The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many vulnerabilities in health care, including how structural racism created the pandemic’s outsize impact on marginalized groups. Age-adjusted infection, hospitalization, and death rates for people of color in the United States were higher than those of white Americans, for example. One big question for health researchers is how...
The European Union has had some success leveling the playing field for countries that struggle to attract research funding, but certain countries still lag behind, according to an EU auditing body’s assessment. The “widening measures” aimed at giving stragglers a leg up can only go so far without matching efforts from those countries, says the report from the European Court of...
For DNA sequencing, this “is the year of the big shake-up,” says Michael Snyder, a systems biologist at Stanford University. Sequencing is crucial to fields from basic biology to virology to human evolution, and its importance keeps growing. Clinicians are clamoring to harness it for early detection of cancer and other diseases, and biologists are finding ever more ways...
The Syriac engraving on the medieval tombstone was tantalizing: “This is the tomb of the believer Sanmaq. [He] died of pestilence.” Sanmaq, who was buried in 1338 near Lake Issyk Kul in what is now northern Kyrgyzstan, was one of many victims of the unnamed plague. By scrutinizing field notes and more photos from the Russian team that had excavated the graves in the 1880s, historian...
Facing growing financial and legal hurdles, a company that owns a troubled research beagle breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia, said last night it will shutter the establishment, which until recently supplied dogs to universities, major drugmakers, and the National Institutes of Health. Because of the growing cost of bringing the complex of several large buildings into...