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We may well remember the 21st century in two halves: the time before SARS-CoV-2 and the time after. Despite decades of warnings about the potential for a deadly global pandemic, public health systems worldwide were completely outmatched. The first COVID-19 patients were admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and several of them died. Many Americans assumed that even if China failed to contain the virus on its own soil, the span of an ocean would protect them....

The drumbeat of exercise’s brain benefits may sound familiar. Most of us know that getting our move on can mean a boost to mental and neurological health. But what if, through understanding these biochemical processes, we could get all of that brain gain without going through the exercise pain? Mouse experiments have already demonstrated the feasibility of such a shortcut. And there is a hint that the results in rodents could work in humans as well....

Part of Antarctica’s Ross ice shelf—the largest ice shelf in the world—appears to be melting 10 times faster than the ice around it. And researchers say a new process, one that was only rarely considered by scientists in the past, is the likely culprit. The findings, published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience, point to warm ocean water, heated up by the sun at the surface of the sea, as the driver behind the melting....

In the aftermath of the guilty verdict in the trial of Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, a consistent element of many criminal trials came into sharp focus: the role of medical expert witnesses, and the influence they wield in the courtroom, particularly as it relates to determining the cause of death. Within the span of the ensuing weeks, one juror said that the medical expert testimony was particularly influential, and a petition to investigate another medical expert witness’s track record of assessing cases for potential bias, garnered over 400 signatures from concerned physicians....

A microfluidic device that recreates interactions between the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and the liver to give a more realistic assessment of nanoparticle toxicity has detected liver tissue injury at lower nanoparticle concentrations than expected following experiments with liver tissue only. Many studies look at the beneficial medical effects of nanoparticles, however, Mandy Esch explains that her work in Michael Shuler’s lab at Cornell University is checking for adverse effects. Esch has made microfluidic silicon chips with separate chambers containing different tissue analogs in the form of cell cultures....

The human papillomavirus (HPV) spreads surprisingly quickly between two people in a new relationship, a new study finds. In fact, couples in the study were actually more likely to be infected with the same strain or strains of HPV if they had been together less than one year, as opposed to a longer period, the researchers said. “HPV is very infectious,” said study researcher Alan Nyitray, of the H. Lee Mof?...

Advances in medical care sometimes come as a result of long and thoughtful work in the laboratory. In 1916, however, medical progress came as a response to the urgent needs of the time. As the Great War raged in Europe, medicines and techniques were invented—or discarded—for helping the massive number of people wounded in war. For patients who had lost limbs or function because of war or disease, medical care became a process of helping the patient regain as much independence as possible....

Sokol transferred the bacterium to mice and found it protected them against experimentally induced intestinal inflammation. And when he subsequently mixed F. prausnitzii with human immune cells in a test tube, he noted a strong anti-inflammatory response. Sokol seemed to have identified a powerfully anti-inflammatory member of the human microbiota. Each of us harbors a teeming ecosystem of microbes that outnumbers the total number of cells in the human body by a factor of 10 to one and whose collective genome is at least 150 times larger than our own....

As we entered the final weeks of a presidential campaign held during a pandemic, access to experimental medical interventions played a major role in the Trump campaign’s case for reelection. President Trump regularly boasted about the Right to Try legislation he signed as a major health care achievement. Meanwhile, he has been hyping the availability of experimental treatments for COVID-19.
With his diagnosis, the president became the living embodiment of how experimental medical interventions have entered the political spotlight....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro A Colombian biology student is facing up to 8 years in jail and a fine for sharing a thesis by another scientist on a social network. Diego Gómez Hoyos posted the 2006 work, about amphibian taxonomy, on Scribd in 2011. An undergraduate at the time, he had hoped that it would help fellow students with their fieldwork. But two years later, in 2013, he was notified that the author of the thesis was suing him for violating copyright laws....

