The COVID-19 epidemic has now entered its third year with its effects still being felt across the world. In many countries, there have been an alarming trend of waning vaccine efficacy paired with the emergence of variants with stronger immune escape and transmission ability. This consistent challenging of our pre-established immune barriers has driven [...]
As COVID-19 approaches its fourth year, Omicron continues to mutate and become more immune-evasive, health officials say. In December, the World Health Organization said variants descending from Omicron show more capacity to escape our immune system. "Omicron, the latest variant of concern, is the most transmissible variant we have seen so far, including all the sub-variants that [...]
Could the COVID-19 surge in China unleash a new coronavirus mutant on the world? Scientists don’t know but worry that might happen. It could be similar to omicron variants circulating there now. It could be a combination of strains. Or something entirely different, they say. “China has a population that is very large and [...]
Mount Sinai researchers have published one of the first studies to associate changes in blood gene expression during COVID-19 with “long COVID” in patients more than a year after they were hospitalized with severe COVID-19. Long COVID is the common name used for what is known more technically as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The findings, published in [...]
The use of light to produce transient phases in quantum materials is fast becoming a novel way to engineer new properties in them, such as the generation of superconductivity or nanoscale topological defects. However, visualizing the growth of a new phase in a solid is not easy, due in-part to the wide range of [...]
Tracking the pathway to immunity, one cell at a time. Vaccines work their magic by effectively producing immune cells that survive for a long time, often for over decades. These immune cells build a barrier of protection that can prevent or minimize re-infection as well as a memory that enables us to identify [...]
You can easily rotate a baseball in your hand by twisting your fingers. But you need inventive scientists with access to world-class scientific facilities to rotate an object that is only two billionths of a meter wide. That is a million times smaller than a raindrop. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) [...]
In new research published in Nature Communications, University of Sussex scientists demonstrate how a highly conductive paint coating that they have developed mimics the network spread of a virus through a process called 'explosive percolation' – a mathematical process which can also be applied to population growth, financial systems and computer networks, but which has not been seen [...]
A concept known as "wave-particle duality" famously applies to light. But it also applies to all matter — including you. In 1905, the 26-year-old Albert Einstein proposed something quite outrageous: that light could be both wave or particle. This idea is just as weird as it sounds. How could something be two things that are [...]
In one of the first large, real-world studies comparing the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines versus natural immunity in protecting against death, hospitalizations and emergency department (ED) visits for any cause, including COVID, research-scientists from Regenstrief Institute, Indiana University School of Medicine and Vanderbilt University Medical Center report that people of all age groups benefited [...]
