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Category: Science/mathematics

How sunlight, the immune system, and Covid-19 interact

How sunlight, the immune system, and Covid-19 interact

Markham Heid writes: Last month, during a now-infamous press conference, Donald Trump speculated about the ways in which sunlight and chemical disinfectants could help protect people from the threat of Covid-19. Trump seemed to suggest that injecting disinfectants could have some utility — a comment that drew immediate scrutiny and scorn. Much less attention was paid to the president’s statement that sunlight might safeguard people from the virus. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet…

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The coronavirus is mutating, but that’s not necessarily good or bad

The coronavirus is mutating, but that’s not necessarily good or bad

Jeremy Draghi and C. Brandon Ogbunu write: In early March, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Science Review published a peer-reviewed study titled “On the Origin and Continuing Evolution of SARS-CoV-2.” The authors argued that the various strains of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, could be grouped into two clusters: An “L” type, which was predominant during the early weeks of the outbreak in Wuhan, and an “S” type, which could be distinguished from the L type by only…

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Vitamin D determines severity in Covid-19

Vitamin D determines severity in Covid-19

Trinity College Dublin: Researchers from Trinity College Dublin are calling on the government in Ireland to change recommendations for vitamin D supplements. A new publication from Dr. Eamon Laird and Professor Rose Anne Kenny, School of Medicine, and the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), in collaboration with Professor Jon Rhodes at University of Liverpool, highlights the association between vitamin D levels and mortality from COVID-19. The authors of the article, just published in the Irish Medical Journal, analyzed all…

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Scientist who fought Ebola and HIV reflects on facing death from Covid-19

Scientist who fought Ebola and HIV reflects on facing death from Covid-19

Science reports: Virologist Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, fell ill with COVID-19 in mid-March. He spent a week in a hospital and has been recovering at his home in London since. Climbing a flight of stairs still leaves him breathless. Piot, who grew up in Belgium, was one of the discoverers of the Ebola virus in 1976 and spent his career fighting infectious diseases. He headed the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS…

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Trump’s America-first push for a coronavirus vaccine

Trump’s America-first push for a coronavirus vaccine

Science reports: Conventional wisdom is that a vaccine for COVID-19 is at least 1 year away, but the organizers of a U.S. government push called Operation Warp Speed have little use for conventional wisdom. The project, vaguely described to date but likely to be formally announced by the White House in the coming days, will pick a diverse set of vaccine candidates and pour essentially limitless resources into unprecedented comparative studies in animals, fast-tracked human trials, and manufacturing. Eschewing international…

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The many ways SARS-CoV-2 attacks the human body

The many ways SARS-CoV-2 attacks the human body

The Washington Post reports: Deborah Coughlin was neither short of breath nor coughing. In those first days after she became infected by the novel coronavirus, her fever never spiked above 100 degrees. It was vomiting and diarrhea that brought her to a Hartford, Conn., emergency room on May 1. “You would have thought it was a stomach virus,” said her daughter, Catherina Coleman. “She was talking and walking and completely coherent.” But even as Coughlin, 67, chatted with her daughters…

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What needs to go right to get a coronavirus vaccine in 12-18 months

What needs to go right to get a coronavirus vaccine in 12-18 months

A coronavirus vaccine is coming, but when? Francesco Carta fotografo/Moment via Getty Images By Marcos E. García-Ojeda, University of California, Merced I, like many Americans, miss the pre-pandemic world of hugging family and friends, going to work and having dinner at a restaurant. A protective vaccine for SARS-Cov2 is likely to be the most effective public health tool to get back to that world. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautiously estimates that a…

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Could BCG, a 100-year-old vaccine for tuberculosis, protect against coronavirus?

Could BCG, a 100-year-old vaccine for tuberculosis, protect against coronavirus?

