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Category: Science/mathematics

The lab-leak debate just got even messier

The lab-leak debate just got even messier

Daniel Engber and Adam Federman write: As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease. The latest piece…

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Covid vaccine immunity is waning — but how much does that matter?

Covid vaccine immunity is waning — but how much does that matter?

Nature reports: Six months ago, Miles Davenport and his colleagues made a bold prediction. On the basis of published results from vaccine trials and other data sources, they estimated that people immunized against COVID-19 would lose approximately half of their defensive antibodies every 108 days or so. As a result, vaccines that initially offered, say, 90% protection against mild cases of disease might only be 70% effective after 6 or 7 months. “It felt a little bit out on a…

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Serious infections linked to autism, study finds

Serious infections linked to autism, study finds

The Scientist reports: While researchers have found plenty of gene variants that seem to increase the risk of an autism diagnosis, it’s not clear why some people carrying these mutations develop autism spectrum disorders and some do not. In a study published today (September 17) in Science Advances, researchers point to a potential answer: severe infections during early childhood. After an early immune challenge, male mice with a mutated copy of the tuberous sclerosis complex 2 (Tsc2) gene developed deficits…

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A massive subterranean ‘tree’ is moving magma to Earth’s surface

A massive subterranean ‘tree’ is moving magma to Earth’s surface

Robin George Andrews writes: Réunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, is like a marshmallow hovering above the business end of a blowtorch. It sits above one of Earth’s mantle plumes — a tower of superheated rock that ascends from the deep mantle and flambés the bases of tectonic plates, the jigsaw pieces that make up the ever-changing face of the world. The plume’s effects are hard to miss: One of the island’s two massive volcanoes, the aptly…

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Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be authorized for children aged 5-11 but may pose risk for boys

Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be authorized for children aged 5-11 but may pose risk for boys

The Guardian reports: Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim. Their analysis of medical data suggests that boys aged 12 to 15, with no underlying medical conditions, are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid over a four-month period. Most children who…

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A new way to think about clean air

A new way to think about clean air

Sarah Zhang writes: When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city’s drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape….

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How racism warps science

How racism warps science

Alice B. Popejoy writes: Of the ten clinical genetics labs in the United States that share the most data with the research community, seven include ‘Caucasian’ as a multiple-choice category for patients’ racial or ethnic identity, despite the term having no scientific basis. Nearly 5,000 biomedical papers since 2010 have used ‘Caucasian’ to describe European populations. This suggests that too many scientists apply the term, either unbothered by or unaware of its roots in racist taxonomies used to justify slavery…

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Another study promoting ivermectin has suspect data

Another study promoting ivermectin has suspect data

BuzzFeed News reports: For anti-vaccine activists, the clinical trial results couldn’t have been better. The drug ivermectin, scientists in Argentina announced last year, prevented 100% of COVID-19 infections. That glowing finding helped spark a craze for the decades-old medication, which is normally used to delouse people and deworm livestock, and drive the perception that it is a silver bullet against the pandemic. “If you take it, you will not get sick,” an ivermectin-boosting physician told a Senate committee in December,…

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Medical science is failing millions of Covid long-haulers

Medical science is failing millions of Covid long-haulers

Ed Yong writes: While watching the scientific community grapple with long COVID, I have thought a lot about a scene in The Lord of the Rings. Faced with impending doom, the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask the powerful treelike ents for help. But despite the urgency of the situation, the ents are slow. They meet for hours, and after a lot of deliberation, they announce that they’ve agreed that the hobbits are not orcs. The hobbits, who already knew that,…

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Ending an eviction moratorium increases Covid-19 hazard, study finds

Ending an eviction moratorium increases Covid-19 hazard, study finds

MIT News reports: Ending an eviction moratorium for renters makes people in a community significantly more likely to contract Covid-19, according to a new study co-authored by MIT researchers. The study uses the variable timing of state-level moratoriums, issued and terminated at different points during the Covid-19 pandemic, to quantify their effect. It is the first study to identify the individual-level risk for people in different social circumstances, due to eviction moratoriums ending. The increased risk runs throughout communities, the…

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Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines against COVID-19 are the safest – and fastest – way to prevent the spread of variants. Luis Alvarez/ DigitalVision via Getty Images By Andrew Read, Penn State Takeaways A 2015 paper on a chicken virus showed vaccines could enable more deadly variants to spread – in chickens. But that outcome is rare. Only a minority of human and animal vaccines have affected the evolution of a virus. In most of those cases, evolution didn’t increase the severity of the…

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Having Covid once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine — but no infection parties, please

Having Covid once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine — but no infection parties, please

Science reports: The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label. The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become…

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Show me the data

Show me the data

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Who should get vaccine booster shots and when? Can vaccinated people with a breakthrough infection transmit the virus as easily as unvaccinated people? How many people with breakthrough infections die or get seriously ill, broken down by age and underlying health conditions? Confused? It’s not you. It’s the fog of pandemic, in which inadequate data hinders a clear understanding of how to fight a stealthy enemy. To overcome the fog of war, the Prussian general and military…

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How a cheap antidepressant emerged as a promising Covid-19 treatment

How a cheap antidepressant emerged as a promising Covid-19 treatment

Vox reports: Since Covid-19 patients started showing up at clinics and hospitals a year and a half ago, doctors and researchers have been hard at work trying to figure out how to treat them. Most drugs and treatments haven’t panned out, producing either no results or small ones in large-scale clinical trials. Many of the few that work are expensive and difficult to administer. Hydroxychloroquine, enthusiastically endorsed by President Trump last year, has been shown to have no measurable benefits….

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How I escaped my troubles through science

How I escaped my troubles through science

Subodh Patil writes: We’ve all felt the need. To just drop whatever loads we’re bearing, retreating to some private realm where our worldly concerns fade into oblivion. Freed from responsibilities, anxieties, hurts, and other miscellaneous burdens, if only transiently. My earliest recollection of the urge must’ve been when I was around 5. My mother was colorfully scolding me the way Indian mothers do, for something I probably did but nevertheless felt unjustly prosecuted for. Turning to the sky beyond the…

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