In late July, volunteers began receiving doses of a potential COVID-19 vaccine in the latest stage of a clinical trial at NYU Langone Health in New York City. The more than 1,000 names on the waiting list suggest the local response to the trial “has been outstanding,” says Mark Mulligan, an infectious disease specialist who […]
The Indian monsoon season is in full swing, drenching the streets of Mumbai and flooding the plains of Bihar. But dark clouds of another kind—disease, hunger and death—are also gathering fast. India is now ahead of all other countries in terms of the number of new recorded COVID-19 cases per day—close to 70,000 in mid-August. […]
“Backing is applied microbiology,” according to the book Modernist Bread. During pandemic lockdowns, many people started baking their own bread. Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs talks about Modernist Bread, for which he was a writer and editor. Source link
Update August 24: The US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization on August 23 to treat COVID-19 with convalescent plasma. US President Donald Trump has called on COVID-19 survivors to donate their blood plasma as a treatment for the disease, saying that “it’s had tremendous response so far”. Meanwhile, rumours have been swirling […]
In reaction to the global COVID-19 pandemic, attention has focused on the potential role of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to further regulate—or ban—various form of the wildlife trade. Banning the wild animal trade, particularly for human consumption, means stopping the movement of some zoonotic diseases—infections […]
“This is interesting. Not too thick,” said Jim Crawford, an atmospheric chemist wearing a motion-sickness patch behind his ear. It was afternoon in late July 2019, and Crawford was bearing down on a skein of wildfire smoke visible from the cockpit of a former commercial jet that NASA had retrofitted into an airborne laboratory. In […]
Firefighters battled nearly two dozen wildfires in California yesterday after a week of raging blazes blackened more than 1 million acres across the state. The fast-moving fires, which are seen by many scientists as a sign of climate change, have killed five people, destroyed more than 1,000 structures and forced thousands to flee. More than […]
This past May, when it finally sank in that I was going to be stuck at home for a very long time because of the pandemic, I took up a hobby that had never especially appealed to me before: birding. I cleaned my neglected bird feeder and filled it with seed, retrieved my binoculars from […]
It is a truism among scientists that our enterprise benefits humanity because of the technological breakthroughs that follow in discovery’s wake. And it is a truism among historians that the relation between science and technology is far more complex and much less linear than people often assume. Before the 19th century, invention and innovation emerged […]
Scientific American August 2020 Newly analyzed remains depict the scope of a devastating event The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake sent a tsunami surging outward from Sumatra, devastating coastlines across Southeast Asia but doing much less damage by the time it reached Africa. Many scientists have since considered the tsunami risk in parts of East Africa […]