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If someone told you in March, when the World Health Organization finally called the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, that we’d have three strong coronavirus vaccine candidates by mid-November, you might have called that person delusional. Yet with Monday’s news from AstraZeneca and University of Oxford that early results from their phase 3 trial demonstrate their […]

DeepMind, an AI research lab that was bought by Google and is now an independent part of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced a major breakthrough this week that one evolutionary biologist called “a game changer.” “This will change medicine,” the biologist, Andrei Lupas, told Nature. “It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will […]

MAYO HAVE MADE five changes for Saturday night’s trip to Omagh for a repeat of last year’s All-Ireland final against Tyrone. David McBrien comes in at full-back for his first league start of the season, with Castlebar Mitchels youngster Donnacha McHugh named to start alongside him. Fionn McDonagh, Jason Doherty and Paul Towey are the […]

President-elect Joe Biden announced a plan on Friday for what will likely be his most pressing challenge when he takes the White House next week: fixing America’s messy Covid-19 vaccine rollout. The plan builds on Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic stimulus proposal, which included a $400 billion Covid-19 plan, announced on Thursday. It seeks more support […]

There’s a reason why a new, more contagious variant of SARS-CoV-2 appeared first in the UK: The country does a lot of viral genetic sequencing. Since the start of the pandemic, researchers in the UK have uploaded 151,859 individual SARS-CoV-2 sequences to GISAID, an international platform for sharing viral genomic data. That’s the highest number […]

For the nearly 100 million people around the world who’ve been infected with the coronavirus, new science offers some comfort: Reinfections appear to be rare, and you may be protected from Covid-19 for at least five months. The study, the largest of its kind, followed more than 20,000 health workers in the UK, regularly testing […]

Scientists are increasingly concerned about a rapidly spreading variant of the virus that causes Covid-19 that was first detected in South Africa. The variant may be more transmissible and could weaken protection from vaccines and prior infections. There’s evidence from several small, and not-yet-peer-reviewed, studies that mutations in the South Africa variant — known as […]

THE GPA HAVE backed Antrim’s bid to have their Ulster SFC opener against Cavan played at Corrigan Park next month.  The Saffrons were drawn first out of the hat for the 23 April clash, handing them their first home championship game in nine years. But an Ulster county board meeting last week saw delegates vote […]

Since December, a handful of fortunate end-of-day shoppers have received coveted doses of the coronavirus vaccine by simply being in the right place at the right time. That place, during a pandemic, could be a Safeway or a Walgreens. Some of these recipients are young and healthy adults, and have likened their surprise immunization to […]

The rapid spread of new variants of the coronavirus, some of which seem to be more contagious than older versions, has experts in the US calling for stricter social distancing and better masking to avoid yet another big surge of new Covid-19 cases and deaths. Health advocates and epidemiologists are particularly concerned about what will […]