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Category: Science/mathematics

The rare Chilean soapbark tree that could help stop the pandemic

The rare Chilean soapbark tree that could help stop the pandemic

Brendan Borrell writes: In early April, Paul Hiley was kicking back in the executive suite at Desert King International LLC, gazing out the window at the San Diego sunshine and daydreaming about his golf game. California had issued its initial stay-at-home order for COVID-19, but apart from the hand sanitizer around the office, life was more or less normal. Retirement was on the horizon for Hiley. Maybe he’d sell the business. Maybe his son, Damian, would take over. For more…

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Scientists may have discovered new secretive organs in the center of your head

Scientists may have discovered new secretive organs in the center of your head

The New York Times reports: After millenniums of careful slicing and dicing, it might seem as though scientists have figured out human anatomy. A few dozen organs, a couple hundred bones and connective tissue to tie it all together. But despite centuries of scrutiny, the body is still capable of surprising scientists. A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands, lurking in the nook…

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Herd immunity is not a plan; it’s magical thinking

Herd immunity is not a plan; it’s magical thinking

Gigi Kwik Gronvall and Rachel West write: Ten months into the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, there is mounting frustration that life is not back to “normal.” Many U.S. schools and businesses remain closed, people are hesitant to fly and enjoy vacations, and in many places, restaurants and indoor activities are sharply limited, with severe economic consequences. With patience wearing thin, it may be tempting to consider policies that give us a return to normalcy, whatever the consequences. This wishful thinking describes the…

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An autoimmune-like antibody response is linked with severe COVID-19

An autoimmune-like antibody response is linked with severe COVID-19

Are patients with severe COVID-19 victims of their own immune response? JOAQUIN SARMIENTO/Getty Images By Matthew Woodruff, Emory University In the earliest days of the pandemic, many immunologists, including me, assumed that patients who produced high quantities of antibodies early in infection would be free from disease. We were wrong. Several months into studying COVID-19, like other scientists, I’ve come to realize the picture is far more complicated. A recent research study published by my colleagues and me adds more…

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How do pandemics end? History suggests diseases fade but are almost never truly gone

How do pandemics end? History suggests diseases fade but are almost never truly gone

The COVID-19 new normal might be here for quite some time. SolStock/E+ via Getty Images By Nükhet Varlik, University of South Carolina When will the pandemic end? All these months in, with over 37 million COVID-19 cases and more than 1 million deaths globally, you may be wondering, with increasing exasperation, how long this will continue. Since the beginning of the pandemic, epidemiologists and public health specialists have been using mathematical models to forecast the future in an effort to…

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Fauci: Trump’s rapid recovery, while welcome, ‘amplifies’ public misunderstanding of Covid-19

Fauci: Trump’s rapid recovery, while welcome, ‘amplifies’ public misunderstanding of Covid-19

STAT reports: Health officials have struggled to convey the seriousness of Covid-19 to many Americans. President Trump’s rapid recovery from the disease, while welcome by all, makes the challenge even more difficult, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases acknowledged. Trump’s quick bounce-back from his infection will likely underscore the mistaken belief some people have that the disease does not present significant health risks, Fauci said in an interview with STAT. “We’re all glad that…

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Could this era of social distancing hasten the demise of flu?

Could this era of social distancing hasten the demise of flu?

Zaria Gorvett writes: Back in January 2020, at the end of the Australian summer, the country had 6,962 cases of the flu confirmed via a laboratory test. At this time, Covid-19 was still known only as “the novel coronavirus” and mostly confined to China. Ordinarily, you would have expected to see more and more cases of the flu as the days became shorter and winter descended. Instead, something unexpected happened. By April there were just 229 cases of the flu…

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‘I feel like I have dementia’: Brain fog plagues Covid survivors

‘I feel like I have dementia’: Brain fog plagues Covid survivors

The New York Times reports: After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier. Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot. Lisa Mizelle, a veteran nurse practitioner at an urgent care clinic who…

