March 27, 2025: Long COVID office to close, ants marching, and transforming a triangle into a square with math. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Jen Christiansen; Source: "Animation of Dudeney's Dissection Transforming an Equilateral Triangle to a Square," by Mark D. Meyerson (reference) | | | • How do microplastics get into our food? Sponges, blenders, kettles—they're all full of plastics that we're ingesting. | 5 min read | | | • The H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in a single sheep in England. What this means. | 2 min read | | | Under orders from the Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services led by RFK, Jr. is planning to close its Office for Long COVID Research and Practice (OLC). The federal government has been making other moves to deprioritize research efforts related to COVID and pandemic preparedness, including terminating grants that support research on antiviral drugs, COVID vaccines and long COVID.
Why this matters: Long COVID still affects an estimated 23 million people in the U.S. today, and the World Health Organization estimates six in 100 people with COVID infections will develop the postviral condition. The causes, the puzzling range in severity, and future treatments and cures have been prime areas of interest for the OLC. Since 2023, the group served as "quarterback," helping coordinate the research of multiple U.S. health agencies like the NIH and CDC. Those projects included community outreach and training doctors to readily diagnose, treat and prevent long COVID.
What the experts say: "I understand there is this enthusiasm to support chronic disease. Well, long COVID is the exemplar of chronic disease," says Ziyad Al-Aly, a leader in long COVID research and a clinical epidemiologist. "I would like to remind RFK, Jr. that he told the nation in his confirmation hearing that he's going to prioritize research on long COVID.... The actions over the past several days don't really align with that." —Lauren J. Young, health editor | | | Fabio Di Biase/Getty Images | | | Lines of marching ants don't experience traffic jams like human-driven cars on highways and roads do. How do they manage this? Ants travel in groups of three to 20 that move at nearly constant rates all while keeping good distances between one another, researchers found in a new study. Plus, they don't speed up to pass others.
Why this is interesting: We humans (or at least our cars) could learn a lot from ant traffic. In a future where self-driving cars are the majority, autonomous vehicles could share information with nearby cars to optimize traffic flow—perhaps, the researchers suggest, by prioritizing constant speeds and headways or by not passing others on the road.
What the experts say: Until self-driving cars become the norm, today's drivers can help avoid traffic gnarls: Don't tailgate, says Katsuhiro Nishinari, a mathematical physicist at the University of Tokyo. Leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown "phantom" traffic jam with no obvious cause (the most enraging kind of all). | | | • Children are growing up in a world saturated with media. Setting parental controls on phones, tablets, computers, TVs and more can feel like a chore, but such measures are an important first speed bump to protecting kids from harmful content, writes Jacqueline Nesi, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Brown University. "They offer a helpful, though imperfect, barrier between our children and the vast world of TV and the Internet," she says. "And they can slow our kids down as they enter that world, reminding them to proceed with caution." | 5 min read | | | Thanks to vaccines, the risk of contracting long COVID has declined to less than 5 percent, according to a study last summer. This still translates into millions of potential cases of the (sometimes) debilitating sequela, each occurrence presenting with a long list of potential symptoms. And researchers are still trying to figure out precisely how the SARS-CoV-2 virus wreaks so much havoc in the aftermath of an infection—perhaps through long-term immune system damage. Many feel that the pandemic is long over, but this is a virus that keeps on giving. | This newsletter is still evolving. Tell me what you think and if we can do better by emailing: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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