Feature

The world is getting fatter. It is a general trend, but one that’s especially well illustrated in the United States. As of 2018, 42 per cent of US adults were obese – almost three times more than in 1980 and prior decades, according to government statistics. With that comes rising...

In 1987, researchers at the University of Wisconsin – Madison put healthy volunteers in a room to play cards with people infected with a common-cold rhinovirus. When the healthy volunteers had their arms restrained to stop them touching their faces and prevent them transferring the virus from contaminated surfaces, half...

When Emanuel Goldman went to his local New Jersey supermarket last March, he didn’t take any chances. Reports of Covid-19 cases were popping up across the United States, so he donned gloves to avoid contaminated surfaces and wore a mask to prevent him inhaling tiny virus-laden droplets from fellow shoppers....

In June 2020, in the biggest research scandal of the pandemic so far, two of the most important medical journals each retracted a high-profile study of Coovid-19 patients. Thousands of news articles, tweets, and scholarly commentaries highlighted the scandal, yet many researchers apparently failed to notice. In an examination of...

Italian physician Paolo Mascagni created a detailed atlas of the lymphatic system – including this drawing from his 1787 Vasorum Lymphaticorum Corporis Humani Historia et Ichnographic. Mascagni depicted the vessels in the meninges around the brain, but other scientists dismissed the idea, arguing that the lymphatic system was separate from...

On a crisp September day, Zoe Aldrich walked onto a rugby pitch on a college campus in upstate New York. With her teammates surrounding her, she got ready for the kick-off and the pitch became a blur of coloured jerseys. A teammate passed Aldrich the ball and she started running,...

While significant gains have been made in the fight against HIV-related stigma and discrimination, prejudiced attitudes still hold back people in rural Kenya from accessing healthcare services. Cultural inhibitions are still at play in the war against sexually transmitted infections (STI) and access to reproductive health services, further multiplying the...

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged that his administration would address inequality and racism. Now that he’s been sworn in as US president, his appointment of a prominent sociologist to the nation’s top science office is raising hopes that the changes will extend to the scientific community. Alondra Nelson,...

The emergence of fast-spreading coronavirus variants has once again put a spotlight on the role of children in the Covid-19 pandemic. Early data on one new variant had suggested that it was spreading more in children than in adults compared with other lineages. But researchers now suggest the variant is...