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 Read more about Astronomers were skeptical about dark matter — until Vera Rubin came along[…]

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 Read more about Solar farms are often bad for biodiversity — but they don’t have to be[…]

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 Read more about What we actually know about the vaccines and the delta variant[…]

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 Read more about How a cheap antidepressant emerged as a promising Covid-19 treatment[…]

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 — Read more about What full FDA approval for Covid-19 vaccines really means[…]

The origins of the novel coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic remain a mystery. US intelligence agencies have now completed a 90-day probe into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, but their classified findings, according to the New York Times, were inconclusive as to whether the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, or made a Read more about The lab leak hypothesis — true or not — should teach us a lesson[…]

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 Read more about What an enormous global study can tell us about feeling better during the pandemic[…]

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 Read more about One of the worst public health dangers of the past century has finally been eradicated[…]

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 Read more about The new Alzheimer’s drug that could break Medicare[…]

The world’s leading health organization, the WHO, repeatedly broke its own rules and spent millions of dollars on high-priced management consultants, according to a new independent audit — even as the United Nations agency has struggled to pay for lifesaving equipment and vaccines in its global Covid-19 response. An unnamed consulting company, which Vox has Read more about The World Health Organization broke its own rules to spend millions on BCG consultants[…]