Almost since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a piece of the SARS-CoV2 virus called the “spike protein” has drawn interest from researchers and healthcare professionals.

New research by Yuyang Lei and colleagues published in the journal Circulation Research sheds new light on how the spike protein might play a critical role in the widespread damage caused by SARS-CoV2, and offers insight into treating the complications of COVID-19.

Vaccine skeptics have seized on the study to cast doubt on the safety of vaccines. But a review of the study’s findings shows that the concerns raised by vaccine doubters are much ado about nothing.

If a post is not popular, you will never see it, so views count, but it is the message and not the popularity of it that persuades people, according to a new paper.

819 demographically diverse American adults aged 18-35 were shown two YouTube videos either for or against vaping. The pro-vaping videos were commercials for e-cigarette brands. The anti-vaping videos were public service announcements produced by anti-tobacco groups. What was changed was the view numbers that participants saw for the videos.

Participants saw view numbers either around 10, 100, 100,000 or 1,000,000.

A new paper uses emotional verbiage like "forever chemicals" and sketchy correlation to try and claim that fires are not what firefighters should be worried about when the alarm rings, it's the chemicals created by Evil Corporations they should fear.

Firefighters are going to be enraged if they see it, and they should be. It puts their lives at risk. This is not junk science, it isn't science at all.

Getting kids to go to sleep has long been a challenge for some, and there are beliefs that it got more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Spotify got science and music together (the parts that aren't already together, music is applied math) to create what they are calling the perfect lullaby. Maybe it will help.

Swedish rappers Jaqueline “Mapei” Cummings and Jason “Timbuktu” are both parents of young children. After Jaqueline gave birth they went to the studio armed with the science of what sounds to use to create the most soothing lullaby according to sleep expert Helena Kubicek Boye. Then they released the work on Spotify Kids.

While exchanging ideas with a dear colleague of mine on possible applications of differentiable programming to the optimization of the design of detection instruments, I came about an interesting, crazy idea which, since I do not have enough time to investigate at the moment, is only suitable for this blog. 

The rationale is that if it is a viable, patentable idea worth something, once it is published here it becomes of public knowledge and hence non-patentable anymore... Which in turn means nobody owns it, and it can be exploited without problem, like the Salk vaccine.

The remains of 36 bubonic plague victims from a 16th century mass grave in Germany provide evidence that evolutionary adaptive processes, driven by the disease, may have conferred immunity on later generations of people from the region.

The researchers collected DNA samples from the inner ear bones of individuals in a mass grave in the southern German city of Ellwangen which experienced bubonic plague outbreaks in the 16th and 17th centuries. Then they took DNA samples from 50 current residents of the town. They compared their frequency spectra - the distribution of gene variants in a given sample - for a large panel of immunity-related genes and found that innate immune markers increased in frequency in modern people from the town compared to plague victims.

Men may be more reluctant to go to a doctor for chest pain but when they get to a care facility, a new analysis finds they get it quicker than women.

In this look at the data, all of the patients were younger, from 18-55. 

Compared with men, women were triaged less urgently, waited longer to be seen, and were less likely to undergo basic tests or be hospitalized or admitted for observation to diagnose a heart attack, according to a demographic look presented at the American College of Cardiology meeting. 

Today is May 5th, when modern Americans assuming this is the day of Mexican independence (it isn't) consume Mexican stuff like burritos and margaritas (those aren't Mexican) but what we should be celebrating is Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard going into space.

On this day in 1961, 60 years ago, Alan Shepard let himself be strapped into a capsule sitting on top of a skyscraper of rocket fuel using parts all selected because they were the lowest bidder on a government contract - and set off for the unknown.

Seriously, this was a risk only test pilots would happily have taken. If you look at the spec that NASA gave to all the corporations that actually put us into space, it reads like aspirational quotes more than engineering:

A new analysis finds that nearly 50 percent of people who have children with a partner who suffers from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder themselves meet the criteria for a mental disorder.

Epicurious, a food website owned by the billion-dollar Condé Nast group, has stated it will no longer carry recipes that use beef. Because of the environment.