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. Please consider a monthly contribution to support this newsletter. Forecasts can be frustratingly speculative and inaccurate, but journalist Lydia Denworth‘s concise sketch of “how the COVID-19 pandemic could end” is worth […]
Delivering accurate health messages to people around the world has never been more urgent than during the COVID-19 pandemic. But delivery means little when messages are left unopened or unattended. In order to truly reach the public with lifesaving health information, public health authorities need to redesign their messages to grab the public’s attention and […]
Back in 1986 South African biologist Rodney Jackson and his now wife Darla Hillard published three “self-portraits” that would shift the course of conservation. Jackson and Hillard got these images by hiding a camera—equipped with a six-volt battery, flash and pressure pad—in a gorge in Nepal known to be frequented by snow leopards. It took […]
Originally published in February 1917 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “A report to the French Academy of Sciences tells of a unique experiment in combating a mosquito plague. Myriads of mosquitoes infest the rice plantations of Madagascar, and it occurred to Dr. Legendre to fight the marsh fever [malaria] caused by the bite of the mosquito […]
Back in 2010 Matt Thompson, then with National Public Radio, forecast in an op-ed that “at some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent.” He called that moment the “Speakularity,” in a sly reference to inventor Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the “singularity,” in which our minds will be […]
Observations | Opinion The pandemic is no excuse to abandon chronic disease management and prevention Advertisement The need for chronic disease management and prevention does not disappear during a pandemic. As I am a gastroenterologist and colon cancer researcher, the irony of cancelling procedures meant to detect colorectal cancer at an early stage during Colon […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic makes grimly clear, cities are arguably humanity’s greatest invention, but densely populated metropolises also make us vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease. Yet humans aren’t the only species that face this problem. Honey bees have lived social lives for tens of millions of years, making them some of the oldest […]
If there’s one thing we know about viruses, it’s that they love to spread. The novel coronavirus is happy to use us humans as its host. Other viruses fancy honeybees. But like us, bees fight back. In the case of one particular virus, called Israeli acute paralysis virus, a study shows that honeybees actually use […]
In trying to make sense of this rapidly changing COVID-19 world, I reflected on the recent passing of one of the great physicists of our time, my former Princeton colleague and Nobel laureate, the late Phil Anderson. Anderson made seminal contributions to our understanding of fundamental interactions that make up matter, but to many scientists […]
An experimental drug—and one of the world’s best hopes against COVID-19—could shorten the time to recovery from coronavirus infection, according to the largest and most rigorous clinical trial of the compound. The experimental drug, called remdesivir, interferes with replication of some viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the current pandemic. On 29 April, Anthony […]