scientific

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

COVID-19

Understanding SARS-CoV-2 And How It Causes COVID-19 – And Then Developing Multiple Vaccines Was The Top Scientific Breakthrough For 2020

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the respiratory illness COVID-19, has killed approximately 2.2% of those worldwide who are known to have contracted it. But the situation could be a lot worse without modern medicine and science. The last such global scourge was the influenza pandemic of 1918, which is estimated to have killed 50 million people at a time when there was no internet or easy access to long-distance telephones to disseminate information. Science was limited, which made it difficult to identify the cause and initiate vaccine development. The world is 100% more prepared for the current pandemic than it was 100 years ago. However, it has still affected our lives profoundly. I am a physician scientist who specializes in the study of viruses and runs a microbiology laboratory tha...

A restart of nuclear testing offers little scientific value to the US and would benefit other countries

July 15, 2020 marks 75 years since the detonation of the first nuclear bomb. The Trinity Test, in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert, proved that the design for the Nagasaki Bomb worked and started the nuclear era. The U.S. tested nuclear bombs for decades. But at the end of the Cold War in 1992, the U.S. government imposed a moratorium on U.S. testing. This was strengthened by the Clinton administration’s decision to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Although the Senate never ratified the treaty and it never entered into force, all 184 countries that signed the test ban, including the U.S., have followed its rules. But in recent weeks, the Trump administration and Congress have begun debating whether to restart active testing of nuclear weapons on U.S. soil. Some cons...

AI tool searches thousands of scientific papers to guide researchers to coronavirus insights

The big idea The scientific community worldwide has mobilized with unprecedented speed to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, and the emerging research output is staggering. Every day, hundreds of scientific papers about COVID-19 come out, in both traditional journals and non-peer-reviewed preprints. There’s already far more than any human could possibly keep up with, and more research is constantly emerging. And it’s not just new research. We estimate that there are as many as 500,000 papers relevant to COVID-19 that were published before the outbreak, including papers related to the outbreaks of SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Any one of these might contain the key information that leads to effective treatment or a vaccine for COVID-19. Traditional methods of searching through the research li...