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Coronavirus: A hunt for the 'missing link' host species

It was a matter of "when not if" an animal passed the coronavirus from wild bats to humans, scientists say. But it remains unclear whether that animal was sold in the now infamous Wuhan wildlife market in China.

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The performance-enhancing trick to being a better athlete

The Pico Simón Bolívar is one of the highest mountains in Colombia. Near the top, there is only half as much oxygen as at sea level, a dizzying 5,500m (18,000 feet) below.

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The indigenous communities that predicted Covid-19

Inside the world’s tropical forests, there are the agents of disease that have the power to bring our way of life to a halt. How we learn to live with these forests will determine our fate, hastening or slowing the onset of future pandemics and the climate crisis.

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Algerian singer Hamid Cheriet - Idir - dies in France at 70

Algerian singer Hamid Cheriet, better known as Idir, has died in France at the age of 70. The tireless champion of the Kabyle and Berber cultures died of pulmonary disease.

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Love Bug's creator tracked down to repair shop in Manila

The man behind the world's first major computer virus outbreak has admitted his guilt, 20 years after his software infected millions of machines worldwide.

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Coronavirus: What global travel may look like ahead of a vaccine

Sun loungers separated by plexiglass. Blood tests and sanitiser spray-downs before flights. These might sound extreme, but they are real measures some in the travel industry are looking at to keep holidaymakers feeling safe and comfortable in a post-lockdown world.

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Coronavirus: 'Covid toe' and other rashes puzzle doctors

Five rashes, including Covid toe, are affecting some hospital patients diagnosed with Covid-19, a small study by Spanish doctors has found. The rashes tended to appear in younger people and lasted several days.

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Hafthor Bjornsson: Game of Thrones actor breaks 501kg deadlift record

Game of Thrones actor Hafthor Bjornsson has set a world deadlifting record by lifting 501kg (1,104lb). Bjornsson, who portrayed Ser Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane in the HBO series, broke the record at his gym in his native Iceland.

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Using Graphical User Interfaces like Cypress' in WSL2

The Window Subsystem for Linux is very powerful. After exploring it for a bit, I wanted to push it even further. Wouldn't it be cool to run GUIs natively inside of Linux, on your computer running Windows? 🤯

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Coronavirus: Why so many people are dying in Belgium

Belgium is the world's worst affected country when it comes to the coronavirus mortality rate. That rate, unlike the total number of fatalities, is a measure of the number of deaths in relation to the size of population.

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High microplastic concentration found on ocean floor

Scientists have identified the highest levels of microplastics ever recorded on the seafloor. The contamination was found in sediments pulled from the bottom of the Mediterranean, near Italy.

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Coronavirus: Trump stands by China lab origin theory for virus

US President Donald Trump has appeared to undercut his own intelligence agencies by suggesting he has seen evidence coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory. Earlier the US national intelligence director's office said it was still investigating how the virus began.

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Neutrino particle 'flips to all flavours'

An important breakthrough may be imminent in the study of neutrinos. The multinational T2K project in Japan says it has seen indications in its data that these elementary particles can flip to any of their three types.

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Antarctic meteorites yield global bombardment rate

It's in excess of 16,000kg. This is for meteorite material above 50g in mass. It doesn't take account of the dust that's continuously settling on the planet, and of course just occasionally we'll be hit by a real whopper of an asteroid that will skew the numbers.

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'Crazy beast' lived among last of dinosaurs

A cat-sized mammal dubbed "crazy beast" lived on Madagascar among some of the last dinosaurs to walk the Earth, scientists have revealed.The 66-million-year-old fossil is described in the journal Nature.

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Dancing gargantuan black holes perform on cue

Astronomers have been able to test key consequences of Einstein's theories by studying the way a couple of black holes move around each other. One of these objects is a true colossus - a hole weighing 18 billion times the mass of our Sun; the other not quite so big at "only" 150 million Sun masses.

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Space elevators: Going up?

The Russians don’t do countdowns. For the final few seconds before launch those of us watching just hold our breath and stand well back. I find several thousand kilometres back at the European Space Agency’s mission control in Germany to be safest.

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Coronavirus 'will hasten the decline of cash'

Coronavirus will hasten the decline in the use of cash as people make a long-term switch to digital payments, experts say. The lockdown has led to a 60% fall in the number of withdrawals from cash machines, although people are taking out bigger sums.

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Pentagon releases UFO videos for the record

The US Department of Defense has released three declassified videos of "unexplained aerial phenomena". The Pentagon said it wanted to "clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real".

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Covid immunity: Can you catch it twice?

Coronavirus is a completely new infection in people. Nobody had immunity at the start of the pandemic - and knowing more about immunity is crucial for understanding what happens next.

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Coronavirus Genome 2

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The Swiss city where even fun is serious

Until 18:00, Basel is all business. It’s not somewhere you can waltz into a meeting five minutes late – not in this Swiss city whose major industries, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, are all about precision and control.

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Coronavirus: Belgians urged to eat more chips by lockdown-hit potato growers

Belgians are well known for loving chips (frites), often with a big dollop of mayonnaise, but hard-up farmers now want them to eat chips twice a week.

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The boy who photographed La Belle Époque of France

Jacques Henri Lartigue, born in 1894 in Courbevoie, was given a camera as a boy by his father at the dawn of the 20th Century. He began taking photographs of his life, including snapshots of his parents; his bedroom; his nanny Dudu throwing a ball up into the air; his brother jumping off a boat.

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Gruffalo artist Axel Scheffler: 'This was something I could do to help'

The illustrator is famous for his weird and wonderful pictures of animals in books like The Gruffalo, but now the coronavirus pandemic has brought him back into the real world with a bump. The 62-year-old has just helped to produce what must have been one of the fastest books in history.

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