Coronavirus Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Scientists tracking the spread of the coronavirus reported on Monday that, for every confirmed case, there are most likely another five to 10 people in the community with undetected infections. These often-milder cases are, on average, about half as infectious as confirmed ones, but are responsible for nearly 80 percent of new cases, according to…

Live Coronavirus Updates Globally

Here’s what you need to know: ImageNear the Louvre in Paris on Sunday.Credit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times Global restrictions rise, but so do the number of new infections. Countries closed borders, cities from New York and Los Angeles to Paris and Madrid closed bars and restaurants, schools closed more classrooms and hundreds of…

Coronavirus Vaccine Dreams

I find myself fantasizing about a Covid-19 vaccine that will get us back to living our lives. About a triumphant announcement that the trial was a resounding success, and science has won, that there is a safe effective vaccine in production, and that we should all line up to get our shots — a vaccine…

Aging Out of the Mammogram

When Janet Halloran last saw her primary care physician, the doctor asked whether she had undergone her annual mammogram. Yes, she replied, she had. At 76, Ms. Halloran, a real estate broker in Cambridge, Mass., is past the age that most medical guidelines recommend breast cancer screening for someone with no history of the disease.…

How to Lose Weight and Keep It Off

Many people who have struggled for years with excess weight know that the hardest and often the most frustrating job is not getting it off but keeping it off. Recent decades have seen countless popular diet schemes that promised to help people shed unwanted pounds, and as each of these diets failed in the long…

Cancer diagnostics

A good indicator of dysregulation in live cells is a change in their RNA expression. MicroRNA (miRNA), a special type of RNA, is considered a biomarker for carcinogenic cells. A team of scientists from China has found a way to amplify miRNA in live tumor cells for bioimaging. As they report in the journal Angewandte…

Is your child getting enough sleep?

There are plenty of good reasons to make sure children get enough sleep, but their parents’ evening peace is nowhere near the most important one. “If we make sure our children get enough sleep, it can help protect them from mental health problems,” says Bror M. Ranum, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of…

Immunotherapy combo achieves reservoir shrinkage in HIV model

Stimulating immune cells with two cancer immunotherapies together can shrink the size of the viral “reservoir” in SIV-infected non-human primates treated with antiviral drugs, researchers have concluded. The reservoir includes immune cells that harbor virus despite potent antiviral drug treatment. The findings, reported in Nature Medicine, have important implications for the quest to cure HIV,…