If you can afford a combination of cotton with natural silk or chiffon, those provide the best protection from coronavirus if you are not one of those people hoarding N95 masks.

But, really, unless you are a healthcare worker, the kind of covering makes little difference. Even if you do spend the money for silk, you are unlikely to have a homemade mask fit well enough it is superior to a bandana. And if you are someone who touches your face often, they are all less effective. Your eyes are not covered. Critics are not wrong for wondering if homemade masks are more than placebo, since aerosols can easily slip through gaps in many cloth fibers.

Though coronavirus is known to much of the world by now, it is often used synonymously with COVID-19 by journalists. In scientific reality, there are a vast number of types of different coronaviruses, potentially as many as the thousands of bat species, but most of them can't be transferred to humans and pose no known threat.

SARS-CoV-2 is just one flavor but coronaviruses have been evolving for likely as long as bats have. 

There is no question depression can have physical effects but it is unclear how much of depression is caused by biology and how much is psychology. 

A new study finds there are increased amounts of an unmodified structural protein, called tubulin, in lipid rafts, fatty sections of a cell membrane, compared with non-depressed individuals. Tubulin is part of a protein complex that provides structure to cells. This complex also is involved in binding a specific protein called Gs alpha, or Gsa, which is a signaling molecule that conveys the action of neurotransmitters like serotonin.

COVID-19 resulted from a coronavirus that originated in a horseshoe bat in China but with at least two dozen species of horseshoe bats in China (no one knows how many there really are), no one can determine which species  was involved.

Bats carry diseases, but unlike the useless disease vectors known as Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, bats have ecological value also; they can pollinate crops and eat disease-carrying mosquitoes.

The leaf beetle Ophraella communa can significantly reduce pollen and that may mean a more cost-effective way to reduce allergies and their health care costs using science, while still appealing to activists that otherwise would oppose it.

Ambrosia artemisiifolia, ragweed, causes sneezing and itchy eyes in those with an allergy and aggravates conditions such as asthma and eczema.

Though we convert fat, protein, and carbohydrates to make our common ATP energy currency, microbes have a far more diverse diet.

It turns out a new one can even digest organic compounds like ethane, the second most common component of natural gas.

In the seafloor of the Guaymas Basin at a water depth of 2000 meters in the Gulf of California, a new archaea named Ethanoperedens thermophilum ("heat-loving ethane-eater") has been discovered, and it can also convert carbon dioxide into ethane.