One in 33 is infected with the virus in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Covid infections down considerably in UK
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Covid in Wales: Face mask mandate kept in health and care settings
It remains a legal requirement in health and care settings in Wales for at least three more weeks.
Drake Hits Back At Troll By Following His Wife And DMing Her On Instagram
The Certified Lover Boy Drake just pulled the ultimate move on an online critic.
The drama-filled interaction started on Tuesday when an Instagram user poked fun at Drake’s son, Adonis, after the rapper commented about fathers who are “elated and competitive and over supportive” of their children’s pursuits. In response, the Instagram user wrote, “Ya son prolly play with ghost writers.”
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The snarky comment was in reference to past controversies where the Canadian rapper was accused of relying on ghostwriters and not drafting his own verses.
Amy Sussman via Getty Images
Drake , who goes by @champagnepapi on the platform, decided to respond in the most Drake way: He swiftly tracked down the commenter’s wife and followed her on Instagram.
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“I just followed your girl cause she’s prob miserable and needs some excitement in her life,” he teased.
The woman Drake followed, who goes by Toni Bowden on the social platform, shared the tea on her Instagram Story.
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“Oh hey @champagnepapi,” she captioned in a screenshot of her followers, with the God’s Plan rapper listed as one of them.
“My husband @ceddybo_ybagnm decides to be a troll and now @champagnepapi thinking I need excitement in my life,” she wrote, alongside laughing and eyes emojis.
But the debacle didn’t end there.
Drake, who has cautioned his fans in his lyrics over the years about stealing girls away from their boyfriends and husbands, annihilated the original commenter with one final blow by sending Bowden a direct message after seeing her posts.
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“I’m here for u ma,” he wrote to her.
The Take Your Girl artist reunited with Future last month for several features on the March Madness rapper’s ninth studio album, I Never Liked You.
This week, Drake was confirmed to appear on Jack Harlow’s new album Come Home the Kids Miss You, which is released today (Fri 6 May).
Game Of Thrones Prequel House Of The Dragon Trailer Brings Blood, Blonds And Beasts
Let the fiery new trailer for the Game Of Thrones prequel series House Of The Dragon scorch whatever sour taste the end of the fantasy drama left behind.
HBO has unveiled an extended look at the forthcoming prequel set hundreds of years before the events of Thrones and based on author George R.R. Martin’s 2018 novel, Fire & Blood.
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The trailer attempts to capture much of what made the flagship series so successful: Dragons roar, families squabble and dynasties almost certainly crumble in the roughly minute-long clip, which puts the ruthless House Targaryen front and centre.
Sporting a set of blonder than blond wigs, King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) and his children, Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) and Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith), rule over the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros before, as Thrones history tells us, a brutal civil war tears the family apart.
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Ollie Upton/HBO
The prequel series, however, begins with the Targaryens firmly seated on the Iron Throne, as we see glimpses of recognisable rivals Houses Stark, Velaryon, and Lannister pledging their allegiance to the family.
But in the trailer, the threats appear to be a bit closer to home. The Targaryen children openly thirst for power, with a woman warning the princess, who is named as the king’s heir, “Men would sooner put the realm to the torch than see a woman ascend the Iron Throne.”
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As the title promises, there are dragons galore here ― the creatures were thought to be extinct at the start of Thrones ― with Smith’s character seemingly accessorising his outfits with a scaled dragon egg.
The trailer concludes with one of the fire-breathers doing what it does best, as an unseen character ominously says, “History does not remember blood. It remembers names.”
Scheduled to premiere 21 Aug on HBO and HBO Max, House Of The Dragon also stars Olivia Cooke, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best, Fabien Frankel, Sonoya Mizuno and Rhys Ifans.
Watch the official teaser trailer above.
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Tory Council Leader Calls For Boris Johnson To Go After Labour Wins Cumberland
A Conservative council leader has said Tory MPs should try to oust Boris Johnson after his party suffered a humiliating defeat in a local election.
