fog

When bees are sick, their reflexes suffer. Presented with a drop of liquid, the infirm insects don’t extend their proboscises to inspect it as quickly as they do when they’re not ill. Similarly, sick rats take longer to navigate an underwater maze than healthy ones, songbirds don’t learn as many tunes, and crows are less inclined to solve puzzles when they’re under the weather.It’s a trend that holds true throughout the animal kingdom: Across taxa, wild animals seem to lose cognitive capacity when suffering from…

Detecting light from the earliest stars and galaxies through clouds of hydrogen could soon be possible, according to researchers. Astronomers have aimed to detect a signal that is a thousand times weaker and other radio signals. Due to the clouds of hydrogen, which absorb light very effectively, using a radio telescope to trace the signal would result in distortions in the observation. Researchers at Cambridge University have created a methodology to eliminate these distortions, allowing them to look through the earliest…

A small new study published Tuesday by scientists at the US National Institutes of Health suggests that the immune response triggered by coronavirus infections damages the brain's blood vessels and could be responsible for long COVID symptoms.  ​The paper, published in the journal Brain, was based on brain autopsies from nine people who died suddenly after contracting the virus.​Rather than detecting evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in the brain, the team found it was the people's own antibodies that attacked the cells lining the…

Although set in the nearish future in space, this multilingual sci-fi film feels quite of the moment, imbued with guilt and angst about environmental catastrophe, but also suffused with a sense of helplessness. It’s 2056 and, after the collapse of the world’s ecosystem, rich people live in air domes that keep them safe from the contaminated atmosphere. Attempts to find a safe place to live off the planet have failed, as anyone sensible could have told us they would do. On the Rubikon, the last space station, they are…

Allison Guy was having a great start to 2021. Her health was the best it had ever been. She loved her job and the people she worked with as a communications manager for a conservation nonprofit. She could get up early in the mornings to work on creative projects. Things were looking “really, really good,” she says—until she got Covid-19.While the initial infection was not fun, what followed was worse. Four weeks later, when Guy had recovered enough to go back to work full-time, she woke up one day with an overwhelming…

The doctors in Bengaluru are witnessing cases of brain fog among patients who have recovered from Covid according to a report. What is brain fog? Brain fog is a term which is used by individuals to describe how they feel when their thinking is sluggish, fuzzy, and not sharp. According to a report published in Harvard Medical Journal, Covid-19 can also have long-term effects on other organ systems. So-called long haulers can have other lingering symptoms…

In the centuries following the burning down of Basing House by Oliver Cromwell in 1645, all sorts of odd things kept turning up in the ruins. There was fine glass from Venice, an ivory cup from west Africa, apothecary jars from Delft and fragments of a Chinese bowl. Random though these remnants were, they were nothing compared with the assorted jumble of house guests who had left them behind. For three years at the height of England’s civil war, 500 or so mostly strangers had been obliged to cram hugger-mugger into the…

At the end of her wide-ranging analysis of the pandemic, Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Guardian columnist and Good Morning Britain contributor, raises the dark question of whether Covid-19 will “be the spark for the third world war”.Written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Sridhar’s book is the story of a global crisis that has since been supplanted, at least in the headlines, by another global crisis. This is the problem with writing about still unfolding events –…

With Russian forces pushing deep into Ukraine, bombarding Kharkiv, Kyiv and other cities, and an unprecedented wave of western sanctions pushing the rouble down to an all-time low, it is hard for any of us to tear our eyes away from the news. But the currents of history that led up to this crisis are deep and complex, and understood in profoundly different ways in Moscow and Kyiv.The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy is a great place to start reading up on the background to the crisis. It tells the…