On a Monday afternoon in early October about 100 years ago, a special meeting of the Baltimore school board was held to decide whether schools should close. Some 30,000 children—more than 60% of the city’s students—had reported absent that day, along with 219 teachers.
It’s unknown how many students stayed home because they were already sick or because they feared …
Read moreOne of the most significant carbon sinks on the planet is right below your feet. Soil, that layer of organic material and crushed-up rock that covers much of the terrestrial earth like a chocolate coating, contains about 2,500 billion metric tons of carbon. It’s the second-biggest carbon sink on the planet after the ocean, currently holding about three times as much carbon as the atmosphe…
Read moreIn an historic milestone that will irrevocably change the landscape of food, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has authorized the sale of cell-cultivated chicken—chicken grown from stem cells in a bioreactor—from two Bay Area-based food technology companies, Good Meat and Upside Foods. The approval, which arrived in company inboxes early this morning in the form of …
Read moreOver the past few years, Professor Zhang Yongzhen has made it his business to sequence thousands of previously unknown viruses. But he knew straight away that this one was particularly nasty. It was about 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 3 that a metal box arrived at the drab, beige buildings that house the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. Inside was a test tube packed in dry ice that contained swabs f…
Read moreThere are more than 30 million white-tailed deer in the U.S. That’s a boon for hunters, a headache for gardeners, a hazard for drivers—and now, it appears, a possible problem in the world’s ongoing effort to control the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a new study (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) published on bioRxiv, researchers at Penn State University found that severa…
Read moreTo protect himself from COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci has long said he’s skipping hugs and handshakes, wearing a mask, and staying off of planes. Last week, he acknowledged adding another step to protect his health: taking supplements of vitamin-D.
“If you are deficient in Vitamin-D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection,” Fauci, head of the National…
Read moreI grew up watching Schoolhouse Rock, the animated shorts that educated American children of the seventies while we zoned out in front of the TV. The most memorable segment was the one where an adorable singing bill—literally a piece of paper rolled up and tied with red ribbon—started out bored and neglected on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. When he finally made it through the many s…
Read moreFor a painting worth nearly half a billion dollars, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi is far from perfect.
The 500-year-old portrait of Jesus Christ has a shady past that includes ownership by King Charles I, a 160-year disappearing act and a sale for only thousands of dollars just 12 years ago.
It is damaged and was heavily repainted, then restored. And at least one …
Read moreThis spring, researchers at a quarry near Draperstown, Northern Ireland, undertook what amounted to a massively scaled up version of the type of science experiment you might see in a middle school classroom. Using a crane, researchers added huge concrete blocks—each 2,400 lbs.—to a footbridge to see how much weight it could hold. What was notable about the bridge, though, was that instead o…
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