Delaying a Covid vaccine’s second dose boosts immune response, research finds
Facing a limited vaccine supply, the United Kingdom embarked on a bold public-health experiment at the end of 2020: delaying second doses of Covid-19 vaccines in a bid to maximise the number of people who would be at least partially protected from hospitalisation and death. Now, a study suggests that...
Indictment: Kenya’s president faces uneasy future with a bolder, progressive judiciary
After years of being reduced to the marionettes by the executive, Kenya’s judiciary is finally taking bold steps to reclaim its powers and mandate that have been emasculated by the executive. On Thursday, the High Court asserted itself when it trashed a constitutional amendment spearheaded by President Uhuru Kenyatta and...
Afro Cinema: Nollywood festival ends in Paris as ‘About a Boy’ wins top prize
About a Boy, a story about the psychological games played between a writer and his muse by first-time director Diji Aderogba received the highest honour at the 2021 Nollywoodweek Film Festival, the audience appreciation award known as the Prix du Public. The announcement of the winning film marked the culmination...
Why it’s going to be hard to rein in the Covid variants on the rampage in India
Scientists are working to understand several coronavirus variants now circulating in India, where a ferocious second wave of Covid-19 has devastated the nation and caught authorities unawares. The country recorded nearly 400,000 new infections on May 9, taking its total to more than 22 million. Evidence is growing that one...
Smartphones now offer cheaper malaria, Zika, chikungunya and dengue tests
Debojyoti Chakraborty took just a few months to develop a Covid-19 diagnostic test that worked in his lab; the challenge was to optimize it for the field. Based on the gene-editing technology CRISPR, the test produces a band on a paper strip if viral RNA is present. But Chakraborty, who...
Spending on science has been, should always be an investment for government
Much like Otto von Bismarck and other nation-builders in Germany, Tsar Alexander II was eager to bolster industrial development throughout his country. Central to those efforts was investing heavily in precision metrology. The tsar found eager and skilful natural scientists such as Mendeleev to help. In the same decade, Japan...
Aging and rejuvenation: It’s probably not a single factor that wastes, revives tissues
Conceptually, the therapeutic strategies of two front-runner start-ups – Elevian and Alkahest – could not be further apart. On the one extreme is Elevian’s reductionist approach, which attempts to recapitulate the benefits of young blood through supplementation with a single pro-youthful factor. On the other is Alkahest’s plasma formulations, created...
Science and politics feed off each other, shape our view of the world around us
Late in August 1609, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei wrote excitedly to his brother-in-law, relating the fast-moving events of that summer. A few weeks earlier, Galileo had heard rumours that a spyglass had been invented in Flanders (now part of Belgium). He quickly produced an improved version, setting off a...
‘HIV vaccine research has long been hindered by a missing sense of urgency’
In 2010, William Schief, an immunologist at Scripps and executive director of vaccine design at IAVI’s Neutralizing Antibody Center, working with a group of researchers began to work with a class of broadly neutralising antibodies called VRC01, the first to be discovered by the NIH Vaccine Research Center. First, they...
Is HIV/Aids vaccine in sight? Covid success provides scientists with a ‘wisp of hope’
When virologist José Esparza began working with the World Health Organization to combat the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, he and many of his colleagues were convinced that a vaccine would be the solution – and that it would come quickly. Their optimism rested on solid science: Researchers knew that...