Shutterstock By Kylie Quinn, RMIT University; Joanna Kirman, University of Otago; Katie Louise Flanagan, University of Tasmania, and Magdalena Plebanski, RMIT University This week, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced it will donate A$10 million to help fund an Australian trial testing whether a very old vaccine, BCG, can be used against a new threat, COVID-19. So what is the BCG vaccine and what might its place be in the fight against coronavirus? The ABCs of BCG The BCG…

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Sugars on coronavirus spike protein offer vaccine clues

Sugars on coronavirus spike protein offer vaccine clues

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Cells are furry. That might come as a surprise, since textbook illustrations so often represent a cell as smooth — “something like a balloon full of water,” said Elisa Fadda, a computational chemist at Maynooth University in Ireland. “But that is absolutely not true.” In reality, the surface of a cell is adorned with a forest canopy of sugars, intricate and diverse clusters of carbohydrates that extend like branches and leaves from protein tree trunks. And because…

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Beware overblown claims about new strains of the coronavirus

Beware overblown claims about new strains of the coronavirus

Ed Yong writes: As if the pandemic weren’t bad enough, on April 30, a team led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory released a paper that purportedly described “the emergence of a more transmissible form” of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. This new form, the team wrote, “began spreading in Europe in early February.” Whenever it appeared in a new place, including the U.S., it rapidly rose to dominance. Its success, the team suggested, is likely due to a single…

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General population probably won’t have vaccine until the second half of 2021 — ‘and that’s if everything works OK’

General population probably won’t have vaccine until the second half of 2021 — ‘and that’s if everything works OK’

STAT reports: The WHO has called for equitable sharing of Covid-19 vaccines, insisting they should be seen as a global resource. But there have been concerns from the earliest days of this pandemic that countries that are home to vaccine production facilities will nationalize any output to ensure domestic needs are met before vaccine can be exported for use elsewhere. Robin Robinson, who led the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority from 2008 to 2016, said the agency has spent…

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Trump wants a coronavirus vaccine already and imagines Jared Kushner can deliver it at ‘warp speed’

Trump wants a coronavirus vaccine already and imagines Jared Kushner can deliver it at ‘warp speed’

The Daily Beast reports: Already under fire for his role atop a shadow task force aiding the administration’s response to the coronavirus, senior White House aide Jared Kushner is now being handed another critical job: helping get a vaccine for the disease developed in record time. President Donald Trump, who has said he believes a COVID-19 vaccine will be available by the end of the year, is turning to his son-in-law to help streamline the effort, branded, “Operation Warp Speed.”…

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Rising fears that Trump will incite a global vaccine brawl

Rising fears that Trump will incite a global vaccine brawl

Politico reports: When global leaders gathered virtually last month at the behest of the World Health Organization to commit to distributing a future coronavirus vaccine in an internationally equitable way, the United States didn’t join in. On Monday, the European Union is hosting a gathering for countries to pledge funding for research into vaccines and treatments for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But once again the U.S. government isn’t expected to participate. The Trump administration’s apparent lack…

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Wuhan virologist identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves and warns more are out there

Wuhan virologist identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves and warns more are out there

Scientific American reports: Before SARS, the world had only an inkling of coronaviruses—so named because their spiky surface resembles a crown when seen under a microscope, says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronaviruses were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak [in 2003] was a game changer,” Wang says. It was the first emergence of a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential. The incident helped to jump-start a global search…

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Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus appears to be more contagious than original

Scientists say a now-dominant strain of the coronavirus appears to be more contagious than original

The Los Angeles Times reports: Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March,…

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No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in or escaped from a Chinese lab, says Fauci

No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in or escaped from a Chinese lab, says Fauci

National Geographic reports: Anthony “Tony” Fauci has become the scientific face of America’s COVID-19 response, and he says the best evidence shows the virus behind the pandemic was not made in a lab in China. Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shot down the discussion that has been raging among politicians and pundits, calling it “a circular argument” in a conversation Monday with National Geographic. “If you look at the evolution of the…

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