Social media: Powerful tool for galvanising civilians against dictators and crime
Watching the analytics skyrocket during a dentist appointment in San Francisco, Jack Dorsey was struck by how quickly a hashtag can move. The founder of Twitter had seen people fire off tweets to coordinate protests in Iran in 2009, and the next year, the website had galvanised crowds of millions...
How a hashtag went viral and incited a military intervention in Nigeria
Russell Simmons was finishing his morning yoga routine on a yacht floating in the turquoise Caribbean waters off St Barts, peacefully unaware that he was about to provoke a tidal wave. The man who founded the boom-bap hit machine Def Jam Records in a cramped Manhattan dormitory room and made...
Multitude of coronavirus variants found in the US, but the threat is unclear
For the scientists who have spent the past year poring over hundreds of thousands of coronavirus genomes, the United States has been an enigma. Despite having world-leading genome sequencing infrastructure and experiencing more Covid infections than any other country, the United States has until recently lagged far behind in sequencing...
CDC director approves J&J’s single-shot Covid vaccine, distribution to begin soon
CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walesnky has signed off on Johnson&Johnson’s vaccine. Walensky’s approval allows the federal government to begin shipping the doses to sites across the country. Her approval comes after a CDC panel voted unanimously to recommend the shot for those 18 and older. A J&J executive told lawmakers...
World’s oldest music tool: How early artistes modified conch shell into a ‘flute
Some 18,000 years ago, in a cave in what we now call France, a human being left behind something precious: a conch shell. It was not just any conch shell. Its tip had been lopped off – unlikely by accident, given that this is the strongest part of the shell...
Testing psychedelics and translating clinical research into actual therapy is tricky
The idea behind psychedelic therapy is that the receptive state that the drug confers opens the door to fresh ideas about how to think about the past and future, which the therapist can reinforce. “There is a growing evidence base to the principle that this is very much about a...
Regulators grapple with how to administer powerful psychedelics for depression
On a sunny day in London in 2015, Kirk Rutter rode the Tube to Hammersmith Hospital in hopes of finally putting an end to his depression. Rutter had lived with the condition off and on for years, but the burden had grown since the death of his mother in 2011,...
WHO mission revisits theory that coronavirus is spread through frozen meat
Momentum is growing for the suggestion that the coronavirus can spread from infected frozen wildlife. A World Health Organization (WHO) fact-finding mission in China did not rule out the idea that this mode of transmission contributed to early outbreaks of Covid-19 – although investigators say it is unlikely to have...
Covid control dilemma: Should we send the less-effective vaccine to Africa?
Yusuff Adebayo Adebisi knows that a vaccine that offers 70 per cent protection against Coovid-19 could be a valuable tool against the coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria – especially if that vaccine is cheap and doesn’t have to be stored at extremely cold temperatures. But what if another vaccine — one...
World to wait longer to know if Pfizer vaccine is effective against Covid variants
An unpublished study by the Israel’s health ministry and Pfizer says the latter’s vaccine is around 93 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic covid-19. Pfizer and its partner, the German biotechnology firm BioNTech, had found 95 per cent effectiveness in their clinical trials carried out in 2020. Researchers are, in...