For much of her life Anne Dalton battled depression. She seldom spoke with people. She stayed home a lot. The days dragged on with a sense of “why bother?” for the 61-year-old from New Jersey who used to work at a Wall Street investment firm. After trying more than a dozen combinations of antidepressant drugs to no avail, things got so bad two years ago that Dalton went in for electroconvulsive therapy—in which “basically they shock your brain,” as she puts it....

Every day people with common mental health difficulties receive prescriptions for therapies that will not help them. Finding treatments that work for these patients entails an arduous process of trial and error. Each failed therapy risks leaving a patient despondent about whether anything will ever help. Depression illustrates poignantly what can go wrong. By most measures, half to two thirds of patients diagnosed with depression will fail to benefit from any particular treatment....

“Climate change is the defining issue of our age,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in his opening remarks. “Our response will define the future. To ride this storm, we need all hands on deck. That’s why we are here today. We need a clear vision.” Ki-moon scheduled the summit during annual General Assembly meetings, giving world leaders a forum in which they could share their plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions....

SEPTEMBER 1957 DNA— “It is difficult to resist the conclusion that DNA is genetic material. If that is the case, our problem is to learn how DNA reproduces itself. The double-helical structure of DNA suggests a possible answer, which I have discussed in a previous article. The basic idea is that the two chains of the DNA, which fit together as a hand fits into a glove, are separated in some way and the hand then acts as a mold for formation of a new glove while the glove acts as a mold for a new hand....

By Reuters Staff CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has ordered all blood collection centers in Florida’s Miami-Dade and Broward counties to stop collecting blood as state health department officials continue to investigate four possible cases of local transmission of the Zika virus. In a statement posted on its website on Wednesday, the FDA said blood centers should stop collecting blood in the two counties until they can implement testing for the Zika virus in each unit of blood collected, or until they can put in place technology that can kill pathogens in collected blood....

The sound of merging supermassive black holes does not saturate the universe. For the past decade, scientists with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration have been listening for a constant “hum” of low-frequency gravitational waves. Theoretical work suggests that this hum—generated by collisions involving supermassive black holes, which contain millions or billions of times more mass than the sun—should be detectable at Earth. NANOGrav hasn’t heard the hum yet, a new study reveals, but this lack of detection is an interesting result in its own right, revealing new details of how galaxies might evolve and merge, team members said....

Gird your gourds. A deadly bacterium transmitted via beetle poop is threatening bright blossoms and bulbous vegetables in the U.S. By the time yellowing leaves and signs of wilting become apparent it is already too late. At that point infected pumpkins, melons, cucumbers or squash plants can only be isolated in hope of minimizing the damage. Crop yield losses can be as high as 80 percent. The killer, a bacterium called Erwinia tracheiphila, was first described in scientific literature some 120 years ago when it was reported in cucumber, melon and winter squash fields in Michigan....

Is string theory science? Physicists and cosmologists have been debating the question for the past decade. Now the community is looking to philosophy for help. Earlier this month, some of the feuding physicists met with philosophers of science at an unusual workshop aimed at addressing the accusation that branches of theoretical physics have become detached from the realities of experimental science. At stake is the integrity of the scientific method, as well as the reputation of science among the general public, say the workshop’s organizers....

In the decade since the start of combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military has relied increasingly on robots. Drones and bomb-removal bots have been designed to keep troops out of harm’s way. Now the U.S. Department of Defense is looking for sleeker, faster robots that can assist with a wider range of missions. The Cheetah, pictured at the right, is one of the new breeds under development. Real cheetahs, which can sprint up to about 120 kilometers per hour, are the fastest-running animals; the robot, made by Boston Dynamics in Waltham, Mass....

Sometime on the morning of August 30 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki quietly posted four papers on his website. The papers were huge—more than 500 pages in all—packed densely with symbols, and the culmination of more than a decade of solitary work. They also had the potential to be an academic bombshell. In them, Mochizuki claimed to have solved the abc conjecture, a 27-year-old problem in number theory that no other mathematician had even come close to solving....