Month: August 2020

Enlarge / T-cells attacking a cell recognized as foreign. (credit: NIH)

We're still struggling to understand whether infection with SARS-CoV-2, with our without COVID-19 symptoms, provides protection from further infections. Antibodies are an indicator of immunity and are the easiest aspect of the immune response to track. But data indicates that the generation of antibodies is highly variable, and their production may start fading within months. But there are many other aspects to the immune response, many of them centered on T cells. And here again, the response seems to be extremely complex.

Now, additional studies are coming out looking at other specialized aspects of the immune response. While these results provide some cause for optimism in terms of long-lasting immunity, there remain large numbers of unknowns.

Go with the flow

The two studies we'll look at were enabled by a technique called "flow cytometry" that's proven very useful for studying the immune response. It basically helps researchers get past the biggest issue with these studies: there's an abundance of very similar-looking cells involved in an immune response. While a trained eye can tell a T cell from a macrophage using a microscope, knowing there are T cells doesn't tell us much. Not only would we like to know how many of them there are, we'd need to know what types of T cells are present. T cells may help the production of antibodies, they may kill infected cells, they might be used to remember exposure to pathogens, etc.

Enlarge / Medical staff wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) as a precautionary measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus approach Lei Muk Shue care home in Hong Kong on August 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | May James)

A healthy, 33-year-old man in Hong Kong is now the first person in the world confirmed to have been reinfected by the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2—which has currently infected more than 23 million people worldwide.

The man’s first infection was in late March. He reported having a cough with sputum, fever, sore throat, and a headache for three days before testing positive for the virus on March 26. Though his symptoms subsided days later, he was hospitalized on March 29 and remained in the hospital until April 14, when he tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 in two tests taken 24-hours apart.

About 4.5 months later, the man tested positive for the virus again. This time, his infection was caught during entry screening at a Hong Kong airport, as he returned from a trip to Spain, via the United Kingdom, on August 15. Though he had no symptoms, he was again hospitalized. Clinical data showed he had signs of an acute infection, but he remained asymptomatic throughout his time in the hospital.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images / GDC / DotEmu)

If you've read our gaming coverage over the past few years, you may have picked up on our love of speedrunning—the act of mastering and exploiting beloved games to finish them faster. While a ton of video and streaming channels focus on this hobby, we continue to look to the biannual Games Done Quick marathon series for the most entertaining (and even educational) speedruns every year.

This week, Summer Games Done Quick turned 10 years old and celebrated the milestone by raising $2.3 million for Doctors Without Borders—all without leaving the house. The series already has a few years of remote speedrunning tech experience under its belt, so the lack of a physical location had only a mild effect on the marathon's watchability. Thankfully, the whole event was captured for VOD enjoyment on YouTube, so if you'd like to catch up on the fun, we present to you the following embedded options and explanations as to why they're fun to watch.

Super Mario 64: Speedrun.com continues to list the N64's breakout classic as a fan favorite, so we were excited to see how a preprogrammed run, adjusted on a frame-by-frame basis, could break the game. As an added bit of challenge, the programmers in question focused on a later version of SM64, which meant they couldn't lean on its notorious "backwards long jump" bug for extra speed.

Enlarge / TikTok's US operations may soon be part of every cool teen's favorite code conglomerate, Microsoft. (credit: SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, filed suit today in federal court arguing that President Donald Trump's efforts to ban the app or force a sale to a US firm are not grounded in facts but instead are part of an "anti-China political campaign."

An executive order curtailing TikTok's US operations "is not rooted in bona fide national security concerns," TikTok argues in its complaint (PDF). "Independent national security and information security experts have criticized the political nature of this executive order, and expressed doubt as to whether its stated national security objective is genuine," the company adds.

TikTok's complaint seeks to prevent the president and the Department of Commerce from "impermissively banning" the app, alleging that the authority under which the order was enacted (the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA) was a "gross misappropriation" and "a pretext for furthering the President's broader campaign of anti-China rhetoric in the run-up to the US election."

Today marks the release of a new trailer for HBO Max’s upcoming sci-fi series Raised by Wolves, produced and initially directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed Alien and The Martian.

Compared to the initial trailer that landed recently, this one fleshes the world out a bit more by introducing additional characters and more thoroughly explaining the central conflict in the series.

Here’s a quick recap of what we know about the series so far: it principally stars a female, possibly part-biological android named Mother, who has left behind some catastrophe on humanity’s home planet to travel to a new one. There, she raises a group of children who will be the seed for a new human civilization that avoids the mistakes that purportedly destroyed civilization as we know it. But in the course of raising them, it becomes clear that the young humans are susceptible to the same tendencies that Mother claims were humanity’s undoing.