Liam Shaw

Robert Schumann’s teenage ambitions of virtuosity were undone by the onset of debilitating pain in his right hand. ‘It came to such a point that whenever I had to move my fourth finger, my whole body would twist convulsively,’ he wrote to a friend. Trying to make his fingers stronger he experimented with mechanical devices that probably banjaxed them irreparably. A new paper in Science Robotics reports a device that Schumann would have jumped at the chance to try: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand.

While normal life must compete with a whole ecosystem, a mirror bacterium might behave like the only real thing in a world of phantom reflections. Normal organisms are kept in check by an ecological balance between their death and growth rate. But without any predators, mirror bacteria that escaped a laboratory might grow exponentially, even with a lower growth rate than normal bacteria.

At some point in the past, humans and other apes lost their tails. Research recently published in Nature proposes a mechanism to explain how.

In the 1880s, the Danish bacteriologist Hans Gram was working in the morgue of the Berlin city hospital, trying to identify bacteria in sections of lung tissue under the microscope. But there was so much blood that the bacteria were ‘impossible to see’. He used a dye – gentian violet – to stain the whole sample, then rinsed it with alcohol to wash out the purple colour. The bacteria appeared ‘an intense blue (often almost black)’ while the human cells were unstained.

Thirty-nine asylum seekers were received onto the Bibby Stockholm, moored off Portland, on 7 August. The opening of the barge had been delayed by fire safety issues including a door being fitted the wrong way around, but Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, told Sky News: ‘I can absolutely assure you that this is a safe facility.’ On the day the asylum seekers arrived preliminary results suggested the presence of Legionella in the water supply – the bacterium that causes the form of pneumonia known as Legionnaires’ disease. They were not evacuated until four days later.

On 18 July 2003, Johnson & Johnson filed a patent for bedaquiline, a new antibiotic against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It was first approved as a medicine in the US in 2012 and is now listed as an essential medicine by the WHO. What should a fair price be for an essential drug? J&J sell bedaquiline at tiered prices around the world: it is more expensive (but easily available) in wealthy countries and cheaper (but hard to come by) where it is most needed. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, in late 2022 it was nearly three times as expensive as it would be in low-income countries if generic forms were available.

It has been reported that a new antibiotic was ‘discovered using AI’. This needs a bit of unpacking. Finding any new drug means searching through ‘chemical space’ – the many possible configurations of atoms that can make up molecules. It’s difficult to get a grip on how vast this universe of possibility is. Most drugs consist of molecules with fewer than thirty atoms and a molecular mass of less than 500 daltons (a hydrogen atom has a mass of one dalton, give or take). It’s hard to estimate, but even if you restrict yourself to a handful of elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur) there are at least 10⁶⁰ possible molecules that fit these criteria. This is a big number, more than a thousand times the number of hydrogen atoms in the Sun. Exploring this chemical universe in its entirety is impossible. The hope is that using predictive algorithms from machine learning can help guide you to the right galaxy.

On 12 November, a man travelled to the UK on a small boat across the Channel. On arrival in England, he was taken to Manston processing centre in Kent. On the night of 18 November, he became unwell and was taken to hospital. He died the following morning. The Home Office said there was ‘no evidence’ that he had died of an infectious disease. A week later, a follow-up PCR test came back positive for diphtheria.  

One doctor who has worked in Manston told the Today programme of inadequate washing facilities in the ‘horrible and crowded conditions’. The chief inspector of borders and immigration said last week that the conditions he had seen on a visit had left him ‘speechless’. According to the Refugee Council, one boy contracted scabies – caused by parasitic mites – after a nineteen-day stay. A video taken by the campaign group SOAS Detainee Support on Sunday, 30 October showed children chanting: ‘We need your help.’

The UK health secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has announced her intention to make it easier for people in England to get antibiotics. The plans are still vague, but involve patients being able to get some antibiotics directly from pharmacists without a GP prescription. Pharmacists in Scotland have for several years now been able to prescribe antibiotics for uncomplicated urinary tract infections (UTIs). Based on this data, the Department of Health and Social Care believe that such a move in England could save 400,000 GP appointments a year.