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Ivermectin has helped treat hundreds of millions of people and billions of pets and farm animals for parasitic diseases. Its discovery even garnered a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015. But now several groups of doctors are encouraging and enabling people to take the drug off-label to treat or prevent COVID—despite a lack of solid evidence that it works against the disease and the fact that high doses can be harmful....

Young, healthy people will be intentionally exposed to the virus responsible for COVID-19 in a first-of-its kind ‘human challenge trial’, the UK government and a company that runs such studies announced on 20 October. The experiment, set to begin in January in a London hospital if it receives final regulatory and ethical approval, aims to accelerate the development of vaccines that could end the pandemic. Human challenge trials have a history of providing insight into diseases such as malaria and influenza....

Around 195,000 years ago our planet entered a long glacial period known as Marine Isotope Stage 6. Cold, dry and harsh conditions settled in, and the number of Homo sapiens plummeted. A small remaining population eked out a living in southern Africa—one of the last habitable terrains. As Curtis W. Marean writes, DNA evidence shows that all humans are descended from that relatively small group of survivors (perhaps only several hundred individuals)....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As ships resume the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in the depths of the Indian Ocean this week, we often hear that the oceans are “95% unexplored” and that we know more about the surface of the Moon or Mars than the ocean floor. But is that true, and what do we really mean by “explored”?...

NASA’s long-lived Opportunity Mars rover is the new American champion of off-planet driving, breaking a distance record set more than 40 years ago by an Apollo moon buggy. The six-wheeled Opportunity rover drove 263 feet (80 meters) on Wednesday (May 15), bringing its total odometry on the Red Planet to 22.220 miles (35.760 kilometers), NASA officials said. The previous mark had been held by the Apollo 17 moon rover, which astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt drove for 22....

Copper is used in everything from automobiles to ordnance. Copper allows electricity to be generated, transported and conducted to the various outlets in a modern home. Copper is also relatively scarce compared to other metals like iron or aluminum that make up a good portion of the earth itself. So copper serves as an excellent metallic bellwether for potential future resource scarcity, according to a group of researchers who compiled data on its extraction, use, recycling and discard to estimate whether there is enough copper available to make a developed standard of living available to all the world’s people....

Do humans learn the same way as computers? Cognitive psychologists have debated this question for decades, but in the past few years the remarkable accomplishments of deep-learning computer systems have fanned the flames, particularly among researchers who study object recognition. Humans effortlessly know that a tree is a tree and a dog is a dog no matter the size, color or angle at which they’re viewed. In fact, identifying such visual elements is one of the earliest tasks children learn....

After months of predictions pointed toward a victory for Hillary Clinton, the U.S. presidential election took a dizzying detour from expectations on Tuesday night, and Donald Trump will be heading to the Oval Office. Trump racked up one swing state after another, leaving even the best poll aggregators dumbfounded. The idea behind these polls is simple: The averaged outcomes of multiple polls will be more accurate than any one survey alone....

One of the most successful environmental treaties in history was finalized 34 years ago to phase out industrial chemicals that eat away at the Earth’s delicate ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol introduced an international agreement to phase out chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs — ozone-depleting chemicals that were once found in refrigerants and other industrial processes. In the decades since, CFCs have plummeted and the infamous “ozone hole” in the Earth’s atmosphere is steadily recovering....

As a physician, climate advocate and health equity educator, I feel like I’ve been sitting within the eye of the storm for months on end. My vantage point has allowed me to see the painful human toll of our country’s intersecting crises. The COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, economic contraction and reckoning on racial justice have converged upon my patients and their communities, resulting in immense human suffering. My work as a clinician is rooted in studying the best medical literature, educating my patients and caring for the ill to the best of my clinical abilities....

Was the big bang really the beginning of time? Or did the universe exist before then? Such a question seemed almost blasphemous only a decade ago. Most cosmologists insisted that it simply made no sense–that to contemplate a time before the big bang was like asking for directions to a place north of the North Pole. But developments in theoretical physics, especially the rise of string theory, have changed their perspective....

For centuries, the idea of “healing thoughts” has held sway over the faithful. In recent decades it’s fascinated the followers of all manner of self-help movements, including those whose main purpose seems to be separating the sick from their money. Now, though, a growing body of scientific research suggests that our mind can play an important role in healing our body — or in staying healthy in the first place. In the book Cure, the veteran science journalist Jo Marchant brings her critical eye to this fascinating new terrain, sharing the latest discoveries and telling the stories of the people —Iraq war veterans among them — who are being helped by cures aimed at both body and mind....

LONDON (Reuters) - One of the biggest icebergs on record has broken away from Antarctica, scientists said on Wednesday, creating an extra hazard for ships around the continent as it breaks up. The one trillion tonne iceberg, measuring 5,800 square km, calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica sometime between July 10 and 12, said scientists at the University of Swansea and the British Antarctic Survey. The iceberg has been close to breaking off for a few months....

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - For the first time, tuberculosis infections rivaled HIV/AIDS as a leading cause of death from infectious diseases, the World Health Organization said in a report released on Wednesday. It found that during 2014, 1.1 million people died of TB in 2014. During the same period, HIV/AIDS killed 1.2 million people globally, including 400,000 who were infected with both HIV and TB. Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the WHO TB program, said the report reflects the dramatic gains in access to HIV/AIDS treatment in the past decade, which has helped many people survive their infections....

One afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the nation’s largest reserve of water. The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego. But as Mulroy looked out over the drought-beleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty....

Abortion makes many people uncomfortable. I get it. When I was an ob-gyn resident, I recall telling my supervising physician that I would learn the skills to perform an abortion, but probably wouldn’t provide them after I graduated because doing so made me “a little uncomfortable.” My supervising physician asked me in response, “Do you think women have a right to this procedure?” I thought, “Well … yeah, of course.” With the leaked decision in Dobbs v....

The setting: a nursery. A baby speaks directly to the camera: “Look at this. I’m a free man. I go anywhere I want now.” He describes his stock-buying activities, but then his phone interrupts. “Relentless! Hang on a second.” He answers his phone. “Hey girl, can I hit you back?” This E*Trade commercial is only the latest proof of what comedians have known for years: few things are as funny as a baby who talks like an adult....

Is lower academic achievement in early life tied to the same gene changes as an increased risk for Alzheimer’s in older age? That is one of dozens of possible deductions to be drawn from the largest genomic study of brain conditions ever conducted, research that obscures what often have been considered clear diagnostic borders. According to the findings, published June 22 in Science, conditions such as schizophrenia, major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder share a suite of overlapping genetic variants rather than having distinct genetic signatures....

Speckled guineafowl drift into the garden where Tulio de Oliveira sits as he describes two new members of the growing Omicron family of SARS-CoV-2 coronaviruses. Called BA.4 and BA.5, the subvariants are now growing in prevalence in South Africa, where the virologist leads one of the world’s strongest genomic surveillance programmes for SARS-CoV-2, at the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The viruses have the attention of the World Health Organization (WHO) because, according to laboratory studies, their mutations might enable them to evade immunity gained from COVID-19 vaccines or prior infections more strongly than existing versions of Omicron....

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the December 2004 issue of Scientific American. In an episode of the classic 1950s television comedy The Honeymooners, Brooklyn bus driver Ralph Kramden loudly explains to his wife, Alice, “You know that I know how easy you get the virus.” Half a century ago even regular folks like the Kramdens had some knowledge of viruses—as microscopic bringers of disease. Yet it is almost certain that they did not know exactly what a virus was....