This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski, sitting in for Ira Flato. Just a quick note here,

we won't be taking any calls for this pre-recorded hour, and Ira's just fine. He's just having a long

planned staycation week. Later this hour, we'll talk about how the coronavirus is disproportionately

affecting some communities in the United States and the systemic reasons for

why that is. But first, you may have seen the story. It looked frightening, to be sure. Two researchers

at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico say that after studying the genome of the novel

coronavirus in cases both old and new, the virus is mutating. And they say those mutations are making

the virus more contagious. But there are reasons to be skeptical about that claim. Viruses mutate all

the time, for starters, and there may not be much evidence that these mutations are actually

affecting how infectious the coronavirus is. Here to explain a bit more, plus other recent science news is Ryan Mandelbaum.

He's a science writer for Gizmodo. He joins me today from Brooklyn, New York. Ryan, welcome back to

Science Friday. Always great to be here, John. Thanks for having me. So I need to know, first of all,

what's wrong with this study about the mutating coronavirus? So a lot of this study is sort of thought

work, you know, just connecting the dots on previously recorded data. And then the study was put on

the bioarchive preprint server, which means that the study was not peer reviewed. So that's

important because it means that, you know, these researchers are trying to get

this research that could be important out quickly, but other scientists haven't been able to take

the time to take a look and look for any potential issues with the work. So when we're

reading something like this, we should be pretty skeptical and we should not necessarily start to get very, very

worried. That's right. As a reader of science news, when you see a big, scary headline, I think

the first thing that you really need to do is start looking for keywords in the news story,

sort of saying whether or not the study was peer reviewed or perhaps saying where it came from, who did it, who funded it. So this is just a

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