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Category: Science/mathematics

Test flight for sunlight-blocking geoengineering research is canceled

Test flight for sunlight-blocking geoengineering research is canceled

The New York Times reports: A test flight for researching ways to cool Earth by blocking sunlight will not take place as planned in Sweden this June, following objections from environmentalists, scientists and Indigenous groups there. The Swedish Space Corporation said this week it had canceled plans for the flight, in which it would have launched a high-altitude balloon, on behalf of researchers, from its facility in the Arctic. It would have been the first flight of a long-planned experiment…

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Sunlight inactivates coronavirus eight times faster than predicted. We need to know why

Sunlight inactivates coronavirus eight times faster than predicted. We need to know why

Science Alert reports: A team of scientists is calling for greater research into how sunlight inactivates SARS-CoV-2 after realizing there’s a glaring discrepancy between the most recent theory and experimental results. UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineer Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz and colleagues noticed the virus was inactivated as much as eight times faster in experiments than the most recent theoretical model predicted. “The theory assumes that inactivation works by having UVB hit the RNA of the virus, damaging it,” explained Luzzatto-Fegiz. But…

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Rediet Abebe tackles inequality through algorithms

Rediet Abebe tackles inequality through algorithms

Rachel Crowell writes: When Rediet Abebe arrived at Harvard University as an undergraduate in 2009, she planned to study mathematics. But her experiences with the Cambridge public schools soon changed her plans. Abebe, 29, is from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital and largest city. When residents there didn’t have the resources they needed, she attributed it to community-level scarcity. But she found that argument unconvincing when she learned about educational inequality in Cambridge’s public schools, which she observed struggling in an…

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U.K. vaccination approach puts U.S. to shame

U.K. vaccination approach puts U.S. to shame

Marty Makary writes: The U.S. will soon achieve herd immunity against the novel coronavirus, but the U.K. will get there sooner. That’s because medical leaders across the pond put the priority on first-dose vaccination, delaying booster shots so that more people could get the initial shot. Fifty-nine percent of British adults are now vaccinated with one dose, vs. only 38% in the U.S. Far more Americans are fully vaccinated—21% have received either a booster or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson…

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Biden task force to probe science manipulation under Trump

Biden task force to probe science manipulation under Trump

NBC News reports: A new White House task force will examine instances where the Trump administration may have distorted or suppressed science in critical government decisions, with an eye toward creating fail-safes to prevent it from happening again, the White House said Monday. In a letter to federal agencies, obtained by NBC News, the White House said the task force’s mandate would include identifying whether current policies effectively “prevent improper political interference in the conduct of scientific research” and “prevent…

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A Biden administration strategy: Send in the scientists

A Biden administration strategy: Send in the scientists

The New York Times reports: More than a decade ago, a woman at a bar near the Columbia University campus turned to Gavin Schmidt and asked if he knew the main component of air. “Yes, nitrogen,” he replied. His answer lost her a bet about whether the average stranger at the bar would know anything about atmospheric chemistry. Two years later, they were married. Sometimes the nerds win. Today Dr. Schmidt is one of the most prominent scientists warning the…

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New data helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life

New data helps clarify how plate tectonics drove the evolution of complex life

Howard Lee writes: In 2016, the geochemists Jonas Tusch and Carsten Münker hammered a thousand pounds of rock from the Australian Outback and airfreighted it home to Cologne, Germany. Five years of sawing, crushing, dissolving and analyzing later, they have coaxed from those rocks a secret hidden for eons: the era when plate tectonics began. Earth’s fractured carapace of rigid, interlocking plates is unique in the solar system. Scientists increasingly connect it to our planet’s other special features, such as…

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Five reasons why Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

Five reasons why Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

Nature reports: As COVID-19 vaccination rates pick up around the world, people have reasonably begun to ask: how much longer will this pandemic last? It’s an issue surrounded with uncertainties. But the once-popular idea that enough people will eventually gain immunity to SARS-CoV-2 to block most transmission — a ‘herd-immunity threshold’ — is starting to look unlikely. That threshold is generally achievable only with high vaccination rates, and many scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse,…

