You’re more likely to have a gout attack if you:

• are male
• have a family history of gout
• have elevated levels of uric acid in the blood
• drink too much alcohol (particularly beer)
• eat a diet high in purines such as meat, sweetbreads, offal, shellfish, and fructose
• are overweight or obese
• use diuretics
• have type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol – these conditions can mean that your kidneys are less able to flush out the urates
• have kidney disease
• crash diet or fast.

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has asked for a lift back across the Atlantic after next month's UN climate summit in Chile was unexpectedly scrapped.

The 16-year-old made it from Sweden to California by boat, train and electric car before Chile's government announced it was canning the summit because of political unrest in the South American nation.

The COP 25 summit will now be held in Spain.

"As #COP25 has officially been moved from Santiago to Madrid I'll need some help," Ms Thunberg tweeted from Los Angeles. 

"It turns out I've travelled half around the world, the wrong way."

"Now I need to find a way to cross the Atlantic in November ... If anyone could help me find transport I would be so grateful."

Ms Thunberg refuses to fly because of the carbon emissions involved.

Her highly publicised journey has so far involved crossing on a zero-emissions sailing boat from the coast of England to New York, then travelling overland through North America by train and in an electric car borrowed from Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Mr Schwarzenegger is not the only celebrity supporting Ms Thunberg — US actor Leonardo DiCaprio shared a photo of the himself and Ms Thunberg on his Instagram, calling her "a leader of our time". 

"It is because of Greta, and young activists everywhere that I am optimistic about what the future holds," DiCaprio said.

"It was an honour to spend time with Greta. She and I have made a commitment to support one another, in hopes of securing a brighter future for our planet."

Ms Thunberg was one of around 25,000 delegates expected in Santiago for the United Nations climate summit.

The summit will now take place in Madrid on the original scheduled dates of December 2-13.

"I'm so sorry I'll not be able to visit South and Central America this time, I was so looking forward to this," Ms Thunberg said on Twitter.

"But this is of course not about me, my experiences or where I wish to travel.

"We're in a climate and ecological emergency. I send my support to the people in Chile."

Ms Thunberg rose to prominence last year after she started spending her Fridays outside Sweden's parliament, holding a sign reading "School strike for climate."

Students across the world began emulating her campaign, leading to organised school walkouts and the rise of the "Fridays for Future" movement which targets government action on climate change.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-03/greta-thunberg-seeks-lift-back-ac...

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Arnold Schwarzenegger could row...

In 2014, when Ian Miller and Tyler Lyson first visited Corral Bluffs, a fossil site 100 kilometers south of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science where they work, Lyson was not impressed by the few vertebrate fossils he saw. But on a return trip later that year, he split open small boulders called concretions—and found dozens of skulls. Now, he, Miller, and their colleagues have combined the site's trove of plant and animal fossils with a detailed chronology of the rock layers to tell a momentous story: how life recovered from the asteroid impact that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Plants and animals came back much faster than thought, with plants spurring mammals to diversify, the team reports today in Science. "They get almost the whole picture, which is quite exciting," says functional anatomist Amy Chew of Brown University. "This high-resolution integrated record really tells us what's going on."

When the asteroid slammed into Earth, it wiped out 75% of living species, including any mammal much larger than a rat. Half the plant species died out. With the great dinosaurs gone, mammals expanded, and the new study traces that process in exquisite detail.

Most fossil sites from after the impact have gaps, but sediment accumulated nearly continuously for 1 million years on the flood plain that is now the Corral Bluffs site. So the site preserves a full record of ancient life and the environment.

Such sites can be hard to date. But Miller, a paleobotanist, and his colleagues collected 37,000 grains of pollen and spores, which revealed a clear marker of the asteroid impact: a surge in the growth of ferns, which thrive in disturbed environments. The site also includes two layers of ash from nearby volcanoes. Volcanic ash includes radioactive minerals whose decay can be used as a precise geochronological clock, providing two time markers. The known flips in Earth's magnetic poles, which some minerals in the layers had recorded, add detail to the chronology. "They have a very strong geochronological framework," says David Fastovsky, a paleontologist at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston.

The record confirms the devastation wrought by the impact. Raccoon-size mammal species had swarmed the site before the catastrophe, but for 1000 years afterward just a few furry creatures no bigger than 600-gram rats roamed a ferny world where flowering plants, with their nutritious seeds and fruits, were scarce.

By 100,000 years later, twice as many mammal species roamed, and they were back to raccoon size. These critters foraged in the palm forests that replaced the ferns. "It's a world that's coming back from complete and utter devastation," Miller says.

Over the next 200,000 years, what he calls the "palm period" gave way to the "pecan pie" period, when walnutlike plants arose. New mammals evolved to take advantage of the nutritious seeds. Mammal diversity increased threefold, and the biggest of the new species reached 25 kilograms—beaver size.

Read more:

doi:10.1126/science.aaz9741

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