Why Is Omicron So Contagious?

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December 17, 2021

Epidemiology Why Is Omicron So Contagious? The new coronavirus variant may be better than other versions at avoiding human immune defenses—but that ability may change in different countries By Charles Schmidt

Animals Newfound Millipede Breaks World Record for the Most Legs It's a millipede, literally By Cameron Duke,LiveScience

Economics In Lagos, Vulnerable Communities Are Buried by Urbanization A guest podcast from Undark: As Nigeria's mangrove forests are covered with sand, dredging threatens the livelihoods of local people By Maggie Andresen,Lydia Chain

Agriculture Tweaks to U.S. Christmas Trees Could Help Them Survive Climate Change International species and selective breeding methods are helping to preserve the evergreen tradition By Nikk Ogasa

Vaccines COVID Quickly, Episode 21: Vaccines Against Omicron, and Pandemic Progress Today we bring you a new episode in our podcast series COVID, Quickly. Every two weeks, Scientific American's senior health editors Tanya Lewis and Josh Fischman catch you up on the essential developments in the pandemic: from vaccines to new variants and everything in between. You can listen to all past episodes here. By Josh Fischman,Jeffery DelViscio | 05:22

Inequality Black Children, as Well as Other Minority Kids, Fare Worse Than White Children in Common Surgeries The reasons for unequal patient outcomes may lie in implicit biases at the hospitals that treat them By Claudia Wallis

Climate Change Emerging Services Aim to Link Climate to Disasters in Real Time Several countries are looking to routinely look for the fingerprints of warming right after extreme weather events happen By Chelsea Harvey,E&E News

Robotics Want to Get Humans to Trust Robots? Let Them Dance A performance with living and mechanical partners can teach researchers how to design more relatable bots By Sam Jones

Vaccines The Risk of Vaccinated COVID Transmission Is Not Low After my son got sick, I dived into the data, and it turns out vaccinated people can and do spread COVID By Jennifer Frazer

Weather Tornadoes at Night and in the Southeast Are Especially Deadly Population density and a prevalence of mobile homes make the region a hotspot for tornado deaths By Andrea Thompson

Arts Poem: 'The Scalar Nature of Snow' Science in meter and verse By Glenn R. McLaughlin

FROM THE STORE Special Editions Volume 30, Issue 5s

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FROM THE ARCHIVE How the Omicron Variant Got So Many Scary Mutations So Quickly The numerous changes in the coronavirus's spike protein could have arisen in an isolated population or an immunocompromised person—or animals By Sarah Wild | December 2021

QUOTE OF THE DAY "We went right from the ancestral Alpha variant to Delta...And those sorts of things may change how much of the population is now susceptible to this new Omicron variant. We'll just have to see how this settles out over time." Jeffrey Shaman, infectious disease modeler at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health

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