Month: March 2022

Every year, thousands of whales strand — meaning that they wind up trapped on beaches or in shallow waters — and it’s really hard to figure out why. It’s not for lack of trying. Teams of forensic researchers investigate stranded whales, studying organs, analyzing body parts with CT scanners, digging through stomach contents, and checkingRead moreRead more

When SpaceX launches its first all-civilian crew into space later this fall and takes a multi-day trip circling the Earth, humanity can follow along online thanks to an exclusive documentary deal Netflix sealed with Elon Musk’s private space company. The first two installments of the five-episode miniseries, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, will debut onRead moreRead more

In 2017, an evolutionary biologist named R. Alexander Pyron ignited controversy with a Washington Post commentary titled “We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.” He wrote: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, butRead moreRead more

Michael Miranda had been fully vaccinated for over four months when he tested positive for the coronavirus. “I stared at my phone for a few moments, wondering if this was a death sentence,” said Miranda, who works as a probation officer in Hawaii. After flying home from a trip to the West Coast, Miranda hadRead moreRead more

There’s a cliché that has popped up for years in discussions of climate and weather disasters: You can’t blame any individual event on climate change. Climate is all about trends and statistics, the reasoning goes, so you can’t necessarily draw meaningful conclusions from a single data point, be it a heat wave, a hurricane, orRead moreRead more

There’s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We’ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus — make it less deadly — not eliminate it entirely. This is not a surrenderRead moreRead more

Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” she wrote. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my bodyRead moreRead more

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 persistedRead moreRead more

Click:the door 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 theRead moreRead more

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 thatRead moreRead more