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Maybe the virus isn’t the problem

Three years into the pandemic, how the virus impacts people’s health can still be mysterious. Why, for example, is it that some end up on ventilators and others get by with a scratchy throat or no symptoms at all? Answers are emerging from scientists who looked beyond the spiky orb to the human side of the equation—and their discoveries are changing the way we think about any infectious disease.

Interview

How to end a pandemic in one jab

Vaccines give us lifetime protection us against polio, measles, and smallpox. Why can’t they do the same for COVID, HIV, and the flu? Biologist Pamela J. Bjorkman has a promising new strategy.

FOREFRONT

FOREFRONT

Insights and ideas from Rockefeller labs

Are flies good at math? What happens in the brain when we’re sick? And why are woodpeckers drumming up excitement among evolutionary biologists?

More Forefront ▷

Features

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Take a closer look

Where does human vision start: in the brain or in the retina? Neuroscientists aren’t so sure. And increasingly, what they’re learning about visual perception raises much larger questions, including what it means to be human.

Where does human vision start: in the brain or in the retina? Neuroscientists aren’t so sure. And increasingly, what they’re learning about visual perception raises much larger questions, including what it means to be human.

Interview

Sebastian Klinge

“It’s a chicken-and-egg question: You need ribosomes to make ribosomes.”

“It’s a chicken-and-egg question: You need ribosomes to make ribosomes.”

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The tech that money can’t buy

What if the tool needed to move science forward doesn’t yet exist? Here are gadgets and techniques born from improvisation that made impossible experiments possible.

What if the tool needed to move science forward doesn’t yet exist? Here are gadgets and techniques born from improvisation that made impossible experiments possible.