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New genetic analysis of 10 genome sequences of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) from nine patients in Wuhan finds that the virus is most closely related to two bat-derived SARS-like coronaviruses, according to a study published in The Lancet.The authors say that although their analysis suggests that bats might be the original host of the virus, an animal sold at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan might represent an intermediate host that enables the emergence of the virus in humans. 

Pyrus calleryana (Callery pear) is a tree native to China and Vietnam that California government introduced a hundred years ago after natural fire blight wiped out much of the European pear crops grown in the state. Since the callery pear was highly resistant to fire they wanted to graft it to the European pear trees, so researchers traveled to China, then took a four-day boat ride from Wuhan up the Yangtze to where the natural trees grew in abundance. As a bonus, they found it could grow anywhere, and that meant it could grow as landscape even in a state that is mostly desert and artificially watered like California.

Plutella xylostella (diamondback moth) does tremendous damage to brassica crops such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and canola. A new strain of diamondback moth developed by Oxitec Ltd, (OX4319L) is modified to control pest diamondback moth in a targeted manner. It limits its  pest counterparts because they find and mate with pest females, but they pass along a self-limiting gene to offspring, which prevents female caterpillars from surviving. With sustained releases, the pest population is suppressed in a targeted, ecologically sustainable way. After releases stop, the self-limiting insects decline and disappear from the environment within a few generations.

Surveys sought to find out how common suicidal ideation and mental health disorders were during combat deployment and to examine the associated risk factors. Some of the greatest risks were being white, having past non-combat trauma, and past major depressive disorder.

An exploratory result, published in Military Medicine, finds that soldiers with traumatic brain injury are more likely than soldiers with other serious injuries to experience a range of mental health disorders.The retrospective analysis examined the cases of 4,980 military members who were severely injured during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2011. Nearly a third of them suffered moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI).

People can deny a lot of science without making a huge difference in their lives; no one will die if they deny evolution. Gravity, on the other hand, will kill you. You can't just jump off a building and deny it exists and expect a positive outcome.This unseen force dominates our entire lives so completely we forget it exists. We drop pencils and struggle to walk uphill and go on with our lives. How people account for this invisible influence while moving through the world was the subject of a recent experiment, and the results showed we regard it a lot differently when we can see it instead of feeling it through changes in weight and balance. 

Oseltamivir, which goes by the brand name Tamiflu and is sold by Hoffmann-La Roche, has long claimed to shorten the duration of flu severity, to skepticism and sometimes even derision from the evidence-based science community.A recently unsealed whistleblower lawsuit claims the company bilked U.S. taxpayers out of $1.5 billion by misrepresenting clinical studies and and publishing misleading articles falsely stating that Tamiflu reduces complications, severity, hospitalizations, mortality and transmission of influenza. And that's just when they encouraged government stockpiling, it does not include people who bought it with their own money, based on aggressive marketing campaigns which used the articles as evidence, the lawsuit alleges.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Horizon Therapeutics Ireland DAC approval for teprotumumab-trbw as treatment in adults with thyroid eye disease, a rare condition where the muscles and fatty tissues behind the eye become inflamed, causing the eyes to be pushed forward and bulge outwards (proptosis). The compound is approved under the brand name Tepezza and is the first drug approved for the treatment of thyroid eye disease.

After Robert Koch first separated Mycobacterium bovis from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and seeing the success of vaccination in preventing smallpox, scientists believed that infection with bovine tuberculosis might protect against human tuberculosis. It wasn't a linear path but after a lot of trial and error, and some fitful starts (including deaths, the kind of thing that would get a product pulled from existence in today's cancel culture, the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine has been administered routinely to protect babies against tuberculosis since 1921.  Today only a few countries, such as the United States and the Holland (where TB is rare) don't use it.

A new survey found that 86 percent of parents believe teens spend too much time gaming. The C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health. also finds differences in gender. Twice as many parents say their teen boy plays video games every day compared to parents of teen girls. Teen boys are also more likely to spend three or more hours gaming.Surveyed parents believe gaming often gets in the way of other aspects of their teen's life, such as family activities and interactions (46 percent), sleep (44 percent), homework (34 percent), friendship with non-gaming peers (33 percent) and extracurricular activities (31 percent).

Microsoft has declared they will become carbon neutral regarding their energy usage by 2030. While their details were sparse, they included electric cars, which still create emissions because 81 percent of electricity is generated using fossil fuels, and charging themselves an internal carbon tax which they would then use to invest. 

Sailors have told tales of giant tentacled sea monsters for millennia. In ancient times, it was the Kraken. In more recent work, Jules Verne delighted and terrified the public while reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.The monstrous Architeuthis dux, the giant squid, must have been terrifying to ancient mariners. They were the size of modern school buses, never a good thing when you are in a wooden trireme, with eyes as big as dinner plates and tentacles that can snatch prey 10 yards away.During an evolutionary scale when most creatures got smaller, how did this squid get so big?Publication of its full genome sequence may give us clues.