Health & Medicine

Shutterstock Sarah Hellewell, Curtin University Most of what we know about how COVID can affect the brain has come from studies of severe infection. In people with severe COVID, inflammatory cells from outside the brain can enter brain tissue and spread inflammation. There may be changes to blood vessels. Brain cells can even have changes similar to those seen in …

Jonathan R Goodman, University of Cambridge Human physiological uniqueness made possible our colonisation of the world. Since our ancestors emerged from the African savanna tens of thousands of years ago, we’ve migrated and established residence in more or less every region on the planet, regardless of how hot or cold in temperature or high or low in altitude. This tendency …

The cells which clear Alzheimer’s plaques from the brain follow a 24-hour circadian rhythm. nobeastsofierce/ Shutterstock Eleftheria Kodosaki, Cardiff University A good night’s sleep has always been linked to better mood, and better health. Now, scientists have even more evidence of just how much sleep – and more specifically our circadian rhythm, which regulates our sleep cycle – is linked …

Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock Eoghan De Barra, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences China, the country that first detected the novel coronavirus, remains one of the few not to have imported one of the exceptionally effective mRNA COVID vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. Instead, it has so far relied on vaccines developed by two Chinese companies, Sinovac and Sinopharm. However, this …

illpaxphotomatic/Shutterstock Paul Hunter, University of East Anglia We’ve known since early on in the pandemic that COVID reinfections could occur. One of the first reinfections reported was in a 33-year-old man from Hong Kong. His initial infection was diagnosed on March 26 2020, with his second infection, with a genetically distinct virus, being diagnosed 142 days later. Since then reports …

Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock Ana Valdes, University of Nottingham The number of people who have died with or from COVID has varied greatly around the world. Peru, the world’s worst affected country, has had 6,067 COVID deaths for every million inhabitants and 88,345 recorded cases per million people. Roughly one in every 15 people who has caught COVID in Peru has died. …

Sotromivab is a monoclonal antibody that binds to the coronavirus to stop it being infectious. Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock Filipa Henderson Sousa, Edinburgh Napier University Back in early 2020, if you got ill with COVID there were no proven treatments for doctors to give you – it was one of the main things that made this disease so scary. Fast forward to …

Kleber Cordeiro/Shutterstock Mark Graham, King’s College London Testing people with COVID symptoms has been a pillar of the UK’s pandemic response, reducing transmission by identifying and isolating those with the virus. But to be effective, it relies on people with symptoms getting tested, which raises an obvious question: what proportion of symptomatic people actually take a test? The ZOE COVID …

Focus and Blur/Shutterstock Jill Kirby, University of Sussex Stress covers a broad spectrum of experiences, ranging from a bad day at the office to the psychiatric trauma of military combat. It is this very imprecision that made stress such a useful concept. We use stress as a description of our emotional state, a medical diagnosis and a rationale for absenteeism. …

Nucleic acid vaccines use mRNA to give cells instructions on how to produce a desired protein. Libre de Droit/iStock via Getty Images Deborah Fuller, University of Washington The two most successful coronavirus vaccines developed in the U.S. – the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – are both mRNA vaccines. The idea of using genetic material to produce an immune response has …