Science

Carina Marquez, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is a big believer in prevention. So she was delighted when, last year, health authorities in the US and Europe approved the first vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus. RSV vaccines hold the potential to reduce the thousands of hospitalizations and deaths associated with the virus in the US each year. But vaccines are only effective if they get in the arms of the people who most need them. “It’s really important to make sure that people have equal access,” Marquez says. “Inequities in access result in inequities in hospitalizations and deaths.”

To make the perfect scoop of ice cream, you first need a dairy base—its natural proteins, fat, and sugar provide the rich, distinct mouthfeel. Heavy cream is added, further smoothing the texture. The introduction of sugar isn’t just for sweetness: like scattering salt on snow, it lowers the freezing point, minimizing ice formation. Flavoring can now be brought to the mix, from the quintessential (chocolate chips or vanilla pods) to the more daring (spices, salt, or booze).

Unsettling news emerged from Missouri in late September. Six health care workers in the state developed mild respiratory symptoms after caring for a somewhat high-profile patient—the first person to have caught bird flu despite having no known contact with infected animals. The fear was that the virus could be spreading from person to person.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasize that so far only the original patient has tested positive for bird flu, however; one of the workers has tested negative for the virus, while the others were not tested and have provided blood samples for further analysis.

California is in the middle of a wildfire crisis. Nine of the 10 largest fires in the state’s history have occurred in the past seven years, as have 13 of the 20 most destructive. Just this past month, Southern California has seen three of the most severe fires in recent memory, while it recently took firefighters more than two months to contain the fourth-largest fire in the state’s history. All told, since 2017 wildfires have caused over $30 billion of damage across the state.

The Exploring Jacket isn’t your regular anorak. Its color comes not from dyes, but from a pigment-producing bacteria called Streptomyces coelicolor. When applied directly to a fabric and left to incubate, the bacteria cells produce a compound in a spectrum ranging from reds and pinks to blues and purples—in eye-catching patterns that evoke the grain of polished marble.

This jacket is just one of the unusual products for sale on Normal Phenomena of Life (NPOL), an online platform launched in 2023 by Natsai Audrey Chieza, the founder of London-based R&D studio Faber Futures, and Christina Agapakis, the creative director of Boston-based biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks. Their goal? To harness the power of living organisms to develop materials and objects. This is biodesign.

On Tuesday morning, five days after Hurricane Helene ripped through Boone, North Carolina, David Marlett was on his way to the campus of Appalachian State University. The managing director of the university’s Brantley Risk & Insurance Center, Marlett was planning to spend the day working with his colleagues to help students and community members understand their insurance policies and file claims in the wake of the storm. He didn’t sound hopeful. “I’m dreading it,” he said. “So many people are just not going to have coverage.”

When Formula E launched, it was ahead of its time. Not in the visionary sense—though it was racing EVs before owning one was cool—but literally: electrification was barely capable of supporting a high-end motorsport.

In 2014 Formula E cars were 100 mph slower than those in IndyCar and Formula One, and their batteries lasted only half a race. “You had this crazy kind of triathlon transition, where the drivers jumped out halfway and got into another racing car,” says Jeff Dodds, Formula E’s CEO.

In a cramped conference room in Bristol, Ilan Gur is trying to convince a group of plant biologists that they can change the world. The 44-year-old has the patter you’d expect from a Californian startup founder, but he’s also one of the UK’s most senior civil servants, so what comes next is unexpected.

Close your eyes, he asks the scientists, and imagine pushing past the very edges of your research. The attendees take a beat, shifting slightly on their uncomfortable chairs. Positive visualization is not quite what they had expected from a workshop introducing them to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), the UK government’s new high-risk, high-reward science funding agency.

23andMe is in trouble. Once a hot Silicon Valley startup, the genetic testing company has been in free fall since a major data breach last year that affected roughly half of its customers. The incident led to a class action lawsuit, which the company has agreed to settle for $30 million.

In August, the company shuttered its in-house drug discovery unit. And last month, all of the company’s board of directors resigned en masse over cofounder and CEO Anne Wojcicki’s “strategic direction,” which included a proposal to take the company private at 40 cents per share. Wojcicki had said she would consider third-party takeover offers but reversed course in a regulatory filing this week.

On Monday, the UK saw the closure of its last operational coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which has been operating since 1968. The closure of the plant, which had a capacity of 2,000 megawatts, brought to an end to the history of the country’s coal use, which started with the opening of the first coal-fired power station in 1882. Coal played a central part in the UK’s power system in the interim, in some years providing over 90 percent of its total electricity.