October 2021

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Big News
Covid-19 Booster, how good is it? While some governments (cough…the U.K...cough) are acting as if Covid is no longer a problem, scientists are still working hard to generate data; this month focusing on how effective the booster vaccine is. Early clinical data directly from Pfizer suggests that in a clinical trial with 10,000 patients, all over 50, who were given a booster jab they found it had 95.6% efficacy. This is promising news for everyone as we move in to the winter season, when cases are expected to keep rising.

Poaching leads to evolutionary change. Poaching elephants for their ivory has been a problem for decades, and it turns out we’re only just beginning to understand how dramatic that impact is. A recent study has highlighted how the Mozambican civil war, which occurred from 1977 – 1992,  has changed the population of  African elephants. They found that following a high level of poaching during the war there was increased number of elephants born without tusks. I also recommend this article if you want to read more.

Little News:
Nature is beautiful! Every year the Wildlife Photographer of the year is announced and while it usually makes headlines for a day or two it usually gets brushed aside by other news. This year, as with every year, the images are spectacular, well done to this year’s winner Laurent Ballesta. If you want to stare in wonder at how beautiful nature is then the full gallery is available on the Natural History Museum website.

My reading suggestion for this month:
Article: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities by James Clear. Figuring out what to prioritise can be hard, should you be reading more, doing more work, spending more time on a different project? This article by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, discusses one method used by investor Warren Buffet to organise his time. My plan for the next month is to try and use this method, I’ll report back in a month and see how it went!