Conservative leader of Carlisle City Council, John Mallinson, vented his frustration after Labour picked up control of the new Cumberland authority after Thursday’s round voting.
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The Tories lost 14 seats on the council in north west England, while Labour gained 12 and took overall control.
Mallinson, who will see the council he led replaced by the new Cumberland authority, told the BBC that he had “lost some very good colleagues” in the election, and had found it “difficult to drag the debate back to local issues” while campaigning because of partygate and the cost-of-living crisis.
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Mallinson said: “I don’t think it was helping to get comments from people like George Eustice talking about people using value brands to ease their shopping bills. That just seems to have come over very patronising.”
He added: “I think it is not just partygate, there is the integrity issue. Basically I just don’t feel people any longer have the confidence that the prime minister can be relied upon to tell the truth.”
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Asked if he thought Conservative MPs should oust the PM, Mallinson said: “That would be my preference, yes.”
On Sky News, he said: “(Johnson) must shoulder a lot of the blame. I have been canvassing in rural areas over the last few weeks and it’s been the one issue that people have brought up time and time again. Partygate, the cost of living crisis, the feel that the government were not in touch … and sadly I have to say the prime minister cannot be relied upon to necessarily to be telling the truth.”
He added: “I think he should consider his position now.”
When asked whether the areas three Tory MPs in the region should attempt to oust Johnson, he replied: “I call upon them to do what they think is right.”
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Meanwhile, Johnson’s Tories face losing control of a flagship London authority to Labour – but there was a mixed picture for Keir Starmer’s party outside the capital.
Wandsworth, which has been a Conservative authority for more than 40 years, looks set to fall to Labour, with the Tories fearing other boroughs will also be lost.
But outside London, the Liberal Democrats won Hull from Labour, while the Greens also picked up seats in contests around England.
Council seats are up for grabs in Scotland, Wales and many parts of England, while there are elections to Stormont in Northern Ireland.
Votes were only being counted in some of the English contests overnight, including key authorities in the capital.
Self-propelled, endlessly programmable artificial cilia
For years, scientists have been attempting to engineer tiny, artificial cilia for miniature robotic systems that can perform complex motions, including bending, twisting, and reversing. Building these smaller-than-a-human-hair microstructures typically requires multi-step fabrication processes and varying stimuli to create the complex movements, limiting their wide-scale applications.
Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a single-material, single-stimuli microstructure that can outmaneuver even living cilia. These programmable, micron-scale structures could be used for a range of applications, including soft robotics, biocompatible medical devices, and even dynamic information encryption.
The research is published in Nature.
“Innovations in adaptive self-regulated materials that are capable of a diverse set of programmed motions represent a very active field, which is being tackled by interdisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers,” said Joanna Aizenberg, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science and Professor of Chemistry & Chemical Biology at SEAS and senior author of the paper. “Advances achieved in this field may significantly impact the ways we design materials and devices for a variety of applications, including robotics, medicine and information technologies.”
Unlike previous research, which relied mostly on complex multi-component materials to achieve programmable movement of reconfigurable structural elements, Aizenberg and her team designed a microstructure pillar made of a single material — a photoresponsive liquid crystal elastomer. Because of the way the fundamental building blocks of the liquid crystal elastomer are aligned, when light hits the microstructure, those building blocks realign and the structure changes shape.
As this shape change occurs, two things happen. First, the spot where the light hits becomes transparent, allowing the light to penetrate further into the material, causing additional deformations. Second, as the material deforms and the shape moves, a new spot on the pillar is exposed to light, causing that area to also change shape.
This feedback loop propels the microstructure into a stroke-like cycle of motion.
“This internal and external feedback loop gives us a self-regulating material. Once you turn the light on, it does all its own work,” said Shucong Li, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard and co-first author of the paper.
When the light turns off, the material snaps back to its original shape.