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There is no ‘scientific divide’ over herd immunity

There is no ‘scientific divide’ over herd immunity

Matt Reynolds writes: On October 4, in a wood-panelled room at an event hosted by a libertarian think tank, three scientists signed a document that they say offers an alternative way of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. The signing of this so-called “Great Barrington Declaration” was greeted with clinking champagne glasses before the signatories jetted off to Washington DC on the invite of White House coronavirus advisor Scott Atlas. Aside from the three lead signatories, there is little about the…

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When COVID-19 superspreaders are talking, where you sit in the room matters

When COVID-19 superspreaders are talking, where you sit in the room matters

Classroom experiments show how the coronavirus can spread and who’s at greatest risk. Tom Werner via Getty Images By Suresh Dhaniyala, Clarkson University It doesn’t take long for airborne coronavirus particles to make their way through a room. At first, only people sitting near an infected speaker are at high risk, but as the meeting or class goes on, the tiny aerosols can spread. That doesn’t mean everyone faces the same level of risk, however. As an engineer, I have…

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What Earth owes to black holes

What Earth owes to black holes

Marina Koren writes: The first picture ever captured of a black hole, one situated in the center of another galaxy, was pretty blurry. Seen in silhouette, it appeared fuzzy, as did the ring of hot gas surrounding it. The reaction of the public did not necessarily match the unalloyed joy of astronomers accustomed to extracting cosmic wonders from lines in a graph. To anyone more familiar with black holes from epic space films, this one mostly looked like a flame-glazed…

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CDC says airborne transmission plays a role in coronavirus spread

CDC says airborne transmission plays a role in coronavirus spread

The Washington Post reports: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged Monday that people can sometimes be infected with the coronavirus through airborne transmission, especially in enclosed spaces with inadequate ventilation. The long-awaited update to the agency Web page explaining how the virus spreads represents an official acknowledgment of growing evidence that under certain conditions, people farther than six feet apart can become infected by tiny droplets and particles that float in the air for minutes and hours, and…

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Huge study of coronavirus cases in India offers some surprises to scientists

Huge study of coronavirus cases in India offers some surprises to scientists

The New York Times reports: With 1.3 billion people jostling for space, India has always been a hospitable environment for infectious diseases of every kind. And the coronavirus has proved to be no exception: The country now has more than six million cases, second only to the United States. An ambitious study of nearly 85,000 of those cases and nearly 600,000 of their contacts, published Wednesday in the journal Science, offers important insights not just for India, but for other…

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Why do some people weather a coronavirus infection unscathed?

Why do some people weather a coronavirus infection unscathed?

By Emily Laber-Warren One of the reasons Covid-19 has spread so swiftly around the globe is that for the first days after infection, people feel healthy. Instead of staying home in bed, they may be out and about, unknowingly passing the virus along. But in addition to these pre-symptomatic patients, the relentless silent spread of this pandemic is also facilitated by a more mysterious group of people: the so-called asymptomatics. According to various estimates, between 20 and 45 percent of the…

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Mysterious circles in the desert explained by the Turing pattern

Mysterious circles in the desert explained by the Turing pattern

Science Alert reports: It was 1952, and Alan Turing was about to reshape humanity’s understanding of biology. In a landmark paper, the English mathematician introduced what became known as the Turing pattern – the notion that the dynamics of certain uniform systems could give rise to stable patterns when disturbed. Such ‘order from disturbance’ has become the theoretical basis for all sorts of strange, repeated motifs seen in the natural world. It was a good theory. So good, in fact,…

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Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans show signs of past coronavirus infection, large national study finds

Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans show signs of past coronavirus infection, large national study finds

The Washington Post reports: Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans showed signs of past infection with the novel coronavirus as of late July, suggesting that most of the country may still be vulnerable to infection, according to one of the largest studies of its kind published Friday in the journal the Lancet. That proportion is an estimate based on the percentage of dialysis patients whose immune systems produced coronavirus antibodies. It does not indicate exactly how many Americans may be…

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