The hunt for a viral treatment
Researchers around the world are working at a breakneck pace to find an effective treatment for Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, reports The New York Times. While most are seeking drugs that attack the virus, a group at the University of California, San Francisco is trying another approach: hunting for drugs that shield the proteins in our own cells that the virus needs to thrive and reproduce. So far they have identified 50 possible candidates; many are already approved to treat unrelated diseases, such as cancer. Just months after the virus was first identified, scientists in New York City and Paris are already testing the drugs on the virus in their labs. If promising drugs are identified, they will have to be tested on animals infected with the coronavirus and then checked to make sure they don’t cause harmful side effects in humans when given in a dose large enough to clear out the virus. The process could take months, but any form of treatment would be a major breakthrough: Doctors can currently offer patients only supportive care— managing the fever and pushing air into lungs with a ventilator—while the immune system tries to fight off the infection.
people with alcohol addiction achieve sobriety, a new study suggests. Medical researchers have long been unsure whether AA and its famous 12-step program is the most effective treatment for alcohol use disorder; in 2006, a review of eight previous studies concluded that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to judge. But an update of that review, covering 27 studies involving 10,565 participants, found that AA not only helps people stop drinking but also has higher rates of continuous sobriety than other treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. The review concludes that AA, which is free, is no worse than other treatments and is often significantly better; one study reported it was 60 percent more effective than alternatives. “From a public health standpoint, this is good news,” lead author John Kelly, from Harvard Medical School, tells Vox .com. “It means that we’ve got a freebie out there that works.”
dinosaur likely hunted and fed on minuscule insects. Interestingly, its eyes would have bulged out to the side, unlike those of any other dinosaur or even current animal species. “One of the key messages from this study is that we are probably missing a big chunk of the ecosystem of the dinosaurs,” said study co-author Lars Schmitz, from Scripps College in California. “We don’t know a lot about tiny things in the age of the dinosaurs”