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Allison Guy was having a great start to 2021. Her health was the best it had ever been. She loved her job and the people she worked with as a communications manager for a conservation nonprofit. She could get up early in the mornings to work on creative projects. Things were looking “really, really good,” she says—until she got Covid-19.

While the initial infection was not fun, what followed was worse. Four weeks later, when Guy had recovered enough to go back to work full-time, she woke up one day with an overwhelming fatigue that just never went away. It was accompanied by a loss of mental sharpness, part of a suite of sometimes hard-to-pin-down symptoms that are often referred to as Covid-19 “brain fog,” a general term for sluggish or fuzzy thinking. “I spent most of 2021 making decisions like: Is this the day where I get a shower, or I go up and microwave myself a frozen dinner?” Guy recalls. The high-level writing required for her job was out of the question. Living with those symptoms was, in her words, “hell on earth.”

Many of these hard-to-define Covid-19 symptoms can persist over time—weeks, months, years. Now, new research in the journal Cell is shedding some light on the biological mechanisms of how Covid-19 affects the brain. Led by researchers Michelle Monje and Akiko Iwasaki, of Stanford and Yale Universities respectively, scientists determined that in mice with mild Covid-19 infections, the virus disrupted the normal activity of several brain cell populations and left behind signs of inflammation. They believe that these findings may help explain some of the cognitive disruption experienced by Covid-19 survivors and provide potential pathways for therapies.

For the past 20 years, Monje, a neuro-oncologist, had been trying to understand the neurobiology behind chemotherapy-induced cognitive symptoms—similarly known as “chemo fog.” When Covid-19 emerged as a major immune-activating virus, she worried about the potential for similar disruption. “Very quickly, as reports of cognitive impairment started to come out, it was clear that it was a very similar syndrome,” she says. “The same symptoms of impaired attention, memory, speed of information processing, dis-executive function—it really clinically looks just like the ‘chemo fog’ that people experienced and that we’d been studying.”

In September 2020, Monje reached out to Iwasaki, an immunologist. Her group had already established a mouse model of Covid-19, thanks to their Biosafety Level 3 clearance to work with the virus. A mouse model is engineered as a close stand-in for a human, and this experiment was meant to mimic the experience of a person with a mild Covid-19 infection. Using a viral vector, Iwasaki’s group introduced the human ACE2 receptor into cells in the trachea and lungs of the mice. This receptor is the point of entry for the Covid-causing virus, allowing it to bind to the cell. Then they shot a bit of virus up the mice’s noses to cause infection, controlling the amount and delivery so that the virus was limited to the respiratory system. For the mice, this infection cleared up within one week, and they did not lose weight.

Coupled with biosafety regulations and the challenges of cross-country collaboration, the security precautions required by the pandemic created some interesting work constraints. Because most virus-related work had to be done in Iwasaki’s laboratory, the Yale scientists would take advantage of overnight shipping to fly samples across the country to Monje’s Stanford laboratory where they could be analyzed. Sometimes, they would need to film experiments with a GoPro camera to make sure that everybody could see the same thing. “We made it work,” Monje says.

Former US Defense Secretary James Mattis criticized Russia’s war in Ukraine, calling it “immoral” and “operationally stupid,” while speaking Friday at the Seoul Forum 2022.

“We have a saying in America, we say that nations with allies thrive, nations without allies wither and we’re watching Russia wither before our eyes right now,” Mattis said.

When asked what military lessons could be taken from the war so far, the former US Marine said: “One is don’t have incompetent generals in charge of your operations.”

He also called Russia’s military performance “pathetic” and decried “the immoral, the tactically incompetent, operationally stupid and strategically foolish effort” of its campaign in Ukraine.

Mattis spoke of previous US efforts to try and bring Russia into the “community of nations,” but said that was not possible with Vladimir Putin as leader.

Putin had removed anyone from his circle that would disagree with him, so he “probably thought that the Ukrainian people were going to welcome him,” Mattis added.

At minimum 17 individuals ended up killed and dozens wounded Friday in missile strikes on Ukraine’s Odesa area, a day soon after Russian troops abandoned positions on a strategic island in a key setback to the Kremlin’s invasion.

The news came just after NATO leaders wrapped up a summit in Madrid, with US President Joe Biden saying $800 million in new weapons for Ukraine.

“We are going to stick with Ukraine, and all of the alliance are likely to adhere with Ukraine, as extended as it normally takes to make sure they are not defeated by Russia,” he said.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as opposed surging diplomatic tensions to the Cold War, telling reporters: “As far as an Iron Curtain is worried, basically it is presently descending… The method has begun.”

