Friday, November 1

SCIENCE

Monoclonal Antibodies – What Are They And Why We Need Them As Well As A Vaccine
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SCIENCE

Monoclonal Antibodies – What Are They And Why We Need Them As Well As A Vaccine

When President Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19, one of the cutting-edge experimental therapies he received was a mixture of monoclonal antibodies. But now a vaccine may soon be available. So are other therapies necessary or valuable? And what exactly is a monoclonal antibody? Over the past few months, the public has learned about many treatments being used to combat COVID-19. An antiviral like remdesivir inhibits the virus from replicating in human cells. Convalescent plasma from the blood of donors who have recovered from COVID-19 may contain antibodies that suppress the virus and inflammation. Steroids like dexamethasone may modify and reduce the dangerous inflammatory damage to the lungs, thereby slowing respiratory failure. The FDA issued emergency use authorization for Eli Lilly’s...
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Can Biden’s Climate Change Plans Quickly Raise The Bar, And Be Transformative?
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ENVIRONMENT, POLITICS, SCIENCE

Can Biden’s Climate Change Plans Quickly Raise The Bar, And Be Transformative?

The day Joe Biden becomes president, he can start taking actions that can help slow climate change. The question is whether he can match the magnitude of the challenge. If his administration focuses only on what is politically possible and fails to build a coordinated response that also addresses the social and economic ramifications of both climate change and the U.S. policy response, it is unlikely to succeed. I have spent much of my career working on responses to climate change internationally and in Washington. I have seen the quiet efforts across political parties, even when the rhetoric was heated. There is room for effective climate actions, particularly as heat waves, wildfires and extreme weather make the risks of global warming tangible and the costs of renewable energy fall. A...
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A New Model Tells Astronomers Where To Look For More Exoplanets Using 4 Simple Variables – They Are Still Out There
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SCIENCE, VIDEO REELS

A New Model Tells Astronomers Where To Look For More Exoplanets Using 4 Simple Variables – They Are Still Out There

Only 12 light years from Earth, Tau Ceti is the closest single star similar to the Sun and an all-time favorite in sci-fi stories. Habitable worlds orbiting Tau Ceti were destinations of fictional starships like “The Expanse”‘s Nauvoo and “Barbarella”’s vessel. “Star Trek”’s Captain Picard also frequented an exotic bar in the system. Now, thanks to a new approach to analyzing nearby planetary systems, we have a deeper understanding of the actual worlds that orbit Tau Ceti and many other nearby stars. Exoplanets – worlds around other stars – have long been staples of science fiction but remained mostly inaccessible to scientific investigations. This all changed over the past decade, when NASA’s Kepler and TESS exoplanet hunter space telescopes added thousands of new planets to the previous...
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At 20 The International Space Station Offers Hope And A Template For Future Cooperation
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SCIENCE

At 20 The International Space Station Offers Hope And A Template For Future Cooperation

On Nov. 2, 2020, the International Space Station celebrated its 20th anniversary of continuous human occupation. With astronauts and cosmonauts from around the world working together, the ISS has demonstrated humankind’s ability to not only live and work in space but cooperate with one another. This remarkable achievement is significant as countries and companies around the world look to expand space exploration beyond Earth orbit. The path to this anniversary was not easy; like most things done in space, the cost and the difficulty were high. Supported by the Reagan administration as part of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, the ISS began its life in the 1980s. Following the Challenger disaster in 1986, planning fell by the wayside as costs increased. Facing delays and cost ...
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Three Scientists Awarded 2020 Nobel Prize In Physics
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE, VIDEO REELS

Three Scientists Awarded 2020 Nobel Prize In Physics

Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in nature. They warp space and time in extreme ways and contain a mathematical impossibility, a singularity – an infinitely hot and dense object within. But if black holes exist and are truly black, how exactly would we ever be able to make an observation? This morning the Nobel Committee announced that the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics will be awarded to three scientists – Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez – who helped discover the answers to such profound questions. Andrea Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Robert Penrose is a theoretical physicist who works on black holes, and his work has influenced not just me but my entire generation through his series of popular books that are loaded w...
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Some Bees Are Born Curious Others Are Single Minded – How The Hive Picks Which Flowers To Feast On
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SCIENCE

