ABOVE: The Scientist Staff

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Note: The answer grid will include every letter of the alphabet.
BY EMILY COX AND HENRY RATHvON

The delta variant is much worse than (what schools dealt with) last year. Cases among kids are going up steeply, and we’ve got to do something more strenuously than we did last year, but the opposite is being put into place.

Alex Huffman, a chemistry professor at the University of Denver, on the fact that nearly 500 new cases of COVID-19 were reported in four school districts in and around Denver just as the 2021–2022 school year got underway (CPR News, August 24)

Time and time again we’re seeing kids return to school and then come home—either after an exposure or sick themselves. The virus sheds for a couple of days before the patient has symptoms. Entire families are suddenly exposed.

Nicole Braxley, an emergency medicine physician at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Sacramento, commenting on an August report by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association documenting increasing numbers of children being infected by SARS-CoV-2 (NPR, August 23)
ACROSS

1. Neural oscillations, e.g.
4. Impaired ability to move a body part
8. Pull back, as the legs of a tortoise
9. Protein-building type of acid
10. Prefix on conductor
11. Result of a tap on the patellar tendon (2 wds.)
13. Manual part with phalanges
14. DNA chain, for one
17. Involuntary responses
19. Sound of an electric signal
22. Flower named for resembling a 3-Down
23. Unit of electric charge
24. Sites of actin and myosin
25. Early proponent of alternating current

DOWN

1. Connector in circuitry
2. Micronutrient needed for metabolism
3. Main sequence object
4. What 25-Across received for his electric arc lamp
5. Chemical assay compounds, like litmus
6. Protection for an important cord
7. Given a powerful stimulus
12. Pertaining to the telencephalon
13. Place to find a radius
15. Watery, as an optical humor
16. Gives an 11-Across, for example
18. Common sonogram subject
20. Kin of a quagga
21. Dome of a home

© JONNY HAWKINS