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Coronavirus Roundup for May 2-May 8

The items below are highlights from the newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign-up here: https://robinlloyd.substack.com. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter.  A 5/7/20 story by Smriti Mallapaty at Nature explores issues related to children and the new coronavirus. Mallapaty reports on some […]

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Heat and Humidity Are Already Reaching the Limits of Human Tolerance

Over the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence on the planet, modern humans have managed to adapt to a huge range of climates—from the arid heat of the Sahara Desert to the icy chill of the Arctic. But we have our limits. If temperatures and humidity rise high enough, even a robustly healthy […]

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The Geosciences Community Needs to Be More Diverse and Inclusive

Cities, countries and continents around the world, from Washington, D.C., to Europe to Antarctica, experienced the warmest winter ever recorded in 2019–2020. Decades of scientific research about how our planet works shows us without a doubt that our climate is changing. Now, as we face the realities of this climate crisis, it is science that […]

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Soils Store Huge Amounts of Carbon, Warming May Unleash It

One of the world’s biggest carbon reservoirs is also one of the least glamorous: the dirt beneath our feet. Soil all over the world probably contains more than 2 trillion tons of stored carbon, scientists estimate. That’s at least three times more than there is floating around in the Earth’s atmosphere. Whether it will stay […]

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Rabbit Virus Could Provide Gene Therapy

Originally published in February 1967 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “Some biologists have wondered if it might someday be possible to alter the genetic material of a human being, for example, to remedy some metabolic deficiency. How would one introduce the desired genetic information? One possibility would be to administer a harmless virus that bears the […]