Here is Dr Tedros demonstrating how to wash your hands for COVID-19 protection in the "Safe Hands" challenge

(click to watch on Youtube)

He is challenging others to do the same and upload videos of themselves doing it.

Though implicit bias - the belief that you are prejudiced, it's just a matter of degree - is controversial, that's only because it lacks scientific footing. A new study seeks to advance that.

We all have likes and dislikes but when it becomes bias or prejudice is subjective. If you prefer dark haired men, does that mean you are prejudiced against redheads? It does, in things like the Implicit Association Test. 

Conspiracy theories have a long history, but the actual term “conspiracy theory” emerged much more recently. It was only a few decades ago that the term took on the derogatory connotations it has today, where to call someone a conspiracy theorist functions as an insult.

So it may come as no surprise that there is even a conspiracy theory about the origins of the label. This conspiracy theory claims that the CIA invented the term in 1967 to disqualify those who questioned the official version of John F Kennedy’s assassination and doubted that his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone.

Drosophila flies lose long-term memory of a traumatic event when kept in the dark, and the authors of a new study link that to a specific molecular mechanism responsible. 

Memories are difficult to erase but breakthroughs could be important for sufferers of trauma, because while most normal events won't be recalled even the same day, a particularly shocking event may be consolidated into our long-term memory, whereby new proteins are synthesized and the neuronal circuits in our brain are modified.

With coronavirus all over media and politicians looking for ways to leverage concern into votes for their political party this November, a number of parents will want to take their children to a doctor at the first sign of a cough "just to be sure" and doctors say that's a bad idea. It burdens a health system that could be overtaxed if aggressive projections about the impact of COVID-19 come true.

Those parents are not being rational, doctors will note, most kids will not be harmed by it any more than they would a bad cold or flu, and yet the American medical system is overrun by "defensive medicine" that engages in the same behavior.

A rock carving found in the Teymareh rock art site in Khomein county in Central Iran is part man and part mantis, with six limbs.  Was it a mistake? The world's first graphic novel? A way to inspire warriors to fight their foes? We may never know. It's hard to even know its age.

Rock carvings - petroglyphs - of invertebrate animals are rare, so for a new paper  entomologists teamed up with archaeologists to try and identify the motif. They compared the carving with others around the world and with the local six-legged creatures which its prehistoric artists could have encountered.

The 2019 version of the coronavirus that has spread to about 50 countries across the world doesn't appear to be transmittable from pregnant mothers to newborns at birth. The new case study is the second out of China within the last month to confirm that mothers infected with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during pregnancy did not infect their babies.

All four mothers in the current study gave birth at Wuhan's Union Hospital while infected. Wuhan in Hubei Province was the epicenter of the current outbreak that has sickened more than 100,000 people worldwide and killed more than 3,400, mostly in China. 

Please share this widely, to put pressure on UK to go back to the contain phase for COVIDー19, and potentially save thousands of lives: Many in the UK have been scared and appalled by Boris Johnson’s statement that “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” Distinguished experts are also shocked and outraged by the UK's decision to stop containing COVID-19, stop detecting mild cases, and just use social distancing to delay it as it spreads through our population.

A new paper shows that a selling feature of electric cars, fast-charging stations along highways, actually subject batteries to high temperatures and high resistance that can cause them to crack, leak, and lose their storage capacity.

Though COVID-19 as a disease is rather difficult to get, spreading the coronavirus itself is as easy as spreading influenza viruses. The big risks will be from a sneeze, though COVID-19 doesn't have much sneezing, or a cough, or touching someone's hands who did either and then touching your own face.

Why do people subconsciously touch their face if they felt something weird on their hands? That is a mystery of psychology, but it's why that is the best deterrent to catching coronavirus or spreading it. 

Yet if someone sneezes and you don't touch their hand, how long will the virus in its "aerosol" state hang around?