Viruses originating from birds and animals are known as zoonotic viruses. When these viruses are transmitted to humans through direct or indirect contact with infected populations, they cause a zoonotic spillover. Approximately 70% of infectious diseases over the last three decades are zoonotic. Because no immediate diagnosis or effective cure is available for the [...]
A team of scientists at the University of Huddersfield has discovered chemical systems that self-assemble into molecular capsules which are highly toxic towards human cancer cells of a range of different tumour types, and which have demonstrated unprecedented cancer selectivity in the laboratory that, in some cases, are many thousands of times more toxic [...]
People infected with the Delta variant generally do not have COVID-19 symptoms until two days after they start shedding the coronavirus. People infected with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to spread the virus before developing symptoms than are people infected with earlier versions, suggests a detailed analysis of an outbreak [...]
Although first detected in December 2019, COVID-19 was inferred to be present in Hubei province, China, for about a month before. Where did this new human disease come from? To understand the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to go back to 2002. At that time a novel respiratory coronavirus appeared in [...]
"The winner of the game," said chess champion Savielly Tartakower, "is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake." In 1971, John Kerry, then a Navy veteran-turned-antiwar-activist, told a US Senate committee about the horrors of the Vietnam War, posing the devastating question: How can we ask someone "to be the last man to die for a mistake?" With [...]
Looking to the past eradication of diseases, a new paper argues that the global eradication of COVID-19 is possible. The paper quantifies the factors affecting eradicability and scores a few diseases accordingly. The authors of the paper hope and believe that the international disruption that COVID-19 has caused may drive the world’s governments toward [...]
If you’ve been worried by recent news stories about a strain of covid called “delta plus,” it may freak you out to hear that scientists just expanded the delta family from four variants to 13. Please take a deep breath. Scientists would really like you to understand that there’s no evidence delta has learned [...]
A research team headed by chemist Prof Bart Jan Ravoo and biochemist Prof Volker Gerke has designed nanocontainers made of sugar and protein components. These containers are taken up by cells through natural processes and can thereby transport substances that normally cannot penetrate the cell membrane – such as drugs or labelled substances for [...]
In 1988, Richard Lenski, a thirty-one-year-old biologist at UC Irvine, started an experiment. He divided a population of a common bacterium, E. coli, into twelve flasks. Each flask was kept at thirty-seven degrees Celsius, and contained an identical cocktail of water, glucose, and other nutrients. Each day, as the bacteria replicated, Lenski transferred several drops [...]
A study conducted at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, USA, and the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, USA, has determined the transmission rate, immune escape ability, and infection fatality rate of the B.1.526 variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The findings reveal that the [...]
