> Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation In December 2020, software developer Angie Hinrichs at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), applied for access to a labor-saving data feed from GISAID, a nonprofit database of viral sequences … | Continue reading
To train a computer to “recognize” elements of a scene supplied by its visual sensors, computer scientists typically use millions of images painstakingly labeled by humans. Eslami et al. developed an artificial vision system, dubbed the Generative Query Network (GQN), that has no … | Continue reading
The security of our digital networks is underpinned by the ability to generate streams of random numbers or bits. As networks expand in an ever-connected way, the challenge is to increase the generation rate of the random numbers to keep pace with demand. Kim et al. designed a ch … | Continue reading
Sound travels faster and farther in water than in air. Over evolutionary time, many marine organisms have come to rely on sound production, transmission, and reception for key aspects of their lives. These important behaviors are threatened by an increasing cacophony in the marin … | Continue reading
Do terrestrial geomagnetic field reversals have an effect on Earth's climate? Cooper et al. created a precisely dated radiocarbon record around the time of the Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees. This record revea … | Continue reading
Zoonotic pandemics, like that caused by SARS-CoV-2, can follow the spillover of animal viruses into highly susceptible human populations. Their descendants have adapted to the human host and evolved to evade immune pressure. Coronaviruses acquire substitutions more slowly than ot … | Continue reading
Will the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—a transition made “orderly” with barbed wire, National Guard soldiers, and the closure of downtown Washington, D.C.—be remembered as an inflection point? After 4 years of boorish incivility, incendiary … | Continue reading
SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins interact with the eukaryotic translation machinery and inhibitors of translation have potent antiviral effects. Here we report that the drug plitidepsin (aplidin), which has limited clinical approval, possesses antiviral activity (IC90 = 0.88 nM) 27.5-fo … | Continue reading
Viral mutations that evade neutralizing antibodies, an occurrence known as viral escape, can occur and may impede the development of vaccines. To predict which mutations may lead to viral escape, Hie et al. used a machine learning technique for natural language processing with tw … | Continue reading
> Science's COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation When the number of COVID-19 cases began to rise again in Manaus, Brazil, in December 2020, Nuno Faria was stunned. The virologist at Imperial College London had just co-authored a … | Continue reading
I logged onto a video call last month, not knowing what to expect. Faculty members in my department had just 1 day's notice of the meeting with our dean, which made me wonder, “Is it another budget cut—or worse?” After a quick apology, the dean pivoted to the news: Given the crun … | Continue reading
In mice, both pain and fear can be transferred by short social contact from one animal to a bystander. Neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex in the bystander animal mediate these transfers. However, the specific anterior cingulate projections involved in … | Continue reading
Herd immunity is expected to arise when a virus cannot spread readily, because it encounters a population that has a level of immunity that reduces the number of individuals susceptible to infection. On page 288 of this issue, Buss et al. ([ 1 ][1]) describe the extent of the lar … | Continue reading
Herd immunity is expected to arise when a virus cannot spread readily, because it encounters a population that has a level of immunity that reduces the number of individuals susceptible to infection. On page 288 of this issue, Buss et al. ([ 1 ][1]) describe the extent of the lar … | Continue reading
Understanding immune memory to SARS-CoV-2 is critical for improving diagnostics and vaccines, and for assessing the likely future course of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed multiple compartments of circulating immune memory to SARS-CoV-2 in 254 samples from 188 COVID-19 cases, … | Continue reading
We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. We submit that a … | Continue reading
Governments are attempting to control the COVID-19 pandemic with nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). However, the effectiveness of different NPIs at reducing transmission is poorly understood. We gathered chronological data on the implementation of NPIs for several European, … | Continue reading
The dramatic success of two COVID-19 vaccines in clinical trials last month marked a triumph for a previously unproven medical technology. The vaccines, one of which was authorized for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week, rely on the genetic instructi … | Continue reading