In March 2020, New York City’s hospitals filled up with patients desperately ill with Covid-19. In many cases, when their fluid-filled lungs could no longer give them oxygen, doctors sedated them and put them on ventilators.

The patients who recovered were taken off the machines and anesthesia. Within a day or so, their doctors expected them to wake up.

But that’s when the phone of Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, started lighting up.

Continue reading “Covid Patients Coming Off Ventilators Can Take Weeks To Regain Consciousness” →

The top Republican on the Senate health committee said in a report on Thursday that the coronavirus pandemic was most likely caused by a laboratory incident in China. The report offered little new evidence, however, and was disputed by many scientists, including those whose research suggests that the outbreak originated instead at a live animal market.

The report, released by Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, grew out of a joint inquiry with the committee’s Democratic chairwoman that proponents of the effort hoped would add a measure of bipartisan credibility to a highly charged debate.

Continue reading “G.O.P. Senator’s Report on Covid Origins Suggests Lab Leak, but Offers Little New Evidence” →

Scientists at Boston University came under fire this week for an experiment in which they tinkered with the Covid virus. Breathless headlines claimed they had created a deadly new strain, and the National Institutes of Health rebuked the university for not seeking the government’s permission.

As it turned out, the experiments, performed on mice, were not what the inflammatory media coverage suggested. The manipulated virus strain was actually less lethal than the original.

Continue reading “Lab Manipulations of Covid Virus Fall Under Murky Government Rules” →

The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, painted a tragic picture of our extinct relatives, who roamed Eurasia tens of thousands of years ago. The family, part of a band of 11 Neanderthals found together in the cave, most likely died together, scientists said, possibly from starvation.

Continue reading “First Known Family of Neanderthals Found in Russian Cave” →

Many Europeans carry genetic mutations that protected their ancestors from the bubonic plague, scientists reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

When the Black Death struck Europe in 1348, the bacterial infection killed large swaths of people across the continent, driving the strongest pulse of natural selection yet measured in humans, the new study found.

It turns out that certain genetic variants made people far more likely to survive the plague. But this protection came with a price: People who inherit the plague-resistant mutations run a higher risk of immune disorders such as Crohn’s disease.

Continue reading “How the ‘Black Death’ Left Its Genetic Mark on Future Generations” →