Almost from the moment it made the jump to humans, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been picking up mutations and creating new lineages as it expands into different populations. In practical terms, the vast majority of these mutations makes absolutely no difference; the resulting virus has the same properties as the unmutated form it's derived from.
NASA has resolved the issues with its Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars and is ready to fly.
The space agency announced on Saturday that it will attempt to fly the small, 1.8 kg helicopter early on Monday. The first flight is scheduled to take place at about 3:30am ET (07:30 UTC). It will take a few hours to relay data from the helicopter to the Perseverance rover, and then to an orbiting satellite and back to Earth. So NASA anticipates receiving the first data back from Mars sometime after 6:15am ET.
European medical regulators on Wednesday concluded that there is a strong link between AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine and life-threatening conditions involving the unusual combination of blood clots and low levels of blood platelets.
As such, the conditions should be listed as a “very rare side effects” of the vaccine, according to the European Medicines Agency, a regulatory agency of the European Union.
Last week, two more pharmaceutical firms backed by the US federal government’s Operation Warp Speed program announced preliminary results from large-scale clinical trials of their Covid-19 vaccines. And both had very welcome results to report. Mostly.
Ever since the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, began jumping from human to human, it’s been mutating. The molecular machinery the virus uses to read and make copies of its genetic code isn’t great at proofreading; minor typos made in the copying process can go uncorrected. Each time the virus lands in a new human victim, it infects a cell and makes an army of clones, some carrying genetic errors. Those error-bearing clones then continue on, infecting more cells, more people. Each cycle, each infection offers more opportunity for errors.
A variant of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is now dominating headlines and inspiring precautionary travel bans worldwide. But scientists are still trying to get a grip on what the variant can actually do differently and what it might mean for the nearly year-old pandemic.
In parts of the United States, autumn is coming. The mornings have a coolness. The dogwood leaves show an edge of color. And outside pharmacies, the banners of fall are appearing: “Flu shots here.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon, a black-and-white spacecraft raced through the atmosphere, ionizing molecules, and creating a plasma inferno. Amidst this fireball, two astronauts sheltered within the small haven of Dragonship Endeavour, as its carbon-based heat shield crisped and flaked away.
New Zealand officials are scrambling to halt a growing cluster of COVID-19 cases that has baffled health investigators trying to understand how the pandemic coronavirus regained a foothold on the island nation.
Reports of influenza and a host of other infectious diseases have plummeted as the COVID-19 pandemic has driven people into lockdowns.
In many places, social distancing measures aimed at curbing the spread of the new coronavirus may be smothering the spread of other infectious diseases at the same time. But, in other places, the pandemic may simply be masking disease spread, as people may avoid seeking care for more routine infections while health care systems stretched thin by the pandemic may struggle to conduct routine surveillance, testing, and reporting.
