News in brief

ABSTRACT

ASTHMA MEDICINE COULD SHAVE DAYS OFF COVID ILLNESS A clinical trial in more than 4,600 people at risk of serious COVID-19 found that an inhalable asthma medication shortened the duration of disease symptoms by about 3 days. Palaeontologists led by Charles Marshall at the University of California, Berkeley, used a method employed by ecologists studying living creatures to estimate the population density of T. rex during the late Cretaceous period (100 million to 66 million years ago). To answer that question, he and his co-authors turned to a method used to estimate the population density of living animals from their body mass and the geographic ranges that they occupy.