Longer Looks: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed

The Washington Post: A TikTok Bone Salesman’s Wall Of Spines Reignites Ethical Debate Over Selling Human Remains 
Human skulls line his shelves. Spines hang on a wall in his showroom, more than 100 backbones from unknown people gathered in perpetual show. They all but certainly never knew one another. Jon Pichaya Ferry, known on TikTok as JonsBones, is a 21-year-old bone salesman. Ferry’s account, where he has garnered nearly 500,000 followers and 22 million likes, features videos where he cheerily answers viewers’ questions on what many see as a macabre field. He also displays his rarest finds, including the skulls of fetuses and toddlers. His cat, Chonk, makes frequent appearances, and fans can even buy JonsBones merchandise. (Anders, 10/10)

The Washington Post: Want To Add Healthy Years To Your Life? Here’s What New Longevity Research Says
Death comes for us all. But recent research points to interventions in diet, exercise and mental outlook that could slow down aging and age-related diseases — without risky biohacks such as unproven gene therapies. A multidisciplinary approach involving these evidence-based strategies “could get it all right,” said Valter Longo, a biochemist who runs the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. (Fuchs, 10/11)

The Washington Post: Plant-Based Diet’s Health Benefits Play Big Role In Its Popularity During Pandemic 
At the pandemic’s height, a majority of American households bought plant-based foods — with the greatest sales coming from milk alternatives, such as oat or almond milk, and from meat alternatives such as the soy-based Impossible Burger or wheat-derived seitan. Today, 1 in 4 Americans still report eating more protein from plant sources than in spring 2020, including foods like quinoa, lentils and tempeh, propelling the more than $7 billion dollar plant-based industry into what many are betting is the future of American cuisine. (Pasricha, 10/9)

The Washington Post: A Recipe For Fighting Climate Change And Feeding The World
“It’s so different from anything I’ve baked with,” says my baking partner, Jenny Starrs. We’re standing in the tiny kitchen of my D.C. apartment, examining palmfuls of a dark, coarse, rich-scented flour. It’s unfamiliar because it was milled from Kernza, a grain that is fundamentally unlike all other wheat humans grow. Most commercial crops are annual. They provide only one harvest and must be replanted every year. ... But Kernza — a domesticated form of wheatgrass developed by scientists at the nonprofit Land Institute — is perennial. A single seed will grow into a plant that provides grain year after year after year. It forms deep roots that store carbon in the soil and prevent erosion. It can be planted alongside other crops to reduce the need for fertilizer and provide habitat for wildlife. (Kaplan, 10/12)

The New York Times: Selma Blair Wants You To See Her Living With Multiple Sclerosis 
Selma Blair could only talk for a half-hour in our first session. That was as long as she trusted her brain and her body to cooperate — any longer and she feared that her focus might start to wander or her speech might begin to trail. “We’re being responsible in knowing that smaller moments will be clearer moments,” she said. For Blair no day is free from the effects of multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune disease that she learned she had in 2018 but that she believes began attacking her central nervous system many years earlier. (Itzkoff, 10/13)

Also —

The New York Times: Newly Discovered Bat Viruses Give Hints To Covid’s Origins 
In the summer of 2020, half a year into the coronavirus pandemic, scientists traveled into the forests of northern Laos to catch bats that might harbor close cousins of the pathogen. In the dead of night, they used mist nets and canvas traps to snag the animals as they emerged from nearby caves, gathered samples of saliva, urine and feces, then released them back into the darkness. The fecal samples turned out to contain coronaviruses, which the scientists studied in high security biosafety labs, known as BSL-3, using specialized protective gear and air filters. (Zimmer, 10/14)

The Washington Post: In Covid Origins Search In China, Enshi Caves And Wildlife Farms Draw New Scrutiny 
Hundreds of caves are spread throughout the mountains of Enshi prefecture, an agricultural corner of China's Hubei province. The most majestic, Tenglong, or "flying dragon," is one of China's largest karst cave systems, spanning 37 miles of passages that contain numerous bats. Nearby are small farms that collectively housed hundreds of thousands of wild mammals such as civets, ferret badgers and raccoon dogs before the pandemic, farm licenses show — animals that scientists say can be intermediate hosts for viruses to cross over from bats to humans. (Standaert and Dou, 10/11)

The Washington Post: How The Nipah Virus Jumped From Humans To Animals And Shaped The Search For Covid’s Origins
The virus had lurked for years, lacking only one thing it needed to inflict widespread human death: a perfect opportunity. In late 1998, it got it. The virus arrived in central Malaysia by air, inside furry bats that alighted on the boughs of fruit trees swaying over pig farms. The bats, messy eaters, dropped their half-consumed meals. The swine, undiscerning eaters, gobbled up the leftovers. The virus, ready to move, hopped into the pigs and passed through their coughs to the humans who worked with them. And within eight months, 105 Malaysians — about 40 percent of those infected — had died of this novel virus, dubbed Nipah, after suffering through fevers, brain inflammation and comas. (Brulliard and Guarino, 10/14)

Bloomberg: Why Some Covid-19 Outbreaks Are Deadlier Than Others With Same Vaccines
It’s one of the great puzzles of the pandemic. Most developed economies are now highly vaccinated with some of the most effective shots on offer, so why are the latest Covid-19 outbreaks more deadly in some places than in others? While it’s clear vaccines led to a drop in fatalities during the most recent delta variant-driven waves compared with earlier bouts with the virus, some countries saw deaths fall to a greater degree than others, an outcome scientists still don’t have answers for. Countries like Germany, Denmark and the U.K. have seen Covid deaths fall to roughly a tenth of previous peaks, according to Bloomberg calculations using data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. In Israel, Greece and the U.S., fatalities fell but remained more than half of the previous peaks. (Hong, Du and Saito, 10/12)

CIDRAP: What Can Masks Do? Part 1: The Science Behind COVID-19 Protection
Confusion continues to abound over the effectiveness of masks to protect people from COVID-19, and recent news stories touting imperfect studies are only compounding the situation. ... This is Part 1 of a two-part commentary explains the differences in cloth face coverings and surgical masks, the science of respiratory protection, and the hierarchy of disease controls. (Brosseau et al, 10/14)

Los Angeles Times: Biohackers At The Gate: The Untold Story Of How DIY Experimenters Waged War On COVID-19
In an old bank building in Brooklyn, N.Y., amateur microbiologists were tinkering with DNA when the anarchist appeared. Then came a robotics expert, coders and other industry revolutionaries. Before long, this collection of inventive, if wildly independent, experimenters would reimagine COVID-19 testing in the fight against a globe-crippling pandemic. That moment in the spring of 2020 was emblematic of how disrupters upend the status quo to advance science and technology. Will Canine, a biohacker and former Occupy Wall Street organizer, and his team of idealists and iconoclasts launched a Kickstarter campaign to build a robot that they hoped would bypass elite labs and corporate monopolies to change the world. They succeeded. (Baumgaertner, 10/14)

The New York Times: Covid Will Be An Era, Not A Crisis That Fades 
The skeletons move across a barren landscape toward the few helpless and terrified people still living. The scene, imagined in a mid-16th-century painting, “The Triumph of Death” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, illuminated the psychic impact of the bubonic plague. It was a terror that lingered even as the disease receded, historians say. Covid-19’s waves of destruction have inflicted their own kind of despair on humanity in the 21st century, leaving many to wonder when the pandemic will end. (Kolata, 10/12)