Adhering to social distancing guidelines, I placed the bag on the doorknob, knocked three times loudly, and quickly stepped back six feet Nothing. I knocked once again and placed my ear by the door. The faint sound of footsteps informed me that “Mr. Roberts” (a pseudonym) was making his way to the door, hindered by […]
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Coronavirus: How It Infects Us and How We Might Stop It
How does SARS-CoV-2 sneak into our body? What can our immune system do and how can the virus sometimes defeat it? How do the leading drug and vaccine candidates work? Will the virus plague us… — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com Source link
Leftovers Are A Food Waste Problem
When restaurants first shut down early in the pandemic, Americans raided grocery stores. They started cooking more at home. And, presumably, generating more leftovers. Those leftovers can be a convenient future meal—but they’ve got a dark side, too. “There’s a tendency that if you put an item on a plate that’s a leftover, there’s a […]
Blood and Silicon: New Electronics-Cooling System Mimics Human Capillaries
As electronics get steadily smaller and denser, they also get hotter. Their components do not function best at high temperatures, so dealing with the escalating heat that colliding electrons produce as they flow through the semiconductors in these shrinking items is a huge—and increasingly pressing—technological challenge. There are various ways to chill components, ranging from […]
How Good a Diet Is Intermittent Fasting?
Healthy weight management comes with many perks. Among the proven benefits: a reduced risk of diabetes, less joint pain, lower chances of certain cancers and an overall fitter cardiovascular system. Some regimens, particularly the Mediterranean diet, seem especially well suited to delivering these advantages, though, as with all diets, only to the degree that people […]
How Scientists Discovered the Staggering Complexity of Human Evolution
In 1859, 14 years after the founding of this magazine, Charles Darwin published the most important scientific book ever written. On the Origin of Species revolutionized society’s understanding of the natural world. Challenging Victorian dogma, Darwin argued that species were not immutable, each one specially created by God. Rather life on earth, in all its […]
Uber Commits to 100 Percent EVs–Will It Work?
Uber Technologies Inc. yesterday pledged to use only electric vehicles by 2030 in the United States, Canada and Europe, and by 2040 in the rest of the world. The splashy climate announcement aligned Uber with rival Lyft Inc., which vowed to reach 100% EVs by 2030 in late June (Climatewire, June 22). It raised questions, […]
Scientists React to Halt of Leading Coronavirus Vaccine Trial
Enrolment in global trials of a leading coronavirus-vaccine candidate are on hold after a ‘suspected adverse event’ in a person who received the vaccine in the United Kingdom. Scientists say that it’s too soon to say what impact this might have on the global push to develop a vaccine, but that the news highlights the […]
Some Dinosaurs Probably Nested in Arctic
“Those vicious, predatory dinosaurs that tended to be fairly small—six to nine, ten feet long snout to tail. They’re certainly in the Jurassic Park movies, the things that terrorize people.” Anthony Fiorillo, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. For more than two decades now, Fiorillo has been digging up dinosaur fossils hundreds […]
COVID-19’s Disparate Impacts Are Not a Story about Race
George Floyd could not breathe. Like other Americans now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, he gasped horribly for air before his world went dark. Unlike them, his agony was not born from a lung-ravaging virus. He was strangled. He was killed in public, with the weight of anti-Black hatred kneeling terribly—almost boastfully—down on his […]