To figure out why and how the effect lasts for years after someone smokes their last cigarette, Duffy’s team turned to their donors’ DNA. Seemingly everything from wildfire smoke to your parents’ trauma has been linked to epigenetic changes—physical manipulations of the DNA molecule that switch genes on or off. Sure enough, the long-term effect […]
Read More“The cell is effectively dressing up as an infectious agent,” Kagan said. “The result is that it convinces itself that it’s infected, and then operates as such.” Simmering Immunity Immune responses can be destructive, and antiviral responses especially so. Because viruses are at their most dangerous when they’re already inside a cell, most immune strategies […]
Read MoreWhat you need to know Overwatch 2 players have discovered a trick that allows Kiriko players to make themselves near-immune to headshot damage from frontal angles. By simply looking straight up, players can make Kiriko’s arm hitbox block her face, preventing critical damage. The only way to headshot a Kiriko using this technique is to […]
Read MoreMuch of this work has been done on the hardy arabidopsis—“the lab rat of plants,” as He puts it. There are a few things that make it the perfect test subject. One is that the humble weed’s genome is fairly short, part of the reason it was the first plant to be fully sequenced. Another […]
Read MoreIn Greenland in January 2021, a child just under two years old was sick—very sick. And his doctors couldn’t figure out why. He was feverish, vomiting, having seizures. Meningitis was suspected to be the cause; a tuberculosis diagnosis was also being tossed around. The child was transferred to Copenhagen—to Rigshospitalet, the largest hospital in Denmark—for […]
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