Science (Page 126)

Dance classes have been implicated as potential superspreading events. dorglao/Shutterstock The COVID-19 coronavirus is not your average virus. During the pandemic, it has become increasingly clear that averages do not apply in understanding the paths the virus takes or when or where it attacks. What some scientists and specialists inContinue Reading

Piccadilly Circus subway underground station is emptier than usual. Matteo Roma/Shutterstock To get through the COVID-19 pandemic, we need good information. One hugely important statistic is how many people have died from the disease in various countries. But it’s notoriously difficult to compare deaths in this way – each nationContinue Reading

Artist's impression of early mammals. John Sibbick/University of Bristol, Author provided Warm blood is one of the key traits that led to the success of mammals as they evolved from scurrying beneath the feet of dinosaurs to spreading into the wild and wonderful collection of animals we know today. ButContinue Reading

We can’t say with any certainty what the future of COVID-19 is. But based on our experience with other infections, there is little reason to believe that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 will go away any time soon, even when vaccines become available. A more realistic scenario is that it will beContinue Reading

A prehistoric woman with a child have left behind the world's longest trackway. Author provided Every parent knows the feeling. Your child is crying and wants to go home, you pick them up to comfort them and move faster, your arms tired with a long walk ahead – but youContinue Reading

Mount Etna erupting. Tomarchio Francesco/Shutterstock How can we tell when a volcano is going to erupt? – Lena, aged eight, Frankfurt, Germany Predicting when a volcano might erupt is very difficult. Some volcanoes erupt almost constantly, such as Kīlauea on Hawaii, but others may have gaps of hundreds of thousandsContinue Reading

This year’s Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded for a genuine revolution in modern science. The Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing tool allows scientists to precisely alter DNA by cutting and pasting sections of it. It has led to many discoveries in medicine, particularly in the development of new cancer therapies, and hasContinue Reading

Emmanuelle Charpentier, director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany, and Jennifer Doudna, professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, US, are the joint winners of the Nobel prize in chemistry 2020 for the development of a precise method of editing genomes. This is theContinue Reading

Emmanuelle Charpentier, director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany, and Jennifer Doudna, professor of biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, US, are the joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 for the development of a precise method of editing genomes. This is theContinue Reading