A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth.

The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct.

“This is a major milestone for us,” said George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, who for eight years has been leading a small team of moonlighting researchers developing the tools for reviving mammoths. “It’s going to make all the difference in the world.”

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As vaccine makers set their sights on boosters, new studies unveiled on Wednesday from Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer-BioNTech demonstrated that extra shots can dramatically raise antibodies against the coronavirus.

The companies said they were submitting the new data to the Food and Drug Administration for evaluation, and Pfizer has formally asked the agency to authorize a booster shot. The Biden administration said last week that it wants to provide booster shots for all Americans eight months after vaccination.

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The powerful protection offered by Moderna’s Covid vaccine does not wane in the first six months after the second dose, according to a statement released by the company on Thursday morning in advance of its earnings call.

But during the call, Moderna executives said they anticipated that boosters would be necessary this fall to contend with the Delta variant, which became common in the United States after the results were collected.

Continue reading “Moderna says its vaccine’s protection holds through six months” →

A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding.

In June, an American scientist discovered that more than 200 genetic sequences from Covid-19 patient samples isolated in China early in the pandemic had puzzlingly been removed from an online database. With some digital sleuthing, Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, managed to track down 13 of the sequences on Google Cloud.

Continue reading “Those Virus Sequences That Were Suddenly Deleted? They’re Back” →