Part of the Escape Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. Phil Nichols doesn’t get a lot of unannounced visitors at the long-term sober-living house in Cincinnati where he lives. The two US marshals waiting at the door on a March afternoon in 2018 told Nichols they had information Read more about The man without a name[…]

In the past half-century, the global production of meat has undergone a seismic shift. While meat was once mostly raised on small farms, today almost all the meat we eat comes from industrialized “factory” farms, known as “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs. More than 90 percent of the world’s meat supply comes from CAFOs. Read more about The next pandemic could come from factory farms[…]

Remember Sharpiegate? It turns out that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may still be reeling from that episode, when President Trump’s refusal to admit he was wrong ballooned into an actual scandal at one of the nation’s premier scientific institutions. The New York Times reported this week that NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig Read more about Trump’s “Sharpiegate” grudge may have cost NOAA’s acting chief scientist his job[…]

Most people who get the coronavirus will fully recover and go right back to their lives. But the latest research suggests that at least 10 percent have long-term symptoms, even after their body has apparently cleared the virus. The condition, known as “long Covid,” has emerged as a scary feature of the pandemic — a Read more about Scientists haven’t figured out long Covid. Here are 5 of their best hypotheses.[…]

The US rollout of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine was halted Tuesday as regulators race to investigate rare blood-clotting complications linked to the shot. The move may force thousands of people scheduled to receive the shot this week to scramble for an alternative. Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Read more about Why Johnson & Johnson shots were paused — and why that’s so confusing[…]

For most of the 21st century, putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions (either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system) has been seen as the serious person’s climate-change policy, preferred by economists, claimed to have bipartisan appeal, and backed relentlessly by tribunes of Beltway conventional wisdom like the Washington Post editorial board. In the Read more about A simpler, more useful way to tax carbon[…]

As urgency mounts for a Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine, a key question for scientists is whether this pandemic will be the watershed moment for two new technologies that have never before seen widespread use in humans. If proven effective, these approaches could dramatically speed up the development of other new vaccines and drastically lower costs, heralding Read more about These Covid-19 vaccine candidates could change the way we make vaccines — if they work[…]

The National Hurricane Center warned that Hurricane Laura will cause “life-threatening storm surge” reaching up to 40 miles inland and rising up to 20 feet as the storm made landfall in Texas and Louisiana. Laura reached the Gulf Coast after midnight on Thursday morning at an “extremely dangerous” Category 4 strength, with winds reaching 140 Read more about Hurricane Laura hits Gulf Coast as an “extremely dangerous” storm[…]

Wildfires continue burning in California, with unhealthy air from smoke still cloaking some parts of the state. Combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, the fires are compounding risks that have been brewing for years. Fire officials have grouped some of the smaller fires in an area into complexes to coordinate their response. The largest of these Read more about What makes California’s current major wildfires so unusual[…]

Hurricane Laura made landfall at 1 am ET Thursday in Cameron, Louisiana, as a fierce Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds. It has since downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, with wind speeds of 75 mph, and is moving north. But perhaps the most dangerous part of the storm may be the storm surge Read more about Hurricane Laura: The danger of storm surge, explained[…]