Science

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley safely splashed down in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule off the Florida coast on Sunday after a two-month stay on the International Space Station. The two men made history earlier this summer when they became the first NASA astronauts to catch a ride to orbit on a private spacecraft as part of the SpaceX Demo-2 mission. It was a test flight to show NASA that the capsule is safe enough to fly humans, so the return of the astronauts concludes that mission.

Many people complain about having a terrible memory. Shopping lists, friends’ birthdays, statistics for an exam—they just don’t seem to stick in the brain. But memory isn’t as set in stone as you might imagine. With the right technique, you may well be able to remember almost anything at all.

Nelson Dellis is a four-time USA Memory Champion and Grandmaster of Memory. Some of his feats of recollection include memorizing 10,000 digits of pi, the order of more than nine shuffled decks of cards, and lists of hundreds of names after only hearing them once.

Sarah bint Yousif Al-Amiri knows what it’s like to build a spacecraft, but she’s never launched one to Mars—or during a global pandemic. As the deputy project manager for the United Arab Emirates’ first interplanetary mission—and the country’s minister of state for advanced sciences—the 33-year-old engineer has spent the past few years bouncing between Dubai and Boulder, Colorado, where a team of Emirati scientists have been busy building a robotic satellite meteorologist called Hope.

There have been a surprising number of studies in recent years examining the effects of swearing, specifically whether it can help relieve pain—either physical or psychological (as in the case of traumatic memories or events). According to the latest such study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, constantly repeating the F-word—as one might do if one hit one's thumb with a hammer—can increase one's pain threshold.

During the first chaotic months of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was already clear that the novel coronavirus spreading around the world didn’t affect everyone equally. The earliest clinical data out of China showed that some people consistently fared worse than others, notably men, the elderly, and smokers. It made some scientists wonder: What if the elevated risk of severe infection and death shared by these different people all boils down to differences in a single protein?

The US National Institutes of Health on Thursday began a clinical trial to treat adult COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug that President Trump has repeatedly promoted during the pandemic despite a lack of evidence for its effectiveness against the new coronavirus.

The trial is one of dozens underway to test the drug, which is currently used to treat malaria and rheumatoid conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. At this point it only has mixed, anecdotal evidence to support its use against COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus that surfaced for the first time in China last year, is an equal opportunity invader. If you’re a human, it wants in. Regardless of age, race, or sex, the virus appears to infect people at the same rate. Which makes sense, given that it’s a totally new pathogen against which approximately zero humans have preexisting immunity.

In the past few days, New York City’s hospitals have become unrecognizable. Thousands of patients sick with the novel coronavirus have swarmed into emergency rooms and intensive care units. From 3,000 miles away in Seattle, as Lisa Brandenburg watched the scenes unfold—isolation wards cobbled together in lobbies, nurses caring for Covid-19 patients in makeshift trash bag gowns, refrigerated mobile morgues idling on the street outside—she couldn’t stop herself from thinking: “That could be us.”

It could be, if the models are wrong.

Back in our exhaustive review of potential treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infections, we mentioned one option that was relatively quick, easy, and required no further approval for use: transfer of blood plasma from those who had previously had an infection. The reasoning being that this plasma will contain antibodies that could neutralize coronaviruses in the blood stream, severely limiting the progression of an active infection. Now, trials of this method are starting in New York City, the hardest hit location in the US.

Properly scrubbing your hands is one of the best ways to stop the spread of germs and viruses, and to ensure you don’t get sick yourself. But if you don't have access to soap and clean water, or if you're out and about and nowhere near a sink, you should carry hand sanitizer to protect your health.