Everyone in the UK - please share this widely, this and other posts that explain what is happening in the UK. We are no longer trying to contain COVID-19 in the UK, only to slow down its spread. Also, we no longer try to keep track of who in our society has the virus, as people with mild symptoms are not tested to see if they have COVID-19. This would be good advice for influenza which is a very different disease. Sadly the Netherlands have also joined us in declaring a similar policy.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has gone just this side of declaring martial law due to a .000008 risk of death from COVID-19. His promotion of panic has led to depletion of essential goods nationwide. With 40,000,000 people and the fifth largest economy in the the world (if it were its own country), California can vacuum up the nation's short-term stores easily. And has. Forget survey results about equality, social justice, and kindness, in reality America's most progressive state is just as greedy and selfish as anyone when it comes to personal behavior.

In the 1980s, as tanning beds became a craze, melanoma rates began to climb. Since cancer often takes time to develop deaths due to melanoma peaked in 2013 but thanks to immunotherapy, less risky behavior, and earlier detection, rates dropped 18 percent within three years after.

This is a fantastic public health victory. People still die, but that is from metastatic melanoma, the aggressive form that spreads from the skin to other organs, such as the lung, liver, or brain.

First off, let me say I do not wish to sound disrespectful to anybody here, leave alone my colleagues, to most of which goes my full esteem and respect (yes, not all of them, doh). Yet, I feel compelled to write today about a sociological datum I have paid attention to, in these difficult times of isolation, when all of us turn to the internet as our main outlet for rants, logorrhea, or to make the impending threat of a global catastrophe less heavy by sharing it with our peers, to exorcise our fears.

Public health officials consistently promote hand-washing as a way for people to protect themselves from the COVID-19 coronavirus. However, this virus can live on metal and plastic for days, so simply adjusting your eyeglasses with unwashed hands may be enough to infect yourself. Thus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have been telling people to stop touching their faces.

Social bonding in vampire bats is no surprise, they have roommates. What is uncommon is that they demonstrate behavior some might call friendship; unrelated vampire bats engage in social grooming and food sharing to form life-saving bonds that can last a lifetime. 

Vampire bats sustain themselves on only blood, and if a bat is unable to feed for 3 days, it runs the risk of starving. Like early man, they have a 'boom and bust' foraging lifestyle, so they either hit it big and get a large blood meal or they're starved for that night.

If they starve three nights in a row there is a high chance they'll die but vampire bats with close social ties can be rescued from the brink. 

An ancient Elpistostege fish fossil has revealed how the human hand evolved from fish fins, the missing evolutionary link in the 'fish to tetrapod transition', as fish began to foray in habitats such as shallow water and land during the Late Devonian period millions of years ago.

Because of concerns about spreading coronavirus, tens of millions of people are working from home that didn't before. 

A new review finds a dramatic increase in the abundance of a worm that can be transmitted to humans who sushi - 283-fold more since the 1970s

But is that due to better detection or a real increase? And what implications does it have for humans and marine mammals?

The oldest fossil of a modern bird yet found dates from the age of dinosaurs and was found in a limestone quarry near the Belgian-Dutch border, making it the first modern bird from the age of dinosaurs found in the northern hemisphere.