It began, as many things do, with a 10-foot marine worm that wields jaws so sharp and powerful they can slice a fish in two. Then came the wasp with a sting so painful that an actual scientist’s actual advice for those who get stung by this thing is to […]
The Deepwater Horizon Disaster Fueled a Gulf Science Bonanza
Today, Reddy has changed his tune a bit. He says that the initial shot of BP research money made a difference for him and other scientists who were trying to understand what happened. He says marine scientists and oil industry engineers had to learn to get along to figure out […]
NASA’s Plan to Turn the ISS Into a Quantum Laser Lab
Later this summer, physicists at the Argonne and Fermi national laboratories will exchange quantum information across 30 miles of optical fiber running beneath the suburbs of Chicago. One lab will generate a pair of entangled photons–particles that have identical states and are linked in such a way that what happens […]
New Covid-19 Antibody Study Results Are In. Are They Right?
All of that might be moot if the testing devices used in both surveys turn out to be flawed. The results come amid widespread concerns about the accuracy of blood antibody tests–especially the rapid lateral flow tests like the ones used in this study. The Stanford preprint referred to a […]
How Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Affecting Climate Change?
It is an invisible, deadly menace. It’s causing almost unfathomable economic destruction. We knew it was coming, but were caught woefully unprepared. It tricked nations into blaming one another–the US being the primary antagonist–instead of working together to stop it. It is the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and it is climate […]
The Covid-19 Newsletter That’s by Doctors for Doctors
The FLARE team meets every day for a 4 pm Zoom meeting, at which they discuss a first draft written by a team member or, occasionally, an outside contributor. Later, they’ll group-edit a Google Doc. Camille Petri, a pulmonary and critical care fellow, is in charge of formatting and hitting […]
‘Covid Near You’ Crowdsources Data to Predict New Hot Spots
Self-reports have a signal-to-noise problem, of course: The worried well, and people who might share a syndrome but be infected with a different organism, can clog up the data. But after a near-decade operating Flu Near You and validating its results against data published each flu season by the Centers […]
‘Common Sense’ Is No Substitute for Science in a Pandemic
In his daily coronavirus briefings, President Trump regularly touts the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as possibly one of the “biggest game-changers in the history of medicine”–based on what seems to be a few anecdotal reports of mild benefits in Covid-19 patients. When a reporter asked Anthony Fauci, director of the National […]
An Imbalance Among Tiny Particles Offers a Big Cosmology Clue
Physicists have detected the strongest evidence yet of a behavioral difference between elementary particles called neutrinos and their mirror-image twins, antineutrinos. The asymmetry could be the key to why so much more matter than antimatter arose during the Big Bang–further explaining why anything at all exists today, since matter and […]
How Long Does the Coronavirus Live on Surfaces? Covid-19 FAQs
If you’ve got kids at home, it’s even more important to maintain a daily routine. Try to stick to a typical schedule: breakfast at breakfast time, schoolwork or structured playtime during the day, and some activity in the afternoon. If you need to lean on television or a tablet more […]