A woman holds her newborn baby in a nursery at the Juba teaching hospital. Very few births in South Sudan, which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world at 2,054 per 100,000 live births, are assisted by trained midwives. Photograph: Reuters
Happy world water day!
‘Baby picture’ of the universe unveiled
NBC News: The European-led team behind the Planck cosmology probe on Thursday released the mission’s first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background — a “baby picture” of the universe that could eventually reveal how it inflated in the first moments of its existence, and whether it possesses the extra dimensions that are predicted by some theorists.
“To a cosmologist, this map is a gold mine of information,” University of Cambridge astrophysicist George Efstathiou, a member of the Planck science team, said during a Paris news conference. He joked that not that long ago, cosmologists might have “given up their children” to have such a map in their hands.
Photo: The Planck cosmology probe has produced the most detailed all-sky map to date showing the cosmic background radiation, also known as the afterglow of the big bang. (ESA)
As a commenter on our story on Guardian Science said:
A fantastic achievement. But is it exciting or depressing that 95% of the Universe is made up of stuff we know nothing about?
You can also see a big big version of the picture on our site here.
The Associated Press photographer Maya Alleruzzo was based in Baghdad for more than four years, covering the 2007 troop surge and the end of combat operations. She has returned to see how the city has changed, visiting the scenes of photographs taken by colleagues over the past 10 years
Some great photos on picture desk live today:
1. Cambodian school children walk home after a morning school session at Tnoat Kpoh village in the outskirt of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photograph: Heng Sinith/AP2. A Somali boy jumps between old fishing boats near Mogadishu’s fish market in the Xamar Weyne district of the Somali capital, in this photo taken March 16, 2013 by the African Union-United Nations Information Support Team (AU-UN IST) and released today. Photograph: Reuters3. One of seven newly-hatched bearded dragons at the Wacol RSPCA centre in Brisbane, Australia. In a first for the centre, the staff managed to extract the eggs from a severely injured bearded dragon and successfully incubate them after the lizard died. Photograph: Jamie Hanson/Rex Features
Halid, who is 10, must be one of the bravest people I am ever likely to meet…
Illustration: George Butler
Scenes from Syria, illustrated by George Butler – in pictures
Brrr - Divnogorsk, Siberia: members of a local winter swimming club warm up on a bank of the Yenisei river at -17C Photograph: Ilya Naymushin/Reuters
A selection of stories, photos, quotes, video and audio from guardian.co.uk, curated by James Walsh, Hannah Waldram, Carmen Fishwick and the Guardian's editorial team. We are also editors of the news tag.
