Current treatments for cystic fibrosis are not suitable for all patients. The lack of treatment options is distressing for people suffering from a rare type of this degenerative and life-threatening disease. But researchers are making major advances.  A decade ago, few cystic fibrosis patients lived beyond their teens. Thanks to a breakthrough in treatment options, […]

Vaccine experts often dislike this question on comparing jabs, and warn against simplistic head-to-head ‘vax-offs’. Having said that, Moderna could be seen as top on effectiveness against severe disease, followed by Pfizer–BioNTech, then Novavax, Janssen and Oxford–AstraZeneca. But some scientists note that in the real world all the vaccines are protecting similarly against severe disease. […]

This review is very much a co-production with Dr Petra Schmidl, an expert on Islamicate occult studies, and she is in fact the lead author The last couple of decades has seen a steady increase in both the volume and the quality of the studies of the occult sciences, magic, astrology, and alchemy, along with […]

A string of chemical accidents in India’s main chemical industry hub of Gujarat, and elsewhere, raises questions about the industry’s regulation. On 6 January, six workers died and 22 others fell unconscious after inhaling toxic fumes emanating from waste being dumped illegally from a tanker in the Sachin Industrial Area of Surat. Police arrested four […]

You may not realize it, but your day revolves around plants. It’s not just mealtime: Commercial plants are used in everything from medicine to food, paper, bioplastics, textiles, rubber and a host of other products. As global climate change intensifies, though, growing many of these plants will be a major challenge. Massive heat waves and […]

Peter Highnam is to become the first chief executive of the UK’s new ‘high-risk, high-reward’ science funding body. Highnam will take the reins at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) from May this year, leaving his current role as deputy director of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). The formation of Aria […]

Thirty years ago, a team working at Boston University made the dramatic suggestion that there are not one but two forms of liquid water, which can interconvert at high pressure well below water’s normal freezing point.1 Researchers have been searching for this putative liquid–liquid phase transition ever since, and evidence has slowly accumulated that it […]

A new study from MIT suggests that the dozens of mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant help it to evade all four of the classes of antibodies that can target the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19. This includes antibodies generated by vaccinated or previously infected people, as well as most of the […]

Antibodies, small proteins produced by the immune system, can attach to specific parts of a virus to neutralize it. As scientists continue to battle SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, one possible weapon is a synthetic antibody that binds with the virus’ spike proteins to prevent the virus from entering a human cell. To develop […]