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…
What it feels like to get Covid-19 after being vaccinated
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…
Climate change worsens extreme weather. A revolution in attribution science proved it.
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.…
We have to accept some risk of Covid-19
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…
Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses
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.…
Solar farms are often bad for biodiversity — but they don’t have to be
Every several years — sometimes just once a decade — when the rains come in just the right amounts and at just the right times,…
Astronomers were skeptical about dark matter — until Vera Rubin came along
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…
What we actually know about the vaccines and the delta variant
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…
How a cheap antidepressant emerged as a promising Covid-19 treatment
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…
What full FDA approval for Covid-19 vaccines really means
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…