Although humans' irresponsible and indiscriminate use of the natural environment could be one of the causes behind the recent coronavirus crisis, bats have been targeted for their role as natural reservoirs of zoonotic pathogens.
The word science has never been as present in the media as it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, and if this continues to be the case in the coming months, it is very likely that something will remain even after the coronavirus disappears.
Can an extraterrestrial organism produce a catastrophic pandemic on our planet? Such a question arises every time we consider bringing samples from other worlds in the Solar System, especially now, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
Using simple materials like plastic bottles, straws, modelling clay, and syringes you can witness many interesting phenomena relating to air and water pressure.
An epidemic like the one we have unfortunately experienced can bring out people's worst fears. Cinema and literature have successfully used fear to write scripts in which an epidemic is the heart of the story or the underlying excuse.
This section of Mètode is now twenty years old. To celebrate it, I retrieve a topic I talked about in issue 34: planetary nebulae.
Those of us who are dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge must make intelligent use of its contingent and provisional nature, to promote the idea that what may appear to be weaknesses are, in fact, the features that allow scientific knowledge to progress and be disruptive.
Embracing an evolutionary perspective thus helps to explain why men and women react differently to certain infectious diseases and to understand (and combat) the strategies of viruses in their relentless evolutionary race to infect and spread among us.
Growing concern for health has fuelled interest in the relationship between diet and disease prevention. But despite the remarkable scientific advances, there are still many unanswered questions, and many evidence-based messages do not reach the population and are lost in a sea of misinformation and half-truths.
The concept of educating city is based on the evidence that space is not neutral, but rather generates, disseminates, and reinforces images and values in an explicit and implicit way. This communicative character is more intense the more complex, diverse, and richer the reference space is.
In the West, our idea of animated cinema is very much influenced by the work of Walt Disney. In Japan, the animated film tradition (anime) is very different. Complicated plots that are often not clearly targeted at a child or adult audience and ambiguous characters. Eastern animated cinema can even dare to make a film speculating on the philosophy of science.
We seem to be living a sweet moment for manned exploration missions to Mars. There are several projects underway, both by private companies and space agencies, which aim to be the first to put a human being on Mars. Does this mean that we are now going to make the ancient dream of stepping on Mars come true?
Maurice Hilleman is probably the scientist who has prevented the highest number of deaths and illnesses from infection in the history of medicine. He and his team obtained or improved more than 25 vaccines against viruses and bacteria.
What do you feel when you thnk about science? There are people who feel nothing at all and so they prefer other readings. I imagine that you will have many different ones, but which is the most prevalent, the one that weighs most heavily?
Every historical period has had its epidemic executioner, and it has almost always been the ecological changes between human communities and the environment that have caused changes in pathogenicity and epidemic diseases.
Cultural accumulation changes what we are and what we do from one generation to the next and, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, changes occur so quickly that we tend to imagine them as distant theories or very recent developments.
Society as a whole benefits from open science, and we can certainly think of it as being critical in responsible research and innovation. It is useful to separate these to some degree, however, for the purpose of understanding whether and how the use of standards could influence the robustness of RRI and OS.
Limited adoption of development standards suggests that we still do not understand why software is so difficult to produce. Software standardisation has been limited by our poor understanding of humans’ role at the origin of technological diversity.
Understanding standardisation as a form of social ordering makes visible aspects of standards that are otherwise obscure. It allows us to move past the immediately accessible at the bench, on the screen, and in text and talk.
The concept of standardization is linked to the industrial revolution and mass production of goods through assembly lines. The question we will try to answer is the extent to which standards can be achieved in the biological realm.
Synthetic biology goes one step further by incorporating conceptual frameworks from computing, electronics, and industrial design. This change makes it possible to conceive the creation of complex biological objects that were previously considered too difficult to assemble.
«The next few years are going to be the golden age of microbiology»
Interview with Simonetta Gribaldo
Simonetta Gribaldo works at the Pasteur Institute and is one of the world experts in archaea, which are fascinating yet still mostly unknown microorganisms.
The problem with the handling of COVID-19 in the United States has been more political than public health-related. When a country has a president who «didn’t know» and thought that «most people didn’t know» that the flu can kill people, what can be expected in terms of the handling of a pandemic?