Here’s how this year’s closely related polio outbreaks in New York state, London, and greater Jerusalem might have started. A child in Afghanistan or Pakistan received two drops of Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened, live virus, in December 2021 or so. Soon after, when the child was still shedding some virus in their stool, their family traveled to...
Yes, having a big name in science will help get your paper published, an unusually robust new study confirms. Just 10% of reviewers of a test paper recommended acceptance when the sole listed author was obscure—but 59% endorsed the same manuscript when it carried the name of a Nobel laureate. The study, which involved recruiting hundreds of researchers to review an economics...
The journal BMC Medicine has decided not to retract a controversial 2013 paper by botanist Steven Newmaster of the University of Guelph (UG) that questioned the purity of herbal remedies and had far-reaching effects on the nutritional supplement industry. An earlier UG investigation had cleared Newmaster of misconduct. “Following [the] investigation … the...
New images from a Sun-orbiting spacecraft may explain strange phenomena within the Sun’s atmosphere that have puzzled solar physicists for decades. The data—released yesterday from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter—shed literal light on shifts in the Sun’s magnetic field known as switchbacks. They could even help explain other solar oddities, such as why the solar wind...
President Joe Biden has chosen Renee Wegrzyn , a 45-year-old applied biologist with a background in industry and government, to head his new agency for biomedical innovation, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). Congress created ARPA-H in March with a starting budget of $1 billion. It aims to bring to biomedical research the...