For young people, breaking into the cutthroat tech industry — or any industry, really — has become far more difficult during the pandemic. In-person networking events and club meetings are on hold; there aren’t many online hubs for informal connection; and the investors and founders whose buy-in can make or break a product are harder…
As businesses try to recover from the pandemic’s economic blow while ensuring the safety of workers and customers, many have complained of two obstacles: access to coronavirus testing for their employees and long delays in receiving results. But some have found a reliable workaround. Through a growing number of intermediaries, they can generally obtain test…
In January, the artist Hank Willis Thomas began enigmatically summoning designers, musicians and activists he knew to his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was working on something big, bringing a force of history back to life. “I didn’t even know why he was asking me to come by,” the artist Wildcat Ebony Brown…
My wife and I are participating in a clinical trial for a Covid-19 vaccine. We had no antibodies before we received the vaccine, but we now have a lot of them, according to two independent tests. Presumably we are like millions of others who have recovered from Covid-19 and have these antibodies, and so are…
My mother saved an immense amount of stuff. That’s something of a burden: What to do with it all? But it’s also a gift. Because she died of cancer in 1992, at 53, when I was just 15. And yet she still finds ways to speak to me, through the things she left behind. One…
The pain woke the 52-year-old physician from a dead sleep. It was as if all the muscles in his right leg, from those in the buttock down his thigh to the very bottom of his calf, were on fire. He shifted slightly to see if he could find a more comfortable position. There was a…
Excessive weight gain during pregnancy may be associated with an increased risk for childhood asthma and allergy. Chinese researchers studied 15,145 mother-child pairs in Shanghai, tracking gestational weight gain and childhood health over an average of almost eight years. The study is in JAMA Network Open. They found that compared with mothers who gained the…
In this age of trolls and bots and digital impostors, words like “crank” and “bully” seem impossibly antiquated, like labels from the black-and-white TV era. “Scoundrel” almost qualifies as a term of endearment — culturally insensitive, for the purveyors of disinformation who parade with grim delight in the virtual public square. A more precise language…
A study on the effectiveness of multiple treatments, including laboratory-made antibodies, at preventing mild COVID-19 from advancing to severe illness in the outpatient setting is underway by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The clinical trial is enrolling patients at Harris Health System’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital. UTHealth is…
Human white blood cells, known as leukocytes, swim using a newly described mechanism called molecular paddling, researchers report in the September 15th issue of Biophysical Journal. This microswimming mechanism could explain how both immune cells and cancer cells migrate in various fluid-filled niches in the body, for good or for harm. “The capacity of living…