Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, has started to worry about mousepox.

The virus, discovered in 1930, spreads among mice, killing them with ruthless efficiency. But scientists have never considered it a potential threat to humans. Now Dr. Carlson, his colleagues and their computers aren’t so sure.

Using a technique known as machine learning, the researchers have spent the past few years programming computers to teach themselves about viruses that can infect human cells. The computers have combed through vast amounts of information about the biology and ecology of the animal hosts of those viruses, as well as the genomes and other features of the viruses themselves. Over time, the computers came to recognize certain factors that would predict whether a virus has the potential to spill over into humans.

Continue reading “Which Animal Viruses Could Infect People? Computers Are Racing to Find Out.” →

This year marks the 40th anniversary of “Chimpanzee Politics,” a book that forced us to look at our simian cousins in a new light. The author, a Dutch primatologist named Frans de Waal, offered an unprecedented look at the social world of chimpanzees. Their lives are crammed with alliances, betrayals, and Machiavellian maneuvers. “Chimpanzee Politics” was also the debut of a gifted writer. De Waal turned what might have been a dry monograph into something that read more like a character-packed novel.

De Waal has been busy in the four decades since. He has studied other primates, such as bonobos, a species that split from the chimpanzee lineage about two million years ago. Unlike chimpanzee societies, in which males typically dominate, bonobo societies turn out to be run by the females.

Continue reading “Primate Societies Are Surprisingly Complex. So Are Their Gender Roles.” →

The British government on Friday shut down or scaled back a number of its Covid surveillance programs, curtailing the collection of data that the United States and many other countries had come to rely on to understand the threat posed by emerging variants and the effectiveness of vaccines. Denmark, too, renowned for insights from its comprehensive tests, has drastically cut back on its virus tracking efforts in recent months.

As more countries loosen their policies toward living with Covid rather than snuffing it out, health experts worry that monitoring systems will become weaker, making it more difficult to predict new surges and to make sense of emerging variants.

Continue reading “Cuts in Britain Could Cause a Covid Data Drought” →