Tag Archives: science

The New York Times reports: The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that lead to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it’s pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of …

The Daily Beast reports: The computational biologists at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle crunched COVID-19 stats from all over the world, charted the trends and concluded that as many as 9.7 million people could die by late September. If the trend line continues, COVID-19 could kill 20 million by 2023, according to IHME’s model. The …

The New York Times reports: The Food and Drug Administration is on the verge of announcing one of its most contentious decisions in years: the fate of an Alzheimer’s drug that could be the first treatment approved after nearly two decades of failed efforts to find ways to curb the debilitating disease. On Monday, the agency will rule on the …

STAT News reports: Each variant will be given a name from the Greek alphabet, in a bid to both simplify the public discussion and to strip some of the stigma from the emergence of new variants. A country may be more willing to report it has found a new variant if it knows the new version of the virus will …

NBC News reports: The U.S. has reported the lowest number of Covid-19 cases in more than a year, as the nation’s airports over Memorial Day weekend experienced the largest number of travelers since the pandemic began. The 11,976 new cases reported on May 29 were the lowest since March 23, 2020, when 11,238 new cases were reported, according to data …

The Washington Post reports: Vietnam’s Health Ministry announced Saturday that it had detected a highly transmissible new variant of the coronavirus that has helped fuel a recent wave of infections in the country. Genetic sequencing indicated that the new variant was a mix of the coronavirus strains first detected in the United Kingdom and India, said Health Minister Nguyen Thanh …

From the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: The federal EEO laws do not prevent an employer from requiring all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated for COVID-19, subject to the reasonable accommodation provisions of Title VII and the ADA and other EEO considerations. These principles apply if an employee gets the vaccine in the community or from the employer. …

The New York Times reports: Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The findings may help put to rest lingering fears that protection against the virus will be short-lived. Together, the studies suggest that most people who have recovered from Covid-19 and who were …

Politico reports: State and federal lawmakers, with the support of unions, are looking to survivor registries created after 9/11 as a model for helping potentially millions of people with often-debilitating long-term symptoms of Covid-19. The efforts would center on creating data troves that so-called “long-haulers” could access to make informed decisions about their care, allow medical providers to study the …

The Washington Post reports: The fight against the coronavirus pandemic has scientists tapping an unlikely resource: the finely tuned olfactory sense of bees. Dutch researchers on Monday said they have trained honeybees to stick out their tongues when presented with the virus’s unique scent, acting as a kind of rapid test. Although it’s a less conventional method than lab tests, …

The Guardian reports: The White House has called for “responsible space behaviours” as a debris from a Chinese rocket, thought to be out of control, is expected to crash back to Earth on Saturday, US time. The US Space Command is tracking debris from the Long March 5B, which last week launched the main module of China’s first permanent space …

NPR reports: A new study estimates that the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. is more than 900,000, a number 57% higher than official figures. Worldwide, the study’s authors say, the COVID-19 death count is nearing 7 million, more than double the reported number of 3.24 million. The analysis comes from researchers at the University …

The Associated Press reports: Teams of experts are projecting COVID-19′s toll on the U.S. will fall sharply by the end of July, according to research released by the government Wednesday. But they also warn that a “substantial increase” in hospitalizations and deaths is possible if unvaccinated people do not follow basic precautions. The CDC is now reporting an average of …

The New York Times reports: In an important step toward medical approval, MDMA, the illegal drug popularly known as Ecstasy or Molly, was shown to bring relief to those suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder when paired with talk therapy. Of the 90 people who took part in the new study, which is expected to be published later this month …

CNN Business reports: A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule soared back from outer space Sunday morning and made a parachute landing in the Gulf of Mexico, returning four astronauts from a record-setting mission to the International Space Station. The astronauts — NASA’s Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut with Japan’s space agency — had boarded their …

Roll Call reports: The National Institutes of Health is preparing to award grants in the next three weeks to researchers studying the long-term effects of COVID-19 and patients experiencing “long COVID.” NIH Director Francis Collins told the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee that the agency expects laboratory research and imaging studies to be underway by the summer. The agency received …

CNBC reports: SpaceX launched another group of astronauts for NASA early on Friday morning, with Elon Musk’s company now having sent 10 astronauts to space in under a year. The Crew-2 mission, the company’s second operational mission for NASA and its third to date, reached orbit successfully after launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 5:49 a.m. EDT. …

Axios reports: All 50 U.S. states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, have now made U.S. adults over the age of 16 eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, meeting President Biden’s April 19 deadline. The landmark speaks to the increased pace of the national vaccination campaign, but will increase pressure on the federal government, states and pharmaceutical companies to provide adequate vaccine …

The Washington Post reports: NASA successfully flew its four-pound helicopter from the surface of Mars early Monday, the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet, a feat NASA officials compared to the Wright brothers first flight in 1903. At about 3:30 a.m., the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the …

Axios reports: The number of new coronavirus infections in the U.S continues to rise, making a quick, clean end to the pandemic less and less likely. Much of the U.S. is relying almost exclusively on vaccines to control the virus, abandoning social distancing and other safety measures. And that’s helping the virus to steadily gain ground even as vaccinations barrel …