Joan Phillips, a certified nursing assistant in a Florida nursing home, loved her job but dreaded the danger of going to work in the pandemic. When vaccines became available in December, she jumped at the chance to get one. Months later, it appears that danger has faded. After the rollout of covid vaccines, the number of new covid cases among nursing home staff members fell 83%—from 28,802 for the week ending Dec....
They crawl. They eat. They excrete. So you’d be forgiven for thinking these globules created by a team Japan were alive—but they’re not. Discovering life-like motion in non-living systems fascinates Akihisa Shioi, from Doshisha University. He and his team are constantly combining new chemicals to investigate the idea. They already knew that droplets of didodecyldimethylammonium bromide (DDAB), a cheap surfactant, react with iodide ions, then scoot around and leave chemical traces, like miniature turbo-snails....
Back in 1961, residents of far-flung countries ate very different mixes of crops (blue, below). By 1985 the disparities worldwide had shrunk (orange), and daily fare became even more homogeneous by 2009 (magenta). In nearly 50 years the differences in foods eaten narrowed by 68 percent. Prevalent staples such as wheat have become even more dominant, and oil crops such as soybean, palm and sunflower have risen sharply (bottom right). The convergence comes at the expense of many minor crops, says Colin Khoury of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture....
JUNE 1955 EINSTEIN–Niels Bohr: “With the death of Albert Einstein, a life in the service of science and humanity which was as rich and fruitful as any in the whole history of our culture has come to an end. Mankind will always be indebted to Einstein for the removal of the obstacles to our outlook which were involved in the primitive notions of absolute space and time.” I. I. Rabi: “His real love was the theory of fields, which he pursued with unremitting vigor to the very end of his more than 50 years of active scientific life....
For people living with rare genetic diseases—many of which can be debilitating or life-threatening—the need for innovative treatments is urgent. Only 5% of the 7,000 known rare diseases have an approved treatment, making patients with rare diseases collectively one of the most underserved communities in medicine today. Ultimately, the ability to realize the full potential of gene therapy to treat rare genetic diseases depends on listening to and addressing patients’ needs....
Guinea was declared free of Ebola transmission on Tuesday after more than 2,500 people died from the virus in the West African nation, leaving Liberia as the only country still counting down the days until the end of the epidemic. The announcement comes 42 days after the last person confirmed with Ebola tested negative for a second time. The country now enters a 90-day period of heightened surveillance, the U.N. World Health Organization said....
What begins in the bathroom often ends in the water supply. No, not that, the drugs in your medicine chest—and that, a new study suggests, could have a significant impact on aquatic life. Toxicologists at Clemson University in South Carolina have found that hybrid striped bass exposed to the antidepressant fluoxetine (the generic name for Eli Lilly’s Prozac) were markedly less interested in feeding than other fish. The more fluoxetine ingested, the less the appetite....
Oceanographers are fond of saying that we know more about the moon’s surface than we do about Earth’s seafloor. It’s true. As of 2017, only 6 percent of the global seabed had been mapped, typically by ships with sonar instruments sailing back and forth in straight lines across a local section of sea. But since then, nations have become eager to chart the seafloor within their own “exclusive economic zones,” which reach 200 nautical miles from their shores, in part to look for critical minerals they can scrape up using big mining machines....
By Katherine Rowland of Nature magazine When police officers, scientists and doctors launched an investigation into the scourge of counterfeit medicines in South East Asia, they were shocked to find that nearly half of the anti-malarials that they seized were fakes. Even more alarming was the discovery that many of the blister packs presumed to contain life-saving tablets were tainted with safrole, a carcinogenic compound used to make the illicit party drug ecstasy....
Netflix launched a feature on Thursday to keep your viewing persona separate from your sports-doc-streaming husband, your romcom-loving girlfriend, your “My Little Pony” fan of a daughter, or your zombie-obsessed brother. If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu, Netflix once had an identical feature, and for some longtime subscribers, it still does in a way. For years, subscribers could separate their DVD-rental queues by household user. Netflix planned the end of profiles in 2008, much to the chagrin of some subscribers....
