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. STAT has published a nicely written, technical piece by Sharon Begley that describes some unusual features of how SARS-CoV-2 infects our cells and hijacks our genes to make copies to itself. […]
Much is being written today on the role of wildlife trade in the COVID pandemic. It would be irresponsible for any government, or anyone really, not to ask how we can prevent the next such pandemic, and what we should do about the wildlife trade in that context. While many are suggesting responses that will […]
I was listening to the comforting background hum of the old refrigerator in my rented apartment. The noise stopped suddenly; the only sound left was the tinnitus ringing in my ears. From my chair, I looked out through the sliding glass door. Wind and rain animated the bright-yellow flannel bushes on the hillside. California had […]
Green snow algae are some of Antarctica’s smallest living organisms, delicate enough to examine by microscope. But when they grow together in clumps, they’re visible from space—a rich, green stain on the surface of the white snow. Now, scientists are using satellite images to determine how much algae is growing in Antarctica. One of these […]
Originally published in April 1860 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “The terrible epidemic of cattle disease, by its continuous spreading, threatens to become one of the greatest scourges that has ever visited the country. The imagination is appalled at the contemplation of the thousands of herds from Maine to Texas being visited by this wasting and […]
As the world grapples with how to safely reopen society in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists have been racing to understand whether COVID-19 infection confers immunity—and how long such immunity might last. A lot hangs in the balance: A strong immune response could mean people who have already been infected would be able […]
The year 2020 was on track to be a good one for South Sudan’s polio hunters. But now many of those working in the global polio eradication campaign are grappling with the potential reversal of much of their work. All house-to-house immunization efforts have been suspended because of the continuing coronavirus pandemic. Disease surveillance officers […]
In early April, Maura Lewinger, a mother of three from New York, told CNN about saying goodbye to her 42-year old husband over FaceTime as he died from coronavirus in the hospital. Unable to be with him at the bedside because of the danger, she, like thousands of others, faced the most difficult moment of […]
More than 200 million people get malaria each year. And about half a million die—mostly in Africa, many of them children. And those staggering numbers are an improvement. Malaria deaths have been cut in half since 2000. In many places, a remarkably simple tool has led the fight: bed nets treated with a mild insecticide […]
A young Ernest Hemingway, badly injured by an exploding shell on a World War I battlefield, wrote in a letter home that “dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death, and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever […]