Liam Shaw is an evolutionary biologist at Bristol. Dangerous Miracle, a history of antibiotics, is out now.
Henry Kissinger said that Zhou Enlai had an extraordinary capacity to ‘intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number’. He may have learned about Pat Nixon’s love of pandas on the first evening of the presidential visit in 1972, as they chatted over shark’s fin soup and the People’s Liberation Army Band played ‘Home on the Range’....
A hantavirus outbreak is extremely unexpected. Part of the confusion in press coverage has arisen from the messiness of viral classification. Although virologists do their best to categorise viruses into the traditional hierarchies of taxonomy – species, genus, family – the results are rarely satisfactory. Hantaviruses are a fairly diverse group of related viruses containing at least twenty species, only some of which can infect humans, and causing quite different diseases when they do. The natural hosts for all those viruses are thought to be rodents. After the passengers on the Hondius were informed in early May that the authorities suspected hantavirus, at least one hoped that it meant the ship was rat-infested; the alternative was that the outbreak was of the Andes virus, the only hantavirus species believed to be capable of human-to-human transmission.
In 1889 Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a 72-year-old professor at the Collège de France, wrote a letter to the Lancet in which he reported the effects of injecting himself with guinea pig semen. The results were remarkable. He could once more lift heavy weights, no longer had to hold the banister when going down the stairs and his youthful vigour had returned in other...
The first vaccines a two-month-old child gets in England offer protection against three species of virus and five bacteria. Since 2015, they have included Neisseria meningitidis group B, the bacterium involved in the recent meningitis outbreak in Kent in which two people have died. The first vaccine against bacteria was created by Louis Pasteur in 1879. It was a live attenuated vaccine for chicken cholera, meaning it involved weakened forms of the bacteria that didn’t cause serious disease. While that approach is still often used for viruses, modern vaccine development for bacteria has largely moved away from live attenuated forms. Ensuring that a bacterium is reliably weakened is a difficult problem because bacteria are complicated: SARS-CoV-2 has only eleven genes; N. meningitidis has about two thousand.
Chimpanzees, New Caledonian crows – and now cows. The list of animals that use tools grew a little longer this week, with a paper in Current Biology reporting that an Austrian cow called Veronika uses a broom to scratch herself. Appealing to tool use as a defining feature of humanity has always been a shaky argument, though a curiously persistent one.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.