Viruses have strategies. They may not be dominated by politics or people who have desire to work in government but they are strategies just the same.

Unable to reproduce on their own, viruses replicate by infecting a living organism's cells and getting the cells to make copies of them. Two main options exist for copies of a virus's genetic structure made in the cell: stay in the cell as a template for making even more copies or get packaged as a new virus and leave in an attempt to infect other cells. The stay strategy initially produces copies of the genetic code faster, while the leave strategy emphasizes newly infecting cells. How do they evaluate these opposing evolutionary strategies? 

The world's most species-rich temperate alpine biota occurs in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Himalaya, and the Hengduan Mountains.

It has continuously existed far longer than any other alpine flora on Earth, which can infer how modern biotas have been shaped by past geological and climatic events.

By Glen Pyle and Gurkiran Dhuga

COVID-19 has thrown professional baseball in North America a curveball. An outbreak among players for the Miami Marlins, that has spread to the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Cardinals, brings into question the infection control protocols touted by Major League Baseball.

Men who live alone and have a smaller social network are less likely to be obese than women who have the same lifestyle, according to results found in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging survey. This debunks the cultural trope that marriage is worse for women and better for men when it comes to health.

The data used were the social ties of 28,238 adults aged 45 to 85 and their waist circumference, body mass index and general obesity. These results are only exploratory, they cannot create a causal link and since they are based on surveys have numerous confounders.

Right now, we can play video games and feel like we are 'in the game' but it's still a lot of suspension of disbelief. If you can only see 40 degrees while driving a car in a game that's nowhere close to your peripheral vision in the real world.

Next generation gaming, beyond better graphics, requires establishing new relationships between game progress and entertainment experience. Chess is a much different experience versus another person than it is a computer, as is Poker. Many less experienced people play far more conservatively versus people because computers don't feel real. And then there are some sports where the experience is limited because you aren't very good at them, such as sports.

As of late we have been scratching the barrel of "straightforward" measurements of the properties of the Higgs boson, the particle discovered in 2012 by the Large Hadron Collider ATLAS and CMS experiments. But the one property determined in the measurement published yesterday by the CMS experiment was one that many of us were very interested to check.

If a particle is an elementary body, how many individual, distinct properties can it really have? For the word "elementary" means that it is intrinsically simple! But things are not so clear-cut in the subnuclear world. An elementary particle, while devoid of inner structure and dimensions, still has a number of measurable attributes. For the Higgs boson we may size up:

- mass (of course!)

Common chemical reactions accelerate Brownian diffusion by sending long-range ripples into the surrounding solvent, which would mean that molecular diffusion and chemical reaction are related. Yet that would violate a central dogma of chemistry; that molecular diffusion and chemical reaction are decoupled. 

The ripples generated by chemical reactions, especially when catalyzed - accelerated by substances not themselves consumed - propagate long-range. This challenges the view that molecular motion and chemical reaction reactions affect only the nearby vicinity. 

Johnson  &  Johnson's Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine raised neutralizing antibodies and robustly protected rhesus macaques against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

TP53 is a gene found in every cell. It produces a protein called p53 which acts as a cell's barrier, even suppressing genetic mutations in the cell. However, if p53 becomes damaged, it no longer protects the cell as well. Perhaps even the opposite, it may drive the cancer, helping tumors spread and grow. That may be why only 2 percent of such cancers take root in the small intestine, while 98 percent take place in the colon, even though the colon is a much smaller organ.

Biologists have mapped the genome of phylloxera, an aphid-like pest capable of decimating vineyards. In so doing, they have identified nearly 3,000 genes enabling the insect to colonize and feed on grape vines by creating what are essentially nutritionally enhanced tumors.