When life originates on a planet, whether Earth or a distant world, the newborn life-forms may have to overcome incredible odds to come into existence—and a new equation lays out exactly how overwhelming those odds may be. The creators of the equation hope it can connect diverse areas of research that aim to answer long-standing questions about the origins of life, much like how the famous Drake equation pulled together research concerning communications from intelligent life....
Russia–U.S. political tensions have officially reached space, the one area where the two countries have historically enjoyed a strong and productive working relationship since the end of the cold war. In response to U.S. sanctions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced Tuesday that his country would not allow the International Space Station (ISS) to operate beyond 2020, according to reports. Russia will also stop providing engines to power Atlas 5 rockets used to launch U....
This is the final story the series of eight stories in our feature on self-experimenters. Alexander Shulgin is the world’s foremost “psychonaut.” The 82-year-old chemist has not only created more of the 300 known consciousness-altering (or psychoactive) compounds than anyone living or dead, he has, by his own account, sampled somewhere between 200 and 250 of them himself—most of them cooked up in the musty lab behind his home in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif....
Dave, a 52-year-old U.S. Navy veteran, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from a difficult childhood. In his job at a government agency, raised voices during meetings triggered thoughts of his abusive father, and his social anxiety occasionally prevented him from leaving his house in the morning. He felt uncomfortable hiding his condition, but he struggled to decide whether to tell his employer about it. “I didn’t have a broken arm or anything that would be easy for them to understand,” he says....
A little known sexually transmitted infection can boost the survival of patients infected with HIV—a more dangerous virus, researchers say. GB virus C (GBV-C) is the only known case of a potentially beneficial STI in humans. But it’s an example of a phenomenon that scientists are beginning to see elsewhere: STIs that are good for your health. What’s more, the health benefits of these helpful STIs could have given a boost to the evolution of promiscuity, scientists say....
Quantum physics is the science of the very small. But physicists are making it bigger, setting records for the size and energies of objects they can get to exhibit quantum effects. Now physicists at the University of Vienna in Austria have “virtually intertwined” or entangled two particles spinning faster than ever in opposite directions. Entanglement occurs when two particles remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, despite the distance between them....
Fifty years ago Star Trek beamed into television sets for the first time, igniting an international passion for an imagined future that has played out in movies, books and conventions ever since. Today devoted fans speak the Klingon language and the residents of Riverside, Iowa, claim dibs on the future birthplace of Capt. James Tiberius Kirk—and many scientists trace their spacefaring curiosities back to this fantasy. The show’s impact on the breadth of scientific imagination has proved as fathomless as space itself....
Mars has become both a literal and figurative graveyard for robotic missions: in total, 26 have either failed to reach the Red Planet or did not survive touchdown. Those disappointments have hardly discouraged further attempts, however. So who’s next in line? The European Space Agency, which, in partnership with Russia’s Roscosmos state corporation, will launch a hugely ambitious mission to Mars this month. If all goes well, the ExoMars program will encompass two separate journeys....
Throw the word “health” at Google, and you will retrieve, as I write this, about 958 million results. Alternatively, if you feel up to reading them, you could directly consult the medical journals for information; the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE service indexes about 5,000 of them. If you are into health and fitness magazines, you probably have more than 100 of those to choose from. Clearly, a world of health information is out there and readily available if you want it....
The newest additions to the Dutch National Police (DNP) are North American “immigrants”: bald eagles that are specially trained to take down airborne drones. The initiative is a first for law enforcement, according to DNP officials. They announced in a statement, released Sept. 13, that the DNP is currently the only police force in the world to include raptors on its roster for drone defense. For the past year, the DNP has tested eagles’ prowess against flying drones, collaborating with a private company called Guard from Above that trains raptors to snatch drones out of the sky....
