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Daily briefing: A radical proposal to infect healthy people with the coronavirus to test vaccines
A ‘human challenge’ study would involve exposing perhaps 100 healthy young people to the coronavirus and seeing whether those who get the vaccine escape infection. Plus: UK prime minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus, and Neanderthals enjoyed a nice bit of fish.
A pile of ancient kitchen rubbish shows Neanderthals had a highly varied diet. Digging in a seaside cave in Portugal, researchers found bones of seals, dolphins and many types of fish, including sharks. The 86,000- to 106,000-year-old remains contribute to showing how Neanderthals’ behaviour — and perhaps their cognitive abilities — were not too different from those of their contemporary modern humans. The cave was so cramped that only a maximum of three people could work inside at any given time. “I was in the fetal position every single day,” says archaeologist Filipa Rodrigues, a coauthor of the study.
• UK prime minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus, as has the health secretary, Matt Hancock. Both politicians say their symptoms are mild and they will continue working — remotely — on the country’s response to the rising number of infections and deaths. Prince Charles tested positive for the virus earlier this week. (BBC | 27 min read)
• The British government says that, within days, it will begin large-scale serological testing that will show whether a person has been previously infected with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The ‘finger-prick’ tests will be available to buy from Amazon and pharmacies, and can be performed at home. If the roll-out goes ahead as planned, the country could become the first to implement at-home testing on this scale. Many questions remain unanswered: how accurate the tests will be, who will make them and how they can be manufactured in sufficient amounts. (Nature | Continuously updated)
• A radical proposal to infect healthy people with the coronavirus to test vaccines could dramatically speed up research. A ‘human challenge’ study would involve exposing perhaps 100 healthy young people to the virus and seeing whether those who get the vaccine escape infection. Bioethicist Nir Eyal, who co-authored a provocative preprint proposing such a study, tells Nature how the study could be done safely and ethically. Participants, he argues, might even be better off for it. (Nature | 6 min read)
• The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced yesterday that it will temporarily suspend its enforcement of environmental laws because of the outbreak. “During this extraordinary time, EPA believes that it is more important for facilities to ensure that their pollution control equipment remains up and running and the facilities are operating safely, than to carry out routine sampling and reporting,” said an EPA spokesperson. (The Hill | 6 min read)
The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States — which now overtakes China as the country with the ighest number of confirmed cases. (Nature | Continuously updated)
COVID-19 will take a huge toll on lives, livelihoods and the economy if social distancing is not maintained, says health-security researcher Tom Inglesby. Move the slider on this simplified interactive graph from The New York Times to understand the effect on infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
A paper just published in Science claims to have falsified earlier hints of dark matter. But ‘not so fast’, says another group that has analysed the same data set — regions in the Milky Way mapped by a European Space Agency X-ray telescope. It is the latest chapter in a saga that started in 2014, when researchers saw X-ray emissions from other galaxies peaking at an energy of 3.5 kiloelectronvolts. Some attributed this to the decay of a novel elementary particle called a sterile neutrino, a candidate for the mysterious dark matter that appears to hold galaxies together.
Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a lively history of smell, practical solutions for climate change and big cats on the prowl.
This is the Ice Pod — stripped so you can see its guts — an instrument built by geophysicist Robin Bell and her team to fit in the military planes that take them to Antarctica and Greenland. “Often, groups of researchers study just ice, rock or the ocean,” says Bell. “The Ice Pod lets us look at the solid Earth, the ice and the ocean at the same time.”
Former EPA analyst of clean-air policy Kathy Kaufman explains why, in some cases, scientists have included supporting data in new rules that roll back environmental regulations that make the orders vulnerable to legal challenges. (The New York Times)