Astronauts were woken during the night to continue the hunt for an air leak on the International Space Station (ISS).

Crew members have been hunting for the source over several weeks. But the search was stepped up a notch when the size of the leak appeared to grow on Monday; this erroneous reading turned out to have been caused by a temperature change onboard the ISS. Analysis by ground teams traced the leak to the main work area inside a Russian ISS module called Zvezda. This module contains life support equipment for the space station and also houses living quarters for two crew members. Further analysis will be necessary to pinpoint the precise area from which air is escaping.(BBC)…[+]

A nurse has been fired from a Canadian hospital after a video emerged showing a dying indigenous woman screaming in distress and being insulted by staff. Quebec Premier Francois Legault said the nurse’s remarks were “unacceptable” and “racist”. He said Joyce Echaquan’s death would be thoroughly investigated.

It is the latest in a series of incidents that have raised questions about systemic racism faced by Canada’s indigenous citizens. In 2015 a report found that racism against indigenous people in Canada’s healthcare system contributed to their overall poorer health outcomes, compared to non-indigenous Canadians. Ms Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw woman, had gone to the Joliette hospital about 70km (45 miles) from Montreal suffering from stomach pains. The mother of seven filmed herself in her hospital bed screaming and calling for urgent help.(BBC)…[+]

The first person cured of HIV – Timothy Ray Brown – has died from cancer. Mr Brown, who was also known as “the Berlin patient”, was given a bone marrow transplant from a donor who was naturally resistant to HIV in 2007.

It meant he no longer needed anti-viral drugs and he remained free of the virus, which can lead to Aids, for the rest of his life. The International Aids Society said Mr Brown gave the world hope that an HIV cure was possible.

Mr Brown, 54, who was born in the US, was diagnosed with HIV while he lived in Berlin in 1995. Then in 2007 he developed a type of blood cancer called acute myeloid leukaemia. His treatment involved destroying his bone marrow, which was producing the cancerous cells, and then having a bone marrow transplant. The transfer came from a donor that had a rare mutation in part of their DNA called the CCR5 gene.(BBC)…[+]

The Covid-19 pandemic began last year in a city in central China, but has since grown to affect nearly every country on earth. The virus has put world leaders in hospital while exposing inequality. It has asked major questions of governments and encroached on the daily lives of billions. And it shows no signs of ending any time soon. As the number of deaths passes one million, we take a look at some of the landmarks along the way. January was a big month for news – it saw the US assassinate an important Iranian general, rampant wildfires in Australia and the death of basketball great Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the biggest story emerged from China, which the BBC first reported as a cluster of cases of a “mysterious viral pneumonia” in the city of Wuhan. On 11 January, China reported its first confirmed death from the virus – a 61-year-old male resident of the city. Chinese scientists identified the illness as a type of coronavirus, which cause different diseases from the common cold to more severe ones like Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome). There were early signs of the kind of response that would later be commonplace around the world – the outbreak prompted Singapore and Hong Kong to bring in screening processes for travellers from Wuhan.

There were also fears the virus could spread rapidly as hundreds of millions of people in China prepared to travel around the country for Chinese New Year. But it was still unclear how the illness was transmitted, with health officials saying no cases of human-to-human transmission had been confirmed. At that point, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it was aware of the outbreak, it was in contact with the Chinese government and it was closely monitoring the event.(BBC)…[+]