The Covinator

New research digs into how the COVID-19 pandemic changed people's personality traits—and not always in the ways you might expect.

A far-right, MAGA, and conspiritualist (conspiracy + spirituality) groups and listservs.

Why must we disaster-proof education? Here are some education-related insights we've gathered from the pandemic.

Like in many countries, misinformation about Covid-19 has circulated widely in Morocco during the pandemic, but much of it came from the US and Europe.

ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OPenAI (San Francisco) in November 2022. ChatGPT is a “large language model” (LLM) with the ability to converse and generate information in a way reminiscent of human skills.

There doesn't have to be a trade-off between good research and fast research.

Conspiracy theories about monkeypox are spreading as fast as the virus itself, mirroring the proliferation of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study from the U of A.

Meta had every opportunity to boost the fight against vaccine hesitancy. It squandered each one.

Researchers are clear about what countries need to do to prevent another disease outbreak with pandemic potential.

The Covid-19 pandemic and other traumatic events can cause days to blur, a sign of stress.

A biologist explains the intricacies of viruses and phages in your body.

For fourth graders across the country, test results show the worst declines in reading and math scores in more than three decades.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly affected mortality worldwide1. There is unprecedented urgency to understand who is most at risk of severe outcomes, and this requires new approaches for the timely analysis of large datasets.

A neuroscientist explains how history, mood, and surprise can make life feel like a slog — or go by in a blur.

A new book explores the far-reaching impact of germs and viruses on human society.

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic three years ago today, but experts disagree about how and when pandemics end. It’s been three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. So we know when the pandemic officially began. But what must happen for it to officially end? Who even makes the call?

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our lives upside down. The physical, emotional, economic, and spiritual impacts are significant with long lasting implications. At the same time, the pandemic has accelerated new and innovative ways of engagement, transforming how people communicate. As we begin to return to our pre-pandemic lives, many wonder what that may look like. How will it be the same? And how will it be different? This presentation will provide predictions for a post-COVID world and the role of technology in addressing future challenges. 

While technology has transformed most industries—from air travel, to finance, to health care—it has yet to do the same in education. Before COVID-19, most school systems across the world did not look strikingly different from how they did in the 20th or even 19th centuries. And investments in ed tech had mostly focused on deploying devices and connectivity, without much regard to their use by teachers and students for learning. Thus, it is not surprising that impact evaluations of investments—for example, the “one laptop per child at home” study in Peru—found no impact on student learning.

Advance preparation and a large-scale, coordinated response are key for managing future pandemics, scientists urge.

The acrimonious debate over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic flared up again with a report from an expert panel concluding that SARS-CoV-2 likely spread naturally in a zoonotic jump from an animal to humans—without help from a lab.

Intense sociality has been a catalyst for human culture and civilization, and our social relationships at a personal level play a pivotal role in our health and well-being. These relationships are, however, sensitive to the time we invest in them. To understand how and why this should be, we first outline the evolutionary background in primate sociality from which our human social world has emerged. We then review defining features of that human sociality, putting forward a framework within which one can understand the consequences of mass social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, including mental health deterioration, stress, sleep disturbance and substance misuse.  

How ancient viral DNA in your genome plays a role in disease and development

Researchers hope to create a new vaccine and treatments with a newly-discovered antibody that neutralizes all COVID variants. Here’s what you need to know.

SARS-CoV-2 generally attacks the lungs, but researchers are also stressing its effects on the brain in a fraction of patients.