Some Bees Are Born Curious Others Are Single Minded – How The Hive Picks Which Flowers To Feast On

When you try to pick a restaurant with a group of friends, how do you decide? Your curious friend wants to try the new place, while your focused friend wants to go to the old faithful. One friend is insistent, while the other is more quiet. Ultimately, the focused vocal friend convinces the group by saying, “I am telling you, this is the best place. It’s a sure thing – we gotta go!” Just like people, honey bees vary in how they seek out food and communicate where to go. As a biologist, I study collective behavior, especially how groups make decisions. My colleagues and I have discovered some individual bees are seemingly born with a predetermined foraging style – they can be either focused foragers or curious foragers. Having different approaches to collecting food turns out to be advanta...
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Wildfire Smoke Is Laced With Toxic Chemicals – Here’s How They Got There
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SCIENCE

Wildfire Smoke Is Laced With Toxic Chemicals – Here’s How They Got There

When you breathe in smoke from a wildfire, you’re probably inhaling more toxic chemicals than you realize. Pollution from power plants and vehicles, pesticides, fertilizers and chemicals in waste can all make their way into trees and plants. When those trees and plants burn, chemicals are released along with health-harming particulate matter in the smoke, gas and ash. Millions of people have been breathing that smoky air this year as the western U.S. experiences another extreme fire year. More than 4 million acres had burned in the West by Oct. 1, California had nearly doubled its previous record for acreage burned, and several weeks of wildfire risk were still ahead. As an engineer and scientist who studies air pollution, I have been looking into how those chemicals compound the health...
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Science untangles the elusive power and influence of hope in our lives
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SCIENCE

Science untangles the elusive power and influence of hope in our lives

On Erin Gruwell’s first day as a high school English teacher, she faced a classroom of 150 “at risk” freshmen. Most of these kids, statistically, were going to fail. They were tough, their young lives already defined by poverty, gangs, violence and low expectations. These students, she wrote, knew nearly every “four-letter word” except one: hope. Traditional dancers celebrate Hari Raya, the end of Ramadan. Photo by Aniq Danial for Unsplash, CC BY-ND Yet four years later, every one of her “at risk” students at Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA, had graduated from high school. More than half went on to graduate from college. The stories written by Gruwell’s students were published as a book called “The Freedom Writers Diary”. It became a New York Times bestseller and in 2007 was made int...
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COVID-19 vaccines: Open source licensing could keep Big Pharma from making huge profits off taxpayer-funded research
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE

COVID-19 vaccines: Open source licensing could keep Big Pharma from making huge profits off taxpayer-funded research

An international, multi-billion-dollar race is underway to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, and progress is moving at record speed, but with nationalistic, competitive undertones. If and when an effective vaccine is invented, its production will require an unprecedented effort to vaccinate people across the globe. However, for the country that invents a safe and effective vaccine, at least in the urgent short term, it will be politically difficult to export vaccines before their own population is immunized. “The only solution,” vaccine development scientist Sandy Douglas told The New York Times, “is to make a hell of a lot of vaccine in a lot of different places.” But how? Having the public sector fund contracts with vaccine makers is a key component to meeting this future, unprecedented, dis...
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Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change denial
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ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE

Faith and politics mix to drive evangelical Christians’ climate change denial

U.S. Christians, especially evangelical Christians, identify as environmentalists at very low rates compared to the general population. According to a Pew Research Center poll from May 2020, while 62% of religiously unaffiliated U.S. adults agree that the Earth is warming primarily due to human action, only 35% of U.S. Protestants do – including just 24% of white evangelical Protestants. Politically powerful Christian interest groups publicly dispute the climate science consensus. A coalition of major evangelical groups, including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, launched a movement opposing what they describe as “the false worldview” of environmentalism, which supposedly is “striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.” Studies show that bel...
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