Another light month in terms of new discoveries, so how about a long, review-type feature article for your reading pleasure and edification. We’ll start off with a couple of articles about the ongoing pandemic and the technologies that have emerged around it however.

• First we have this one about an antibody treatment for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Far less attention has been paid to them than vaccines, but such treatments are another important tool to manage the pandemic. This one seems particularly important it seems capable of neutralizing not only all known strains of SARS-CoV-2 but also all known serbecoviruses, which means it covers all viruses of the same genus. It achieves this by binding to a particular site on the coronavirus spike protein that is thought to be unlikely to vary by much from mutation.
• Meanwhile the same technology that enabled mRNA vaccines is making its way to cancer therapies with human trials starting in Europe. BioNTech actually has several different mRNA cancer therapies in the works, targeting different types of cancers but all work on the same principle of programming the immune system to target tumor cells. Needless to say if the human trials work out, this would make a huge difference in the health outcomes of cancer patients.
• Next here’s an announcement about a team succeeding at synthesizing starch out of carbon dioxide. They claim that their process is more efficient than conventional agriculture but I’m not sure what that means as it applies to energy-use or economics. Nevertheless this is clearly a major discovery especially as carbon dioxide is now seen as a major pollutant. Converting it to food seems incredible. Incidentally I’ve read recently that companies trying to grow meat without animals aren’t having much success at making it economical and it may well be impossible to achieve at scale.
• Finally here’s a broad review of the current state of physics. Essentially the field is in upheaval because the Large Hadron Collider has failed to find so-called sparticles, the heavier supersymmetric partners of the known fundamental particles. This throws the entire principle of supersymmetry into doubt and along with it string theory as the leading theory of everything. This is a real problem for physics as theoreticians have bet on it being true and have done a lot of theoretical work ahead of finding empirical evidence. Now the doors are thrown wide open again to alternative theories of everything with one favorite, among many others, being entropic gravity.