There was a glimmer of hope even so, when Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who visited Moscow on Thursday immediately after a journey to Kyiv, explained he had offered Russian President Vladimir Putin a concept from their Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Neither aspect has disclosed what was in the observe.

Hrs following the summit finished, missiles had been fired at an condominium creating and recreation centre in the southern region of Odesa, a strategic flashpoint that is property to Ukraine’s historic port city of the exact same identify.

The nine-storey apartment making was partly wrecked, leaving 14 individuals lifeless and 30 wounded, such as numerous children, the unexpected emergency products and services explained.

3 persons, like a youngster, have been killed and a person wounded in the attack on the recreation centre, they stated.

The strikes, in the Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky district, had been launched by aircraft that flew in from the Black Sea, stated Odessa armed service administration spokesman Serhiy Bratchuk.

“The worst circumstance circumstance performed out and two strategic aircraft came to the Odessa area,” he explained in a Tv set interview, incorporating they experienced fired “very weighty and very powerful” missiles.

Bratchuk urged people today not to put up on the net details about the rescue procedure.

– ‘Goodwill gesture’ –

The early Friday strikes arrived a day after Russian troops abandoned their positions on Snake Island, off the coastline of Odessa.

The island experienced grow to be a image of Ukrainian resistance in the very first times of the war, when the rocky outcrop’s defenders told a Russian warship to “go f*ck yourself” soon after it referred to as on them to surrender — an incident that spurred a defiant meme.

It was also a strategic focus on, sitting apart shipping and delivery lanes around the port of Odessa. Russia experienced attempted to put in missile and air defence batteries when under fireplace from drones.

The final decision to abandon Snake Island “changes the problem in the Black Sea noticeably,” Zelensky mentioned in his each day address Thursday.

“It does not yet assure stability. It does not but warranty that the enemy will not return. But it currently considerably limits the actions of the occupiers.”

British Key Minister Boris Johnson cited Snake Island as he warned the Russian president that any eventual peace offer would be on Ukraine’s terms.

“We’ve found what Ukraine can do to push the Russians again. We have viewed what they did close to Kyiv and Kharkiv, now on Snake Island,” Johnson said.

The Russian defence ministry statement described the retreat as “a gesture of goodwill” meant to exhibit that Moscow will not interfere with UN efforts to organise guarded grain exports from Ukraine.

But Ukraine officials claimed it as a acquire.

“They generally downplay their defeats this way,” Ukraine’s Overseas Minister Dmytro Kuleba reported on Twitter.

In peacetime, Ukraine is a major agricultural exporter, but Russia’s invasion has broken farmland and witnessed Ukraine’s ports seized, razed or blockaded — threatening grain importers in Africa with famine.

Western powers have accused Putin of using the trapped harvest as a weapon to boost force on the intercontinental neighborhood, and Russia has been accused of stealing grain.

– ‘Direct threat’ –

On Thursday, a ship carrying 7,000 tonnes of grain sailed from Ukraine’s occupied port of Berdyansk, said the regional chief appointed by the Russian profession forces.

Evgeny Balitsky, the head of the professional-Moscow administration, reported Russia’s Black Sea ships “are making certain the security” of the journey, introducing that the port had been de-mined.

Individually, the Russian defence ministry stated its forces are keeping extra than 6,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war who have been captured since the February 24 invasion.

The conflict in Ukraine dominated the NATO summit in Madrid this week, as the alliance officially invited Sweden and Finland to be a part of, and Biden announced new deployments of US troops, ships and planes to Europe.

Russian missiles continued to rain down in other places in Ukraine and a United Nations official explained Thursday that 16 million persons in Ukraine have been in will need of humanitarian assist.

In the southern town of Mykolaiv, rescuers located the bodies of seven civilians in the rubble of a destroyed setting up, unexpected emergency providers reported.

The city of Lysychansk in the jap Donbas region — the latest aim of Russia’s offensive — is also facing sustained bombardment.

The problem in Lysychansk — the last key town the Russians will need to just take in excess of in the Lugansk area — was “extremely difficult” with relentless shelling creating it impossible to evacuate civilians, regional governor Serhii Haidai claimed.

“There is a whole lot of shelling… The Russian army is approaching from distinct instructions,” he said in a video clip posted on Telegram.

The child killed at the holiday resort was a 12-year-old boy, said Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office. He added that three people, including two children, were still under the rubble.