Mark Swan, 24, from Seaham, took the first gold of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow on Friday, lifting 220kg for a European record in the men's lightweight para powerlifting. During lockdown his father, told six years ago that cancer gave him four years, built him a bench and rack out of wood so he could keep training. He has outlived the prognosis.
More than 1,100 children aged two months to six years were treated for severe pneumonia at 13 hospitals in South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Moving them from a drip to oral amoxicillin once they improved, for four or five days in total, proved as safe as the five days of injections WHO recommends, and sent them home about a day earlier.
Louisiana's reintroduced whooping cranes have had their best season since the project began in 2011, with 10 chicks fledging against a previous best of eight. Eighteen of the 20 pairs that nested hatched chicks, the highest share yet recorded, and the state flock now numbers 84 birds. The last wild whooping crane there was seen in 1950.
Working with the Very Large Telescope in Chile, a team led by Kevin Hoy detected an object of at least 0.9 Jupiter masses circling a brown dwarf, which in turn orbits the star CD-35 2722, on a 170-day path. Nature published the result on Wednesday. The researchers cheerfully admit that words such as planet and moon do not fit it neatly.
Nine seasons of diving off Polace on the Croatian island of Mljet have brought up more than 600 grams of gold from a Byzantine wreck, among it four jewelled belt sets and a signet ring bearing an emperor's portrait. Coins of four Heraclian rulers date the sinking to the late seventh century.