The omicron offshoot’s ability to easily infect cells may be helping it spread rapidly in places The omicron variant’s family tree has grown substantially over the last year. The brood now encompasses a subvariant soup with alphanumeric names such as BA.2, BA.5 and BF.7. The U.S. Centers for Disease ControlContinue Reading
New COVID booster vaccines built for the latest variants are here and should be more effective. But there are still some unknowns A new generation of COVID booster shots are now available to most people 12 years of age and older in the U.S. The Food and Drug Administration authorizedContinue Reading
The Beautiful Chemistry Project re-creates the era’s cosmetics to find the science behind them Art historian Erin Griffey is a bit of a beauty maven. “I’m one of those people who reads the backs of beauty products,” she says. That’s why, while working on a book about beauty culture inContinue Reading
Monkeypox testing has been limited in the U.S. More than 1,050 monkeypox cases have been detected in the U.S. as of Wednesday (July 13), but based on the availability of diagnostic tests in the country, this may be a significant undercount, some experts say. So far this year, about 10,800Continue Reading
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian found nerve cell sensors for heat, cold, pain and pressure. Some touching research took the 2021 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. David Julius of the University of California, San Francisco and Ardem Patapoutian of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., were awardedContinue Reading
Experts want more data before making the jabs more widespread. In the United States, booster shots of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine won’t be widely available to the general public starting this week. Instead, only certain groups will have access to a third dose of the vaccine: people 65 yearsContinue Reading
When nobody else wanted the job, Marguerite Vogt stepped in. Working from early morning until late at night in a small, isolated basement laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, Vogt painstakingly handled test tubes and petri dishes under a fume hood: incubating, pipetting, centrifuging, incubating again. She was tryingContinue Reading
Clumps of brain cells made from people with Rett syndrome had abnormal electrical activity Clumps of brain cells grown from the stem cells of two people with a neurological syndrome show signs of the disorder. The results, published August 23 in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that personalized brain organoids could beContinue Reading
The results suggest brain cell activity could play a surprising role in the body’s metabolism. Ripples of nerve cell activity that lock in memories may have an unexpected job outside of the brain: Dropping blood sugar levels in the body. Just after a burst of ripples in a rat’s hippocampus,Continue Reading
A year and a half of pandemic has left many children struggling academically and emotionally. At the start of a school year, kids usually show up with oversized backpacks stocked with fresh pencils, crisp notebooks and snacks. This back-to-school season, many children will carry extra baggage. Eighteen months of anContinue Reading
