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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Migratory bird flies non-stop over 7,500 miles from Alaska to New Zealand

Migratory bird flies non-stop over 7,500 miles from Alaska to New Zealand

The Guardian reports: A bird said to have the aerodynamic build of a “jet fighter” has been tracked flying more than 12,000km (7,500 miles) from Alaska to New Zealand, setting a new world record for avian non-stop flight. The bar-tailed godwit set off from south-west Alaska on 16 September and arrived in a bay near Auckland 11 days later, having flown at speeds of up to 55mph. The male bird, known as 4BBRW in reference to the blue, blue, red…

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Writing off Trump, GOP allies focus on one last big win

Writing off Trump, GOP allies focus on one last big win

Politico reports: As news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death rippled across Washington on the evening of Sept. 18, some of President Donald Trump’s conservative allies likened the sudden Supreme Court vacancy to an eleventh-hour bailout. Besieged by slipping poll numbers and new accusations that he misled Americans about the dangers of Covid-19, Trump — and his closest aides and allies — saw a Republican-led confirmation fight as a welcome detour to galvanize his base in the final month before…

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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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My job was to keep Americans safe and Trump was my biggest obstacle

My job was to keep Americans safe and Trump was my biggest obstacle

Elizabeth Neumann writes: Everything we saw during the first presidential debate is indicative of how President Donald Trump behaves in the White House. His business model is chaos. He has no organization, no leadership, and sees every interaction as a contest or a battle, even when it doesn’t have to be. Chris Wallace now knows how so many administration staffers feel — and how I felt when the president got in the way of me doing my job. He is…

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Facebook rolls out a new vaccine misinformation policy — but leaves out misinformation super-spreaders

Facebook rolls out a new vaccine misinformation policy — but leaves out misinformation super-spreaders

STAT reports: Facebook rolled out a new policy on Tuesday aimed at cracking down on vaccine falsehoods, a ballooning problem for the social network as a growing number of users with neutral views about vaccines appear to turn into vocal opponents. The new policy prohibits formal advertisements that discourage people from getting vaccinated, reversing a years-long trend in which such ads were widely permitted. The site also said it will amplify factual messages from international public health authorities including the…

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Three Rockefellers say banks must stop financing fossil fuels

Three Rockefellers say banks must stop financing fossil fuels

Daniel Growald, Peter Gill Case and Valerie Rockefeller write: One hundred years ago, as a deadly influenza gripped the world and the stock market dropped precipitously, our great-grandfather John D. Rockefeller Jr. began investing in New York banks to diversify the family’s business away from fossil fuels in the midst of the economic uncertainty. The result was the beginning of our family’s century-long association with what is today JPMorgan Chase, known in its earlier incarnation as the “Rockefeller Bank.” The…

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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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The blueprint for life, neatly folded

The blueprint for life, neatly folded

By Ivan Amato, Knowable Magazine, October 10, 2020 Squinting through his microscope at salamander cells, late-nineteenth-century biologist Walther Flemming spotted a curious substance deep inside the cells’ nuclei that selectively soaked up the stain he was using. The stuff looked like a skein of wool — until, that is, a cell underwent division. Then the skein separated into fatter, discrete threads: the chromosomes, Greek for “color bodies.” Flemming’s scientific descendants are still squinting, but with ever more powerful molecular, imaging…

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Republican hypocrisy is destroying trust in Supreme Court

Republican hypocrisy is destroying trust in Supreme Court

Donald B. Ayer and Alan Charles Raul write: When a vacancy on the Supreme Court arose nine months ahead of the election in 2016, Sen. Mitch McConnell said in no uncertain terms: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” Now, after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two months before Election Day, as voters are…

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Why Facebook can’t fix itself

Why Facebook can’t fix itself

Andrew Marantz writes: When Facebook was founded, in 2004, the company had few codified rules about what was allowed on the platform and what was not. Charlotte Willner joined three years later, as one of the company’s first employees to moderate content on the site. At the time, she said, the written guidelines were about a page long; around the office, they were often summarized as, “If something makes you feel bad in your gut, take it down.” Her husband,…

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On Facebook, misinformation is more popular now than in 2016

On Facebook, misinformation is more popular now than in 2016

The New York Times reports: During the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms to spread disinformation to divide the American electorate. Since then, the social media companies have spent billions of dollars and hired tens of thousands of people to help clean up their act. But have the platforms really become more sophisticated at handling misinformation? Not necessarily. People are engaging more on Facebook today with news outlets that routinely publish misinformation…

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Florida sees signals of a climate-driven housing crisis

Florida sees signals of a climate-driven housing crisis

The New York Times reports: If rising seas cause America’s coastal housing market to dive — or, as many economists warn, when — the beginning might look a little like what’s happening in the tiny town of Bal Harbour, a glittering community on the northernmost tip of Miami Beach. With single-family homes selling for an average of $3.6 million, Bal Harbour epitomizes high-end Florida waterfront property. But around 2013, something started to change: The annual number of homes sales began…

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