Antibiotic resistance is a serious problem. Nature constantly evolves new ways to kill, which means pathogens will develop new methods of resistance to current treatments, but pharmaceutical companies also have little incentive to develop new antibiotics. Instead, they have obstructions when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will require a billion dollars in expenses, 10 years of regulatory approval, and then grandstanding politicians will demand it immediately be generic and cost a dollar. 

A new paper finds that widely available retinal imaging techniques may help reveal more about brain disease and monitor treatment efficacy, including a currently untreatable form of childhood-onset dementia, Sanfilippo syndrome.

Sanfilippo syndrome is one of a group of about 70 inherited conditions which collectively affect 1 in 2800 children in Australia, and is more common than cystic fibrosis and better known diseases. Around the world 700,000 children and young people are living with childhood dementia. The researchers studied Sanfilippo syndrome in mouse models, discovering for the first time that advancement of retinal disease parallels that occurring in the brain. 

Early in the pandemic, many researchers feared people who contracted COVID could be reinfected very quickly. This was because several early studies showed antibodies seemed to wane after the first few months post-infection.

It was also partly because normal human coronaviruses, which are one cause of common colds and are cousins of SARS-CoV-2, do not generate long-lasting immunity, so we can get reinfected with them after 12 months.

Over recent weeks and months, we’ve heard of several COVID cases in which people have tested positive after previously clearing the virus.

Scientists are hopeful being infected with COVID-19 confers immunity for a length of time. But some of these instances have raised concerns about reinfection. Although rare, it seems to be possible.

The other thing which could be at play in many of these cases is “prolonged viral shedding”.

Modern science can tell us so much about the hazards of the world that it has become difficult for most people to understand absolute and relative risk. Environmentalists claim they need money to pay lawyers to ban chemicals, even if they are a drop in 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools while epidemiologists can statistically link any common food or product to cancer.

That's right - I finally hit the ground with my creativity, and my jokes are starting to use old material for my post titles. Yet producing a pair of Higgs bosons in a proton-proton collision is seriously cool indeed. The Higgs boson in fact is one of the few particles that does a trick called "self-coupling": in a sort of ermaphroditic act it is capable of giving birth to a pair of objects identical to itself. 

Recently, Pfizer and BioNTech released promising preliminary results of their clinical Phase III trials with 40,000 participants for their RNA vaccine candidate. This report suggests 90% efficacy for protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes the CoVID-19 disease. However, there is no peer-reviewed publication on this yet.

The 10+ Wheat Genomes Project, led by University of Saskatchewan Professor Curtis Pozniak, and the International Barley Pan Genome Sequencing Consortium, led by Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research Professor Nils Stein, have sequenced a suite of genomes of wheat and barley, opening up genetic variations for both.

Alternative Chinese medicine harms endangered species like pangolins, tigers and rhinos, but deniers of evidence-based medicine are often part of the same political tribe as professional conservationists. That confirmation bias about alternative medicine has limited conservation gains.

The use of endangered species in traditional Chinese medicine threatens species' survival. Noting inefficacy and providing various forms of scientific evidence are not influencing decisions and behaviors. Especially because environmentalists often use the same anti-corporate tropes that convince deniers of vaccines that science is a conspiracy.

Most of Ireland’s rocks are the wrong age for dinosaur fossils, either too old or too young. That doesn't mean dinosaurs weren't there, it means fossilization is a true anomaly and finding fossils makes it even more challenging to have hard evidence.

That has now been achieved. Two fossil bones found by the late citizen scientist Roger Byrne, and donated along with many other fossils to Ulster Museum, have been confirmed as early Jurassic rocks found in Islandmagee, on the east coast of County Antrim.