Science & technology | PINS and needles

Long covid is not the only chronic condition triggered by infection

Finding similarities between post-infectious illnesses could lead to better treatments

An illustration showing a brain within a head surrounded by a colourful bar chart that waves up and down and other shapes floating around.
Illustration: Cristina Spanò

SOME INFECTIONS—HIV/AIDS, for example—are chronic. If you catch one you are stuck with it indefinitely, unless a treatment exists to clear away the guilty pathogen. Many, though, are acute. Unless they kill you, your immune system will do the clearing and you can carry on as before.

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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Peering through the fog”

From the February 24th 2024 edition

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has achieved something extraordinary

If SpaceX can land and reuse the most powerful rocket ever made what can’t it do?

Surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

Could life exist on one of Jupiter’s moons?

A spacecraft heading to Europa is designed to find out


Ships wake in the ocean with swell & stormy skies.

Noise-dampening tech could make ships less disruptive to marine life

Solutions include bendy propellers and “acoustic black holes”


Meet Japan’s hitchhiking fish

Medaka catch rides on obliging birds, confirming one of Darwin’s hunches

AI wins big at the Nobels

Awards went to the discoverers of micro-RNA, pioneers of artificial-intelligence models and those using them for protein-structure prediction

Google’s DeepMind researchers among recipients of Nobel prize for chemistry

The award honours protein design and the use of AI for protein-structure prediction