The material’s specific twists and motions change with its shape, making these simple structures endlessly reconfigurable and tunable. Using a model and experiments, the researchers demonstrated the movements of round, square, L- and T-shaped, and palm-tree-shaped structures and laid out all the other ways the material can be tuned.
“We showed that we can program the choreography of this dynamic dance by tailoring a range of parameters, including illumination angle, light intensity, molecular alignment, microstructure geometry, temperature, and irradiation intervals and duration,” said Michael M. Lerch, a postdoctoral fellow in the Aizenberg Lab and co-first author of the paper.
To add another layer of complexity and functionality, the research team also demonstrated how these pillars interact with each other as part of an array.
“When these pillars are grouped together, they interact in very complex ways because each deforming pillar casts a shadow on its neighbor, which changes throughout the deformation process,” said Li. “Programming how these shadow-mediated self-exposures change and interact dynamically with each other could be useful for such applications as dynamic information encryption.”
“The vast design space for individual and collective motions is potentially transformative for soft robotics, micro-walkers, sensors, and robust information encryption systems,” said Aizenberg.
The paper was co-authored by James T. Waters, Bolei Deng, Reese S. Martens, Yuxing Yao, Do Yoon Kim, Katia Bertoldi, Alison Grinthal and Anna C. Balazs. It was supported in part by the U.S. Army Research Office, under grant number W911NF-17-1-0351 and the National Science Foundation through the Harvard University Materials Research Science and Engineering Center under award DMR-2011754.
Cost of living: Are value food brands healthy?
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Invasive species and climate change impact coastal estuaries
Native species in California’s estuaries are expected to experience greater declines as invasive species interact with climate change, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.
The study, published in the Ecological Society of America’s journal, Ecology, said these declines are expected not only because of climate-related stressors, but also because of the expanding influence of new invasive predators whose impacts are occurring much farther up the estuary.
“Our study found that climate change and biological invasions can interact in coastal estuaries in unpredictable ways,” said lead author Benjamin Rubinoff, a Ph.D. student in the UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy when the research was conducted. “This increased risk of predation makes it difficult for native species that are already dealing with increasingly stressful environmental conditions.”
The researchers tested the influence of environmental stress and predation on sessile invertebrates in Tomales Bay, California during the summer of 2019. Sessile invertebrates are animals without backbones that attach to reefs or seagrasses and barely move, such as bryozoans and ascidians. Their predators include sea stars, crabs, and snails, among other species.
Estuaries a unique environment
In estuaries, changes in salinity and water temperature strongly influence the distribution of many invertebrate species, from mussels to crabs to sea squirts. These gradients can be especially steep in the estuaries of California, which are highly vulnerable to climate change and invasive species.
In most estuaries, stressful conditions for marine organisms such as low salinity and high temperature increase as you move inland from the ocean. With increased stress, native predators typically consume fewer prey.
But the study found that biological invasions are changing this equation, since many non-native predators tolerate stress better than native ones. So highly stressed native prey species are subjected to large numbers of stress-tolerant invaders that compete with them for resources, if not consume them.
Stressful situation
“The stress gradients typical of West Coast estuaries are being rapidly altered by climate change,” said co-leading author Edwin “Ted” Grosholz, a UC Davis professor with the Department of Environmental Science and Policy and the Bodega Marine Laboratory. “These changing gradients are scrambling the historical predator-prey landscape, creating novel matchups and putting native prey at much higher risk from invaders.”
Grosholz adds that such changes are hard to predict, and only experimental studies like this can disentangle the interacting effects of climate change and invasions on struggling native species.
For the study, the researchers deployed square plates made of PVC with different caging treatments at three locations across Tomales Bay from June to October 2019. Some plates were protected from predators while others allowed predator access. At the end of the period, the researchers brought the plates back into the lab and identified organisms using a microscope and determined percent cover.
The study was funded by grants from UC Davis and Point Reyes National Seashore Association.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of California – Davis. Original written by Kat Kerlin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
