McMaster University researchers who analyzed thousands of documents covering a 300-year span of plague outbreaks in London, England, have estimated that the disease spread four times faster in the 17^th century than it had in the 14^th century.

The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show a striking acceleration in plague transmission between the Black Death of 1348, estimated to have wiped out more than one-third of the population of Europe, and later epidemics, which culminated in the Great Plague of 1665.

Researchers found that in the 14^th century, the number of people infected during an outbreak doubled approximately every 43 days. By the 17^th century, the number was doubling every 11 days.

“It is an astounding difference in how fast plague epidemics grew,” says David Earn, a professor in the … Read the rest

Shaynna Blaze is known for her bubbly personality and honest opinions as a judge on The Block.

But the interior designer has admitted that life under Melbourne‘s strict COVID-19 lockdown took its toll on her.

The 57-year-old, who was filming the Channel Nine renovation show just before Victoria’s second wave hit, told TV Week: ‘I’m a strong person, but I’ve got to say [lockdown] affected me greatly.’

‘I’m going to say this for the first time: I had days where I just sobbed and sobbed,’ she revealed.

The blonde explained that her moments of sadness were not just about being unable to go out to local restaurants and coffee shops.

‘It’s about that general conversation and connection and human touch. You’ll never take that for granted,’ … Read the rest

Health authorities fear a coronavirus cluster in Sydney’s outskirts could spread to tourist towns on the NSW south coast as the state records five new infections. 

Four overseas travellers in quarantine tested positive to COVID-19 in the 24 hours to 8pm Saturday, bringing the total number of cases in NSW to 4,149. 

The one new locally acquired case is a close contact of cases linked to Great Beginnings Childcare Centre in Oran Park, in Sydney’s south west. 

There are now six cases associated with the childcare centre, and 19 in total in the Oran Park community cluster. The centre has been closed since October 13 and will remain shut until October 28 and contact tracing and investigations continue. 

Those who attended Great Beginnings Childcare Centre between 2- 13 October close contacts and have been urged to get tested immediately and self-isolate for a full 14 days from when they last attended. … Read the rest

When Prince Harry was seeking to impress Meghan Markle in the early days of their courtship, he took her on a surprise trip to Botswana, the African country he used to call his ‘second home’.

There they celebrated her 36th birthday in a $2,000-a-night deluxe tent at the Meno a Kwena safari camp on the Okavango Delta, with spectacular views over the Boteti River, a popular watering hole for elephants.

It was, by all accounts, an idyllic sojourn, which went a long way towards cementing their relationship.

Three years later, however, in the wake of the emergence of Covid-19, Botswana is in lockdown, its borders closed. With the collapse of the tourist industry, locals in the area surrounding the safari camp have lost their livelihoods and a region once famed for its protection of big game is now a poachers’ paradise.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a team of researchers, led by the University of California, Irvine’s Xiangmin Xu, PhD, a five-year, $3 million grant for a project titled, “Single-Cell Analysis of Aging-Associated 4D Nucleome in the Human Hippocampus.”

Now, as part of the 4D Nucleome consortium, Xu, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology and director of the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping at the UCI School of Medicine, together with MPIs, Carl Wayne Cotman, PhD, a professor of neurology and founding director of the UCI Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia, and Bing Ren, PhD, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, will work to build an understanding of aging-associated chromatin architecture changes in single cell nuclei.

The three dimensional nuclear organization and its relationship with the regulation of gene expression programs are … Read the rest