Category: Coping with COVID
Cascades of red wine flood a city’s streets in Portugal after huge tanks rupture
NPR There is so much surplus red wine in Portugal, it’s flooding the streets. That’s one way of deciphering the incredible scene that unfolded in São Lourenço do Bairro, a small town where millions of liters of wine recently overwhelmed the roads. The roughly 2.2 million liters of wine (some 581,000 gallons) poured out of […]
Sep 12, 2023
Live Worm Removed From Woman’s Brain
MedPageToday A live, wriggling parasitic roundworm, 80 mm long, was extracted from the brain of a 64-year-old woman in Australia. The worm was a third-stage larval form of Ophidascaris robertsi and was surgically removed from the patient’s right frontal lobe, reported Sanjaya Senanayake, MBBS, of the Canberra Hospital in Australia, and co-authors in Emerging Infectious Diseases The helminth […]
Aug 29, 2023
‘Don’t Kiss or Snuggle Your Turtle,’ C.D.C. Warns Amid Salmonella Outbreak
NYT Twenty-six people have been sickened in recent months in an outbreak linked to small turtles, health officials said. In recent years, health officials have warned those who have bearded dragons, hedgehogs, ducks and chickens as pets to do their part in preventing the spread of salmonella infections. Now, an outbreak of salmonella cases across 11 […]
Aug 22, 2023
Scientists Recreate Pink Floyd Song by Reading Brain Signals of Listeners
The audio sounds like it’s being played underwater. Still, it’s a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can’t speak. Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song. The research, published on Tuesday, produced a recognizable, […]
Aug 15, 2023
At-Home COVID-19 Tests Under $20 at Amazon
Because COVID is still circulating, and tests are hard to find on store shelves.
Aug 15, 2023
The special ingredient for Mars travel meal prep? Astronaut breath
NPR The ingredients for space yeast are fairly simple. “Astronaut breath, water, yeast starter, electricity, a rolling pin and we can make it happen,” Stafford Sheehan, a finalist in the NASA-sponsored Deep Space Food Challenge, told NPR. Put air, water and yeast starter into Sheehan’s handy machine, wait about two hours and voila: a protein shake […]
Aug 8, 2023
Scientists woke up a 46,000-year-old roundworm from Siberian permafrost
Washington Post A female microscopic roundworm that spent the last 46,000 years in suspended animation deep in the Siberian permafrost was revived and started having babies in a laboratory dish. By sequencing the genome of this Rip Van Winkle roundworm, scientists revealed it to be a new species of nematode, which is described in a […]
Aug 1, 2023
Snail Racing World Championships make post-pandemic return
A snail racing event making its return this weekend in England has been awarded a Guinness World Record as the longest running humane snail-racing world championships. The Snail Racing World Championships in Congham, England, are returning Saturday after being suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event was founded by Tom Elwes in the 1960s after he […]
Jul 18, 2023