Posts

Vera Rubin didn’t “discover” dark matter, but she put it on the map. Dark matter is a wild concept. It’s the idea that some mind-boggling percentage of all the matter in the universe may be invisible, and wholly unlike the matter that makes up Earth. Rubin is celebrated because she forced much of the astronomy […]

Every several years — sometimes just once a decade — when the rains come in just the right amounts and at just the right times, rare flowers speckle the Mojave Desert in California. Some, like the Barstow woolly sunflower, emerge from plants no larger than a thumbnail. They spring forth from seeds that have persisted […]

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed, and with it, so has the effectiveness of the vaccines. The bottom line remains the same: The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that are most prevalent in the US are still quite effective in preventing any illness from the novel coronavirus, and extremely effective in preventing the kind of […]

Since Covid-19 patients started showing up at clinics and hospitals a year and a half ago, doctors and researchers have been hard at work trying to figure out how to treat them. Most drugs and treatments haven’t panned out, producing either no results or small ones in large-scale clinical trials. Many of the few that […]

Nearly nine months after the first Americans received their shots, the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration for people 16 and older on Monday. This could help increase the number of people willing to get vaccines and make it easier to compel those who are less willing — […]

On Monday, the United Nations announced an environmental and public health milestone: the end of the use of leaded gasoline in automobiles and road vehicles worldwide. The last holdout was Algeria, which had large stockpiles of leaded gasoline; in July, those stockpiles ran out, and Algeria has now made the transition to unleaded gasoline. Lead […]

During the pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time alone. I live by myself. I work from home. At times, I experienced fits of fidgetiness and restlessness, contributing to feelings of burnout. Here’s what helped: reappraising the situation. What I was feeling was isolation, and the loneliness that comes with it. Instead of letting it […]

Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers Americans over 65, is facing an impossible dilemma: Should it cover a new and expensive medication for Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts 6 million Americans and for which there is no existing treatment, even though the drug might not actually work? It is an enormous question. Alzheimer’s patients […]

The Covid-19 pandemic upended daily life so drastically that there was a moment when it seemed to be making a dent in the climate crisis. Rush-hour traffic disappeared, global travel slowed to a crawl, and the resulting economic tailspin sent energy-related pollution plummeting almost 6 percent globally. This kind of decline in pollution is unprecedented […]

Another Covid-19 vaccine, this one from the biotech firm Novavax, has posted superb results in a phase 3 clinical trial, the company announced on Monday. But with more than half of US adults now vaccinated against Covid-19, the biggest impact of these results may be in other countries. The Novavax vaccine stands out from other […]