lawsuit against the estate of the deceased gunman, denturist Gabriel Wortman.

Lethbridge police are being investigated by an outside force after handcuffing a woman in a stormtrooper costume outside a Star Wars-themed business earlier this week. But still the force faces accusations that not enough is being done to investigate what happened.

A young wild horse likely wouldn't have survived the night if a group of animal lovers hadn't stumbled across the filly struggling — and failing — to drag itself out of a two-metre deep mud hole.

The mother of a newborn wants to see her own mother cuddle the baby, while adult children must rely on virtual connections with their elderly mother. COVID-19 proves challenging physically and emotionally for many this Mother's Day.

In a tale of two cities, Moscow keeps its distance while in Minsk, thousands turn out for the traditional military spectacular

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In any other year, hundreds of thousands of Russians would have marched with portraits of relatives who fought in the second world war in a memorial called the Immortal Regiment.

But on Saturday, the images of Soviet veterans and their families floated past on Russian television, a public vigil adapted for the era of social isolation.