This AI Tool Could Predict the Next Coronavirus Variant

Trouble viewing? View in your browser. View all Scientific American publications.

    

June 28, 2022

Epidemiology This AI Tool Could Predict the Next Coronavirus Variant The model, which uses machine learning to track the fitness of different viral strains, accurately predicted the rise of Omicron's BA.2 subvariant and the Alpha variant By Sara Reardon

Reproduction New Abortion Laws Could Make Prenatal Genetic Screening Harder to Do States that outlaw abortions after a certain number of weeks could make it difficult or impossible to terminate a pregnancy because of a serious genetic disorder By Sara Reardon,Kaiser Health News

Politics Gunshot Survivors and Trauma Surgeons Welcome the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act After a chaotic week in which gun safety measures were struck down by the Supreme Court and enacted by Biden, the time to act is now By Joseph V. Sakran

Space Exploration NASA's Tiny CAPSTONE CubeSat Launches on Pioneering Moon Mission The spacecraft will arrive in lunar orbit in mid-November to help prepare for a future moon-orbiting outpost By Mike Wall,SPACE.com

Renewable Energy Renewable Energy Is Surging, But Trouble Looms The International Energy Agency projects that spending on renewables in 2022 will exceed the record $440 billion invested last year By Benjamin Storrow,E&E News

Mathematics Mathematicians Are Trying to 'Hear' Shapes An intriguing question about drums kicked off decades of inquiry By Rachel Crowell

Climate Change U.S. Jump-Starts Effort to Curb Residential CO2 Emissions The project will retrofit older homes and apartment buildings to be more energy efficient By John Fialka,E&E News

Pollution What Air Pollution in South Korea Can Teach the World about Misinformation Tracking how misinformation campaigns begin and amplify can give scientists tools to combat them By Dongwook Kim,Seoha Park,Seungkook Roh

Vaccines Kids' Vaccines at Last and Challenges in Making New Drugs: COVID, Quickly, Episode 33 On this episode of the COVID, Quickly podcast, we discuss some parents breathing a collective sigh of relief and the paradox of how effective vaccines can make it harder to create new drugs to treat patients who get the coronavirus. By Tanya Lewis,Josh Fischman,Jeffery DelViscio | 08:25

Weather How Connected Cars Can Map Urban Heat Islands Crowdsourced vehicle data trace the contours of dangerous city temperatures By Rachel Berkowitz

Renewable Energy We Need to Make 'Electrifying Everything' Easier Incentives and remodeling need to be more straightforward and equitable if we expect people to convert their homes away from fossil fuels By The Editors

FROM THE STORE Revolutions in Science Normally science proceeds in incremental steps, but sometimes a discovery is so profound that it causes a paradigm shift. This eBook is a collection of articles about those kinds of advances, including revolutionary discoveries about the origin of life, theories of learning, formation of the solar system and more. *Editor's Note: Revolutions in Science was originally published as a Collector's Edition. The eBook adaptation contains all of the articles, but some of the artwork has been removed to optimize viewing on mobile devices.

FROM THE ARCHIVE Are New Omicron Subvariants a Threat? How Scientists are Keeping Watch In South Africa, a network of researchers are studying whether new lineages BA.4 and BA.5 escape immunity from COVID-19 vaccines and prior infections By Amy Maxmen,Nature magazine | April 2022

LATEST ISSUES

Questions?   Comments?

Download the Scientific American App

To view this email as a web page, go here. You received this email because you opted-in to receive email from Scientific American. To ensure delivery please add news@email.scientificamerican.com to your address book. Unsubscribe     Manage Email Preferences     Privacy Policy     Contact Us