Science stories you've missed

Years ago, I reported for Slate on animal relationships across species - not only are humans fond of their cats, but it turns out, it is not uncommon for dogs and cats to bond, as any Youtube search will prove. Less common is the cheetah and the dog, but even that relationship is part of the animal experience. "Animals can forge bonds across species boundaries if the need for social contact pre-empts their normal biological imperatives. A cat raised with dogs doesn’t know it’s a cat, the logic goes," my piece started. So I found it very interesting that a new study out of the UK talks about an aspect of this topic, animal emotions. The new theory from researchers at the School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast suggests that animals experience emotions like we do - showing positive moods when they “win” and sour moods when they “lose”. Their findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B . Using animal contests as a ca...

In their fourth consortium regarding the pandemic, called "Catalyst Conversations" , researchers and scientists today spoke from their respective Zoom locations - including a cool ocean backdrop in England - to weigh in on the future of vaccines. Balancing the need for speed with safety is on everyone's minds these days, and definitely here in the States where President Trump even coined his team's efforts "Operation Warp Speed." While globally, effective vaccines and therapies to control the Covid-19 pandemic are weighing on everyone's minds, the reality is that every race has its cost. Today one of the panelists cited the comparison to an airplane, that "we are trying to build the airplane while flying it" and only later said darkly that there is a reason that of course, no one flies an airplane while it's being buit. Removing competitive barriers to encourage open science around antiviral and vaccine candidates, conjoining data standard...

So-called "deep learning techniques", such as what are called convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have been exciting ecologists lately. In a paper published this week in Methods in Ecology and Evolution with the British Ecological Society, researchers show how such tools can automatize the analysis of various types of bird data, ranging from species abundance to behaviors, and from sources such as pictures or audio recordings (reviewed in Christin, Hervet, & Lecomte, 2019). Such identification, the authors contend, is crucial when trying to answer questions related to evolutionary biology and is mostly performed by marking animals with tags. "Such methods are well-established, but often make data collection and analyses time-consuming, or limit the contexts in which data can be collected," the researchers write. Computational advances, in particular regarding deep learning -- part of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks -- can help r...

"Many people don't realize that Albert Einstein was at the forefront of racial equality in the United States. It pained him to see the plight of African Americans." -Michio Kaku, Prof of Physics, City College NY Theoretical physicist and Nobelist Albert Einstein, famous for the equation E = mc2 and developing the theory of relativity, was greeted like a rock star when he appeared in public. He was a modest, unassuming celebrity and yet clearly the limelight suited him. In a new docudrama available for purchase on DVD, producer-director Julia Newman paints an elegant if at times frustrating portrait of the enigma scientist from Germany. He was Jewish and to hear her narrators tell it, gradually more fascinated with his own Jewishness. He had two wives (his physics student Mileva and then his cousin, the more matronly Elsa) but was a notorious womanizer, more or less sugarcoated in the film. He is shown to be a jerk in his treatment of wife one with a list of rules r...

A new paper published as part of the Cato Working Papers (www.cato.org/workingpapers) posits that travel restrictions imposed from China did not halt transmission of the novel Coronavirus into the United States. The authors write that, "Historically, travel restrictions to prevent the spread of pandemic influenzas have been ineffective at halting or significantly delaying the spread (WHO Writing Group, 2006)." They use what is called the synthetic control method (SCM) to estimate a "counterfactual" (meaning, something has not happened or is not the case) number of COVID-19 cases for the U.S. in the absence of the February 2, 2020 travel restriction (Abadie, 2019; Abadie et al., 2010, 2015; Abadie et al., 2003; McClelland et al., 2017). "We use four different outcome variables to measure [the] number of COVID-19 cases: the cumulative number of new COVID-19 cases, the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases per million, the number of new cases, and the number of n...

For good reason, I have feared going out into the world over the past three and a half months. Yesterday I took three bus rides and on the second, I could have had my life put in jeopardy. I will only know if I come down with COVID-19 symptoms or get tested to find out. Here is what happened: I was on the Coastal Link bus here in Connecticut, gazing out the window, when an unstable and quite vocal disheveled character wandered on to the bus in front of Stop 'n Shop. He sat down and then got up and started to sing (badly) out the window. This immediately rattled me so I mentioned it to the driver, who called out but then ignored him. As I gazed out the window, I tried to calm my nerves, when suddenly I hear something and turn to my left. He is at my side, crazed One-Flew-Over-The-Cuckoo's-Nest-like right at my side, cackling and writhing just inches from where my nostrils can absorb someone's viral droplets. "AAAAHHHH!!!! GET AWAY! GET AWAY FROM ME!" I shrieked. ...

While pangolins can be carriers of coronavirus, they may be able to tolerate it through an unknown mechanism according to a recently published study in the journal "Frontiers in Immunology". "The transmission of pathogens from other vertebrate animals to humans is of particular concern because the resulting diseases, known as zoonoses, have caused major epidemics in the past and continue to pose enormous threats to the human population," the authors state in the journal. The article is entitled, "Pangolins Lack IFIH1/MDA5, a Cytoplasmic RNA Sensor That Initiates Innate Immune Defense Upon Coronavirus Infection." The pangolins in particular, the statement says, "lack two sensors that detect when a virus enters the body and trigger a sometimes dangerously excessive immune response in other mammals. Understanding how pangolins are able to survive coronavirus infections could help in the development of new treatment options for humans." I had t...

While scaly creatures known as pangolins can be carriers of coronavirus, they may be able to tolerate it through some other unknown mechanism according to a recently published study in the journal "Frontiers in Immunology". The news concerning these exotic animals was shared today, May 8, in a press release from Medical University of Vienna. "The transmission of pathogens from other vertebrate animals to humans is of particular concern because the resulting diseases, known as zoonoses, have caused major epidemics in the past and continue to pose enormous threats to the human population," the authors state in the journal. The pangolins in particular, the statement says, "lack two sensors that detect when a virus enters the body and trigger a sometimes dangerously excessive immune response in other mammals. Understanding how pangolins are able to survive coronavirus infections could help in the development of new treatment options for humans." Simi...

A study published today, April 6, in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment examines a novel twist on an old idea: that beauty is more than skin deep. The authors have shown how one should take charisma into account when studying and managing invasive species. Such interlopers are the second largest cause of biodiversity loss. Transferred to new environments by human activity, they become competitors or predators of local species, which are often unable to withstand the incursion. An international research team, involving two French laboratories, have evidenced an aspect of these invasions: species charisma. The popularity of a species and its perception by society and the media, they concur, determines how it is introduced and what impact it has on its new surroundings. In Italy, for example, the arrival of the popular North American grey squirrel threatens the existence of the native red squirrel. "Charisma is used in the literature to refer to the “attractive...