In late March, Mary Jane Sturgis got a call from her primary-care physician’s office, saying that her doctor was working from home during the Covid-19 crisis and suggesting an alternative for her scheduled checkup. Would Ms. Sturgis agree to a video appointment on Zoom? “I didn’t know what Zoom was,” Ms. Sturgis recalled. “But I…
By now we know — contrary to false predictions — that the novel coronavirus will be with us for a rather long time. “Exactly how long remains to be seen,” said Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s going to be a matter of managing it over…
Not long ago I asked a colleague to take my photo just before I was to see a patient who potentially had the novel coronavirus. Even though I had assured my 82-year-old mother every night that my hospital department has adequate supplies, she was worried and needed proof. “Make sure you get me from head-to-toe,”…
“Everybody hopes for seasonality” when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, Peter Juni of the University of Toronto acknowledged. Maybe, just maybe, the summer will diminish the spread of Covid-19. But a new study, by Dr. Juni, an epidemiologist, and his colleagues in Canada and Switzerland, offers very little encouragement for warm-weather worshipers. In countries…
George Mason University professor Elise Miller-Hooks and her team have been studying and modeling the flow of patients through American hospitals in times of crisis since 2014. Now, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, they are collaborating with Mersedeh Tariverdi who is a Senior Data Scientist in the Health, Nutrition, and Population Group at…
Robots with toes? Experiments suggest that climbing robots could benefit from having flexible, hairy toes, like those of geckos, that can adjust quickly to accommodate shifting weight and slippery surfaces. Biologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics observed geckos running horizontally along walls to learn how they use…
A Texas A&M AgriLife Research team has good news for patients with copper-deficiency disorders, especially young children diagnosed with Menkes disease. A team led by James Sacchettini, Ph.D. professor and Welch Chair of Science, and Vishal Gohil, Ph.D., associate professor, both from the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Texas A&M University, published a paper…
The first class of Damon Runyon Quantitative Biology Fellowship Awardees launched their research in novel directions that may lead to the next breakthroughs in cancer research. Nine brilliant young scientists will apply their quantitative skills to design innovative experiments and interpret massive data sets that may help solve important biological and clinical problems. The awardees…
May 8, 2020 — A study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health found that black subjects who were exposed to highly segregated neighborhoods in young adulthood exhibited worse performance in cognitive skills in mid-life. The findings are published online in JAMA Neurology. Until this research, there had been little information on the association…
Temperature and latitude do not appear to be associated with the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), according to a study of many countries published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) //www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.200920, but school closures and other public health measures are having a positive effect. “Our study provides important new evidence, using global data from…