James' World 2

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Ever spawning COVID variants have made the past two years exhausting, to say the least. I am so tired of worrying about how some tiny bizarre mutation to the spike protein of this itsy bitsy virus-cell could affect me. Big Pharma recently tried to console us with promises of variant-specific vaccines, but they aren’t coming fast enough to keep up with the Greek alphabet of COVID terror. Thankfully, some forward-thinking scientists are working on a universal COVID vaccine.

“You don’t want to play this whack-a-mole approach. This could go on forever,” David Martinez, a viral immunologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Washington Post. Martinez is working with other scientists at UNC to develop a vaccine with “chimeric spikes.” What that means is that, instead of using the spike protein of just one coronavirus to create a vaccine, they are using a cocktail of variants that have different spike protein mutations. The idea is that it will be more difficult for new strains to evade a vaccine that uses this multi-pronged approach, according to the Washington Post.

In case you’re not a microbiologist, an analogy might be helpful here. Vaccines work by teaching our bodies to recognize and defend itself against invading viruses by showing them what potentially dangerous viruses look like. One of the problems we’ve encountered with coronavirus is that it changes so quickly that by the time our bodies are exposed to a new mutation, it looks very different from what the vaccine showed us, so our bodies don’t know how to fight it.

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Maxine McCrann

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Thanks to a scientific breakthrough from Stanford University electrical engineers, the latest sci-fi gadget turned reality is a “tricorder,” a la the Star Trek device that lets users (like medical everyman Dr. Leonard McCoy) diagnose illnesses from a few inches away, doing away with invasive pricks and pokes.

While it isn’t a spitting image of Star Trek‘s fictional technology (it isn’t the 24th century yet), the concept, called “noncontact thermoacoustic detection” in the team’s Applied Physics Letters paper, could detect early-stage cancers with electromagnetic energy. The idea is that tumors grow additional blood vessels to continue growing and that growth would show up as “hot spots” on an ultrasound.

It could also be used to detect plastic explosives used to booby trap roads in war zones. As Stanford’s Tom Abate writes, the microwaves produced by the device would heat a muddy patch of ground where there might be a bomb, causing the mud to expand and “squeeze” the explosive, generating ultrasound signals that reveal the presence of the explosive — all from a safe distance.

Assistant professor Amin Arbabian and Professor Butrus Khuri-Yakub, who led the Stanford research team, began work on the project after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a U.S. military research and development branch tasked with finding cutting-edge innovation in military technology, was looking for a way to detect buried non-metallic explosives without coming in contact with the ground above them. Current detection methods can’t locate plastic explosives, and anything that touches the surface would make the bomb blow up. 

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The wooly mammoth’s curving tusks and towering skeleton captures people’s imagination, as does the mystery of their extinction: Did human hunters kill the species? Did the end of the Ice Age and a changing climate decimate their food of choice? Now researchers have added a new theory to the list of potential mammoth killers. These titans may have had bones too weak to let them survive.

Sergei Leshchinskiy of Russia’s Tomsk State University analyzed more than 23,500 mammoth bones and teeth from several sites and found bone disease in 90 percent of them, reports Kate Horowitz for Mental Floss. This disease is most likely from nutrient deficiencies.

“Even the bones from baby mammoths were brittle and weak, which suggests their mothers weren’t getting the nutrients they needed,” Horowitz writes.

The new theory could tie up all of the stories about potential causes for mammoth demise into one tidy package: A period of changing climate could have leached minerals from the soil, resulting in osteoporosis and other bone diseases Leshchinskiy found. Weak bones would have made the beasts easier to hunt and kill, leaving mammoths on track for extinction.

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