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Coronavirus is evolving but so are our antibodies

Coronavirus is evolving but so are our antibodies

Antibodies (white) binding to a coronavirus (red and orange). Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock By Sarah L Caddy, University of Cambridge and Meng Wang, University of Cambridge The emergence of “variants of concern” has raised questions about our long-term immunity to the coronavirus. Will the antibodies we make after being infected with or vaccinated against the dominant lineage, called D614G, protect us against future viral variants? To answer this question, scientists have been examining how our antibody responses to the coronavirus develop over…

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DNA databases are too white

DNA databases are too white

Tina Hesman Saey writes: It’s been two decades since the Human Genome Project first unveiled a rough draft of our genetic instruction book. The promise of that medical moon shot was that doctors would soon be able to look at an individual’s DNA and prescribe the right medicines for that person’s illness or even prevent certain diseases. That promise, known as precision medicine, has yet to be fulfilled in any widespread way. True, researchers are getting clues about some genetic…

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Tracking the coronavirus’s evolution, letter by letter, is revolutionizing pandemic science

Tracking the coronavirus’s evolution, letter by letter, is revolutionizing pandemic science

Sarah Zhang writes: In the beginning, there was one. The first genome for the virus causing a mysterious illness we had not yet named COVID-19 was shared by scientists on January 10, 2020. That single genome alerted the world to the danger of a novel coronavirus. It was the basis of new tests as countries scrambled to find the virus within their own borders. And it became the template for vaccines, the same ones now making their way to millions…

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Unlocking the mysteries of long COVID

Unlocking the mysteries of long COVID

Meghan O’Rourke writes: The quest at mount sinai began with a mystery. During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in New York City, Zijian Chen, an endocrinologist, had been appointed medical director of the hospital’s new Center for Post-COVID Care, dedicated both to research and to helping recovering patients “transition from hospital to home,” as Mount Sinai put it. One day last spring, he turned to an online survey of COVID‑19 patients who were more than a month past…

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Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same

Yes, all of the COVID-19 vaccines are very good. No, they’re not all the same

Hilda Bastian writes: Public-health officials are enthusiastic about the new, single-shot COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, despite its having a somewhat lower efficacy at preventing symptomatic illness than other available options. Although clinical-trial data peg that rate at 72 percent in the United States, compared with 94 and 95 percent for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, many experts say we shouldn’t fixate on those numbers. Much more germane, they say, is the fact that the Johnson & Johnson shot,…

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The virus is mutating — but we can still beat it, one vaccination at a time

The virus is mutating — but we can still beat it, one vaccination at a time

Dhruv Khullar writes: Last March, during the first wave of the pandemic, Adriana Heguy set out to sequence coronavirus genomes. At the time, New York City’s hospitals were filling up, and American testing capacity was abysmal; the focus was on increasing testing, to figure out who had the virus and who didn’t. But Heguy, the director of the Genome Technology Center at N.Y.U. Langone Health, recognized that diagnostic tests weren’t enough. Tracking mutations in the virus’s genetic code would be…

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The short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus

The short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus

Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell write: When experts envision the future of the coronavirus, many predict that it will become a seasonal pathogen that won’t be much more than a nuisance for most of us who have been vaccinated or previously exposed to it. But how long that process takes — and how much damage the virus inflicts in the interim — is still anyone’s guess. “The most predictable thing about this coronavirus is its unpredictability,” said Howard Markel, a…

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How to understand Covid-19 variants and their effects on vaccines

How to understand Covid-19 variants and their effects on vaccines

Tara C. Smith writes: Viruses evolve. It’s what they do. That’s especially true for a pandemic virus like SARS-CoV-2, the one behind COVID-19. When a population lacks immunity and transmission is extensive, we expect viral mutations to appear frequently simply due to the number of viruses replicating in a short period of time. And the growing presence of immune individuals means that the viruses that can still transmit in these partially immune populations will be favored over the original version….

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