Cashing in

Covid is at an all-time high in the U.S., and testing is critical to slow the spread. So Kroger and Walmart have raised their prices for test kits. They (and Amazon) had an agreement with the Biden administration to sell the tests at cost, but now that the agreement is over, there’s no reason not to make a profit off the pandemic.

“All-time high”? Yep. “The U.S. has set a seven-day-average record for Covid cases every day over the last week.” And that’s not counting the people who test themselves at home. Oh, and “A record-high number of kids are getting hospitalized with Covid-19,” too.

Release and catch, chemo-style

Chemotherapy may kill cancer cells, but it can also do a number on healthy cells. (You know this already.) If you’re an engineer hoping to solve this, there’s one technology that comes to mind: nanoparticles.

That’s just what chem/bio engineers at Penn State came up with — nanomaterials based on “hairy cellulose nanocrystals” that allow the chemo drugs to attack tumors, but then capture them before they circulate to the rest of the body. By being small and hairy, they’re able to capture a lot of the drug, too.

“We envision that this effective, non-toxic nanoparticle could be a building block for the next generation of devices to capture excess drugs and remove unwanted molecules from the body, such as psychedelics and toxins.”

It was Erinaceus all along

Conventional wisdom: Antibiotic overuse caused bacteria to evolve resistance, eventually resulting in MRSA — methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

New evidence: MRSA actually came from … hedgehogs.

British researchers, working with those shifty Danes, surveyed specimens from the wild hordes of hedgehogs roving the countrysides of Denmark and Sweden. Their finding: MRSA’s antibiotic-resistant genes were around in the 19th century.

“Our study suggests that it wasn’t the use of penicillin that drove the initial emergence of MRSA, it was a natural biological process. We think MRSA evolved in a battle for survival on the skin of hedgehogs, and subsequently spread to livestock and humans through direct contact.”

He’s laughing at your superior intellect

Elsewhere: Just Keep Jabbing edition

West Virginia will become the first state to ask federal health officials to administer a second booster — a fourth dose — of Covid-19 vaccines to essential workers, people over 50, or those with underlying conditions.

City mouse, country mouse, Omicron mouse

We’re still not quite sure where Covid-19 originated — almost certainly it jumped from an animal to a human … somewhere. But Chinese researchers say they’ve figured out where the omicron variant came from: a mouse.

It might have been a wild mouse, it might have been in a lab, but the large number of differences Omicron has show (they say) that it mutated on something other than a human. Their idea: Omicron developed when mice caught Covid-19 from humans, were infected long enough for it to mutate with some mouse-specific changes, then spread it back to people — “reverse zoonotic transfer.”

Their study appeared in the Journal of Genetics and Genomics.

Or just spit

Masks, if not worn properly, make glasses fog. So people buy anti-fogging sprays and cloths — it’s apparently easier than fitting the mask correctly.

Problem, per Duke environmental researchers: Those sprays often have high levels of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, aka PFAS.

Exposure to some PFAS […] is associated with impaired immune function, cancer, thyroid disease, and other health disorders. Mothers and young children may be especially vulnerable to the chemicals, which can affect reproductive and developmental health.

Solution: a bit of diluted dish detergent or baby shampoo. Wipe, let dry, rub clear with a soft microfiber or all-cotton cloth.

The next last resort

Looking for an alternative to colistin — an antibiotic of last resort — researchers at Rockefeller University devised not just a new antibiotic candidate, but a way to search for even more … and do it in a fraction of the time.

Like many antibiotics, colistin comes from nature (from bacteria, in fact). But instead of testing a gadzillion bacteria looking for other interesting compounds, these researchers worked backwards. Knowing which genes produced colistin, they searched a database of bacterial genomes for something similar to those.

It’s a lot faster to have a computer search a database than to grow and test a lot of germs, for sure. They sifted through more than 10,000 bacterial genomes and ended up with “35 groups of genes that they predicted would produce colistin-like structures.”

They narrowed that down and [insert science here] ended up with a compound they called “macolacin.”

In lab experiments, macolacin was shown to be potent against several types of colistin-resistant bacteria including intrinsically resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae, a pathogen classified as a highest-level threat by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Colistin, on the other hand, appeared to be totally inactive against this bacterium.

So not only do they have the basis for a new drug candidate, but also a new “evolution-based genome mining method” to search for yet more.

Science news

It’s the constant state of existential dread: A study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior shows a marked decline in the sexual activity of people aged 14 and 49 between over the last decade. (Or maybe it’s the video games.)

It might depend on whether you’re thinking Old or New Testament: Researched published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion “suggests that religious believers who relate to God in an uncertain or anxious manner are more likely to experience symptoms of psychological distress, including anxiety, paranoia, obsession and compulsion.”

Ignore the Kardashians: “People who are obsessed with celebrities tend to score lower on measures of cognitive ability”.