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It’s Shark Week – a time to celebrate and learn about these wonderful animals – and here at The Conversation, we’ve marked it in our own way: with really cool science.
Sora Kim, a professor of paleoecology at the University of California Merced, shares her research on ancient shark teeth in Antarctica, where sand tiger sharks once roamed. By studying the chemistry of those teeth, she and her colleagues were able to gain insights into a major climatic change in Earth’s history. The fossils are “helping solve the mystery of why the Earth, some 50 million years ago, began shifting from a ‘greenhouse’ climate that was warmer than today toward cooler ‘icehouse’ conditions,” she writes.
The delta variant of the coronavirus now accounts for more than half of the case in the U.S. and is rapidly spreading in other countries. If a person had been infected by a different variant months ago, will that person have immunity? And how effective are current vaccines? We asked immunologist Jennifer Grier from the University of South Carolina to survey the latest research and answer these questions. Her article is worth a read to understand the details of how immunity works, but her bottom line is simple: If you’ve already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, you should still get the vaccine to be protected.
When The Conversation U.S. first launched, we were housed at Boston University in a cramped basement room. So when we began thinking about doing stories on the so-called lab leak hypothesis – the notion that the coronavirus escaped from a lab that researches pathogens – a few editors suggested hearing from the people who run BU’s biocontainment lab. Ronald Corley, director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories in Boston, provides an inside view of how these secure facilities operate and the work they do.
Here are some other science stories from the past week:
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