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Category: Science/mathematics

How dangerous Omicron is, won’t be known for weeks

How dangerous Omicron is, won’t be known for weeks

Science reports: At 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in San Diego, received a message on Slack: “This variant is completely insane.” Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh was reacting to a new SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence found in three samples collected in Botswana on 11 November and one picked up a week later in a traveler from South Africa to Hong Kong. Andersen looked at the data and then replied: “Holy shit—that…

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What we need to understand about the Omicron variant

What we need to understand about the Omicron variant

Ashish Jha asks: How worrisome is Omicron? There are three key questions that help scientists understand how consequential any variant might be. The first question is whether the variant is more transmissible than the current, prevalent Delta strain? Second, does it cause more severe disease? And third, will it render our immune defenses — from vaccines and prior infections — less effective (a phenomenon known as immune escape)? On transmissibility, the data, while early, look worrisome. This new variant appears…

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What impossible meant to Richard Feynman

What impossible meant to Richard Feynman

Paul J. Steinhardt writes: Impossible! The word resonated throughout the large lecture hall. I had just finished describing a revolutionary concept for a new type of matter that my graduate student, Dov Levine, and I had invented. The Caltech lecture room was packed with scientists from every discipline across campus. The discussion had gone remarkably well. But just as the last of the crowd was filing out, there arose a familiar, booming voice and that word: “Impossible!” I could have…

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First known Covid case was vendor at Wuhan market, scientist claims

First known Covid case was vendor at Wuhan market, scientist claims

The New York Times reports: A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported on Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had most likely gotten the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests that the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many miles from it. The report, published on Thursday in the prestigious journal…

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Who said science and art were two cultures?

Who said science and art were two cultures?

Kevin Berger writes: On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow declared that a gulf of mutual incomprehension divided literary intellectuals and scientists. “The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition,” Snow said. “On the…

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Men are just as emotional as women, study suggests

Men are just as emotional as women, study suggests

Alison Escalante writes: It is not a compliment to call someone “emotional.” We incorrectly see emotion as the opposite of the “rational” or “effective,” even though neuroscientists have long known that emotion is what drives intelligent thought. Now scientists have just revealed another area where we get emotion completely wrong. Despite centuries of stereotypes, a new study finds that men are just as emotional as women. Men have the same ups and downs, highs and lows as women do. And…

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Earth’s first continents may have appeared three-quarters of a billion years earlier than previously thought

Earth’s first continents may have appeared three-quarters of a billion years earlier than previously thought

Inside Science reports: Earth’s first continents may have emerged from the oceans roughly 750 million years earlier than previously thought, rising from the seas in a manner completely unlike modern continents. These early masses of solid rock may have floated buoyantly atop magma welling up from below, a new study finds. Unlike any other known planet, Earth possesses both continents and oceans on its surface. The emergence of land from sea greatly influenced Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, climate and proliferation of…

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An idea about safety that keeps putting us in danger

An idea about safety that keeps putting us in danger

Tim Requarth writes: Remember March of 2020, before masks? Back then, as we became aware that the coronavirus was circulating around the country at an alarming clip, packed up our offices, and pulled our kids out of in-person school, the nation’s top experts urged us not to bother covering our nose and mouths. Among the complex reasons for the hesitation was a simple one: distrust of the public. “I worry that if people put on masks, then they’ll think, OK,…

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Vaccine confers better protection than natural immunity, CDC finds

Vaccine confers better protection than natural immunity, CDC finds

Yahoo News reports: Earlier this month, the conservative radio host Dennis Prager announced he had contracted the coronavirus. This was, as far as he was concerned, good news. The unvaccinated Prager had hoped to protect himself against COVID-19 the old-fashioned way: by getting sick. “It is infinitely preferable to have natural immunity than vaccine immunity,” Prager said, echoing an anti-vaccine argument echoed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other pro-Trump figures who have turned coronavirus vaccination into a culture war…

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The search for people who never get Covid

The search for people who never get Covid

Nature reports: Imagine being born naturally resistant to SARS-CoV-2, and never having to worry about contracting COVID-19 or spreading the virus. If you have this superpower, researchers want to meet you, to enrol you in their study. As described in a paper in Nature Immunology this month, an international team of scientists has launched a global hunt for people who are genetically resistant to infection with the pandemic virus. The team hopes that identifying the genes protecting these individuals could…

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Why I still believe Covid-19 could not have originated in a lab

Why I still believe Covid-19 could not have originated in a lab

By Wendy Orent Where did the Covid-19 pandemic come from? Almost since the beginning of the outbreak, a bitter and explosive controversy has raged over the origins of the novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2. The rapid shut-down of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan immediately suggested to Western observers that the Chinese government itself thought that the market was the source, especially since 26 out of 47 of the original cases could be linked to it. An article published…

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Gain of function research

Gain of function research

Derek Lowe writes: The NIH has not been doing itself any favors recently when it comes to questions about coronavirus research. Ever since the advent of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, there have been questions about coronavirus work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My own view hasn’t really changed since the last time I wrote about that particular issue: I think a natural origin for the current virus is very much more likely than it being some sort of engineering…

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The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

Nature reports: For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) that allows researchers to view the proteins in cells at high resolution. In these videos, she could see all kinds of striking things, such as the inner workings of cells and the compartments inside them, in unprecedented detail. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and…

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Is this the beginning of techno-eugenics?

Is this the beginning of techno-eugenics?

Philip Ball writes: The birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978 provoked a media frenzy. In comparison, a little girl named Aurea born by IVF in May 2020 went almost unnoticed. Yet she represents a significant first in assisted reproduction too, for the embryo from which she grew was selected from others based on polygenic screening before implantation, to optimise her health prospects. For both scientific and ethical reasons, this new type of genetic screening is highly…

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Science vs. medical bureaucracy

Science vs. medical bureaucracy

David Leonhardt writes: For the 15 million Americans who have received the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine, the confusing messages from the federal government just keep coming. An F.D.A. advisory panel is scheduled to vote today on whether J. & J. recipients should receive a booster shot. But the panel is not likely to vote on what seems to be the most relevant question: Should the booster shot come from one of the other vaccines — Pfizer’s or Moderna’s, which…

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Ivermectin is a Nobel Prize-winning wonder drug – but not for Covid

Ivermectin is a Nobel Prize-winning wonder drug – but not for Covid

While ivermectin was originally used to treat river blindness, it has also been repurposed to treat other human parasitic infections. ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP via Getty Images By Jeffrey R. Aeschlimann, University of Connecticut Ivermectin is an over 30-year-old wonder drug that treats life- and sight-threatening parasitic infections. Its lasting influence on global health has been so profound that two of the key researchers in its discovery and development won the Nobel Prize in 2015. I’ve been an infectious disease pharmacist for…

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