COVID-19 – Quanta Magazine

How Many Microbes Does It Take to Make You Sick?

Tara C. Smith — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:19:23 +0000

For a pathogen to make us sick, it must overcome a lot. First it has to enter the body, bypassing natural barriers such as skin, mucus, cilia and stomach acid. Then it needs to reproduce; some bacteria and parasites can do this virtually anywhere in the body, while viruses and some other pathogens can only do so from within a cell. And all the while, it must parry attacks from the body’s immune...

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What Happens When We Give Animals Our Diseases?

Tara C. Smith — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 14:45:11 +0000

When scientists think about the movement of microbes between animal species, we generally focus on “spillover” events: when pathogens move from animals to humans. But pathogen transmission isn’t a one-way street. Humans appear to have introduced SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 —into populations of wild deer, mink, captive gorillas, pet dogs and cats, and a variety of other species.

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Why Is Inflammation a Dangerous Necessity?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 20:30:52 +0000

We’ve heard a lot about the immune system over the last couple of years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but of course our immune system fights off much more than the coronavirus. And while the immune system protects us brilliantly from countless pathogens every day, sometimes it can also attack our own bodies, causing harmful and even deadly inflammation. In this episode, host Steven Strogatz speaks...

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Evolution ‘Landscapes’ Predict What’s Next for COVID Virus

Carrie Arnold — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 17:10:28 +0000

In the fall of 2019, the world began one of the largest evolutionary biology experiments in modern history. Somewhere near the city of Wuhan in eastern China, a coronavirus acquired the ability to live inside humans rather than the bats and other mammals that had been its hosts. It adapted further to become efficient at spreading from one person to the next, even before the body’s defenses could...

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The Year in Biology

John Rennie — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 15:56:21 +0000

Three and a half billion years of evolution have given life on Earth plenty of time to explore the margins of what’s possible, so biological science has a lot of catching up to do. Biologists have identified some fundamental principles and mechanisms that govern their field, like natural selection, the cellular nature of organisms and the central dogma of molecular biology. They have toiled to...

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