Tag: new analysis
The Missing Data That Could Help Turn the COVID Origins Debate
Updated at 2:45 p.m. on March 21, 2023
Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue. What they found, as The Atlantic first
Why Congress Doesn’t Work – The Atlantic
Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.
That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.
Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share
The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic
For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab. Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the United States, and rampant speculation from all corners of the world, many scientists have stood by the notion that this outbreak—like most others—had purely natural roots. But that hypothesis