Daily briefing: COVID-19 is no longer an international health emergency

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COVID-19’s emergency phase is over

COVID-19 is no longer a public health emergency of international concern, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Friday. The WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, made the decision following a recommendation by the organization’s COVID-19 emergency committee, which highlighted the decreasing numbers of deaths and hospitalizations and the high levels of population immunity against SARS-CoV-2 as reasons for downgrading the pandemic’s emergency status. “This virus is here to stay,” said Tedros. “The worst thing any country could do now is to use this news as a reason to let down its guard, to dismantle the systems it has built, or to send the message to its people that COVID-19 is nothing to worry about.”

Nature | 3 min read

Pluto spacecraft team fights to keep control

The New Horizons spacecraft, which snapped stunning images during humanity’s first visit to Pluto in 2015, is at the centre of a dispute over its future. Principal investigator Alan Stern and his team are keen to investigate another body in the Kuiper belt if they find one. But NASA plans to start managing the spacecraft mainly as a heliophysics mission, which will study space weather and other phenomena from its unique location in deep space. That means a new group of scientists might take control of the mission — a move that Stern likens to “a boarding party”.

Nature | 5 min read

Language model builds better antibodies

A protein language model, a generative artificial intelligence similar to ChatGPT, can improve antibody therapies against viruses such as COVID-19, Ebola and influenza. The models suggested changes to existing antibody therapies that boosted their ability to recognize and block the proteins that viruses use to infect cells. Many of the alterations were outside the regions that are usually the focus of engineering efforts, says biochemist and study co-author Peter Kim. “The model is reaching to information which is completely, or largely, non-obvious to even the experts in antibody engineering.”

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Nature Biotechnology paper

CDC director Walensky to step down

Rochelle Walensky, who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through some of the grimmest phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, has announced that she will leave the agency at the end of June. Walensky steered the CDC through the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines and the subsequent changes to recommendations on masking, quarantine and other infection-control measures. Although some criticised the agency during Walensky’s tenure, others praised her leadership even if they did not always agree with the CDC’s actions during the pandemic. “We should recognize she did her best despite many inherent obstacles,” says physician-scientist Eric Topol.

Nature | 2 min read

NIH reinstates EcoHealth grant

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research organization that studies emerging infectious diseases in wildlife. It fell under intense scrutiny because it collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to modify viruses in a way that some observers deemed risky — but many scientists consider such work safe and essential. Since 2020, EcoHealth has become a political football in the United States, gaining and losing its funding several times. Under this grant, it will now operate under an extensive list of restrictions.

Nature | 4 min read

Features & opinion

The case for ethical space exploration

In her book Off-Earth, astrophysicist Erika Nesvold explores how humans moving into space can avoid bringing along messy Earthly problems, such as environmental destruction and social injustice. Safeguards will be needed to protect asteroid miners from exploitation, and people must grapple with the ethical complications of population control in permanent space settlements. “Historians, especially colonial historians, can point to lessons learnt — cautionary tales and also success stories from the past,” she says.

Nature | 7 min read

A practical guide to time tracking

Time tracking, using apps such as myhours.com, “tells you what you are actually doing with your time, not what you imagine you are doing with it”, says academic coach Melanie Smith. Apps such as Jira allow early-career researchers to map out realistic timelines. Large projects can be broken down into a series of mini-projects and then further into subtasks with detailed timelines. Blocks of work time should be short enough to ensure that you’re not going into your downtime either too tired or too wired to relax, suggests consumer-behaviour researcher Sijin Chen.

Nature | 7 min read

Where I work

Materials scientist Yichen Cai creates thin, flexible devices that mimic human skin. These ‘e-skin’ films, which are as thin as one nanometre, could eventually be used in wearable sensors for blood pressure, movement and body temperature. “It could also allow robots to sense touch, like humans do,” says Cai. (Nature | 3 min read)