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Category: Science

Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?

Laura Spinney writes: Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Much experimentation and data analysis later, he realised there was a fundamental relationship between force, mass and acceleration. He formulated a theory to describe that relationship – one that could be expressed as an equation, F=ma – and used it to predict the behaviour of objects other than apples. His predictions turned out to be right (if…

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Human behavior in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine

Human behavior in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine

Ian Stewart writes: In Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), the mathematician Hari Seldon forecasts the collapse of the Galactic Empire using psychohistory: a calculus of the patterns that occur in the reaction of the mass of humanity to social and economic events. Initially put on trial for treason, on the grounds that his prediction encourages said collapse, Seldon is permitted to set up a research group on a secluded planet. There, he investigates how to minimise the destruction and reduce…

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The forgotten role of religion in science writing

The forgotten role of religion in science writing

Adam Shapiro writes: It’s been nearly 30 years—a generation!—since professional science communication as a field began to seriously push back against what’s been called the knowledge deficit model (sometimes just called the “deficit model.”) (See “The Trust Fallacy,” July–August 2021.) That model describes a way of thinking about people’s understanding and acceptance of scientific knowledge, supposing that the greatest barrier to scientific literacy was a lack—or deficit—of information about a topic. If only people better understood evolution, the thinking went,…

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Omicron doesn’t infect the lungs very well, animal studies find

Omicron doesn’t infect the lungs very well, animal studies find

The New York Times reports: A spate of new studies on lab animals and human tissues are providing the first indication of why the Omicron variant causes milder disease than previous versions of the coronavirus. In studies on mice and hamsters, Omicron produced less damaging infections, often limited largely to the upper airway: the nose, throat and windpipe. The variant did much less harm to the lungs, where previous variants would often cause scarring and serious breathing difficulty. “It’s fair…

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Beyond case counts: What Omicron is teaching us

Beyond case counts: What Omicron is teaching us

STAT reports: The Omicron wave in the United States is upon us. If you were fortunate enough to tune out from Covid-19 news over the holidays, you’re coming back to startling reports about record high case counts and, in some places, increases in hospitalizations. The wave will crest, of course; the question is when. For now, experts say, the country still has a ways to go to get through the Omicron surge. Below, STAT outlines what Omicron is already teaching…

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Is fluvoxamine the Covid drug we’ve been waiting for?

Is fluvoxamine the Covid drug we’ve been waiting for?

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Food and Drug Administration last week authorized two oral antiviral medicines for the early treatment of Covid-19. But don’t get too excited. The U.S. will still have a meager treatment arsenal this winter. The U.S. has been relying on monoclonal-antibody treatments, but most don’t hold up against the Omicron variant. One, by GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, does better at neutralizing the variant, but supply is limited. Pfizer’s newly authorized antiviral pack Paxlovid will also…

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How will our warming climate stabilize? Scientists look to the distant past

How will our warming climate stabilize? Scientists look to the distant past

Ars Technica reports: Thanks to unbridled greenhouse gas emissions, our planet is stitching together a climate version of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. We still have ice from the warmer parts of the Pleistocene even as our temperature approaches the warmer Pliocene levels of 3 million years ago. Meanwhile, our CO2 level is between the Pliocene and the Miocene of 10 million years ago, and we risk an Eocene hothouse not seen in 40 million years. At some point, this unnatural fusion…

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Will we always need Covid-19 boosters? Experts have theories

Will we always need Covid-19 boosters? Experts have theories

STAT reports: With the world facing the latest in a seemingly endless stream of coronavirus variants — and with bullish talk from manufacturers about a need for even more vaccine shots — you wouldn’t be alone if you were wondering: Are Covid boosters always going to be a fixture in our future? The simple truth is that, at this point, there’s no definitive answer to that question. But virologists, immunologists, and vaccinologists have opinions that are anchored in an understanding…

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When did scientists first warn humanity about climate change?

When did scientists first warn humanity about climate change?

Live Science reports: Climate change warnings are coming thick and fast from scientists; thousands have signed a paper stating that ignoring climate change would yield “untold suffering” for humanity, and more than 99% of scientific papers agree that humans are the cause. But climate change wasn’t always on everyone’s radar. So when did humans first become aware of climate change and the dangers it poses? Scientists first began to worry about climate change toward the end of the 1950s, Spencer…

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What has the Omicron variant changed?

What has the Omicron variant changed?

Dhruv Khullar writes: The Covid-19 pandemic, like every pandemic before it, is a story of equilibriums: between viral biology and human immune response; between news of the pathogen and fear of it; between the damage it inflicts and the social, economic, and political choices we make. A disease persists as a pandemic as long as these forces remain in flux; it becomes endemic when the balance is, more or less, set. The morning after Thanksgiving, Americans awoke to an unsettling…

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Pfizer two-shot course has 23% efficacy vs. Omicron in S. African study

Pfizer two-shot course has 23% efficacy vs. Omicron in S. African study

Bloomberg reports: A two-shot course of Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine has just 22.5% efficacy against symptomatic infection with the omicron variant, but can thwart severe disease, according to laboratory experiments in South Africa. Researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban issued additional data on a small study released earlier this week. The research considered blood plasma samples from 12 participants. Scientists found omicron resulted in about a 41-fold reduction in levels of neutralizing antibodies produced by people who had…

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The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

Rachel Gutman writes: Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a new variant…

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The coronavirus attacks fat tissue, scientists find

The coronavirus attacks fat tissue, scientists find

The New York Times reports: From the start of the pandemic, the coronavirus seemed to target people carrying extra pounds. Patients who were overweight or obese were more likely to develop severe Covid-19 and more likely to die. Though these patients often have health conditions like diabetes that compound their risk, scientists have become increasingly convinced that their vulnerability has something to do with obesity itself. Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune…

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What’s next for Covid’s viral evolution

What’s next for Covid’s viral evolution

Nature reports: As the world sped towards a pandemic in early 2020, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom gazed into the future of SARS-CoV-2. Like many virus specialists at the time, he predicted that the new pathogen would not be eradicated. Rather, it would become endemic — the fifth coronavirus to permanently establish itself in humans, alongside four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses that cause relatively mild colds and have been circulating in humans for decades or more. Bloom, who is based at the Fred…

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Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Science reports: Since South African scientists announced last week they had identified an unsettling new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the world has anxiously awaited clues about how it might change the trajectory of the pandemic. But as big a mystery—if less urgent—is where and how Omicron evolved, and what lessons its emergence holds for avoiding future dangerous variants. Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta. Instead, it appears to…

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Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

A virus’s genes hold a record of where it’s traveled, and when. imaginima/E+ via Getty Images By Claire Guinat, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich; Etthel Windels, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and Sarah Nadeau, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich More than 250 million people worldwide have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, usually after a diagnostic nose swab. Those swabs aren’t trash once they’ve delivered their positive result, though. For scientists like us they carry additional valuable information about…

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