News at a glance: Long Covid treatment, global earthquake model, and deep-sea mining

MARINE SCIENCE Ocean mining ban sought Europe’s top science advisory panel last week called for a moratorium on commercial deep-sea mining, arguing that its environmental impacts are poorly understood and that critical clean energy minerals can be harvested from mines on land. According to some forecasts, only the highest demand scenarios for minerals used in renewable power and electric vehicles require supplies from the deep sea, says the report from the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council. Next month, the United Nations’s International Seabed Authority (ISA) will consider a moratorium in international waters. (The United States is not an ISA member because it has not ratified the Law of the Sea Convention.) Although individual scientists have previously called for a moratorium, this is the first such call by a major scientific panel. BIOMEDICINE Diabetes drug deters Long Covid The inexpensive and widely used diabetes drug metformin decreased the risk of developing Long Covid in overweight and obese outpatients who took it while acutely ill with SARS-CoV-2 infection, researchers reported last week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases . The risk was 41% lower for the metformin group than for a comparison group receiving a placebo. The study presents the first evidence from a randomized clinical trial that a medication taken by patients who have acute symptoms such as cough and fever can re...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research