Crowns in flight

[petrea_mitchell]

The New York Times has an article on an interesting bit of coronavirus science that I thought would have been picked up and reported more widely. Some scientists have done a simulation of what's in all those little aerosolized droplets that people put out when talking, coughing, etc. The tl;dr is that the spike mutations in the Delta and Omicron variants appear to give them big advantages in surviving in those droplets.

Which is fascinating because all the talk in SARS-CoV-2 mutation right now is about it trying to evolve away from being recognized by antibodies or latch onto receptors better. Here's an evolutionary pressure that has nothing at all to do with how it interacts with the human body.

Comments

[darkoshi]

That article and its visualizations are fascinating. The numbers astound me; a billion atoms in a tiny too-small-to-see droplet.