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 body … Continue reading "Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses"

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 … Continue reading "Solar farms are often bad for biodiversity — but they don’t have to be"

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 … Continue reading "Astronomers were skeptical about dark matter — until Vera Rubin came along"

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 … Continue reading "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 … Continue reading "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 — … Continue reading "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 … Continue reading "The lab leak hypothesis — true or not — should teach us a lesson"

Hurricane Ida has begun pummeling the Gulf Coast, making landfall as a Category 4 storm on Sunday near Port Fourchon, Louisiana. The storm has already tied for the strongest recorded landfall in Louisiana, with winds at 150 miles per hour. Hurricane Laura in 2020 also had 150-mile-per-hour winds, as did an 1856 hurricane, according to … Continue reading "What do hurricane categories mean?"

Hurricane season brings a recurring set of difficulties to coastal communities, and particularly to the South. Like other natural disasters, hurricanes can lay bare inadequate infrastructure, political ineptitude, and stark racial and economic inequalities. For residents of the Gulf Coast region, Hurricane Ida comes 16 years — to the day — after Hurricane Katrina and … Continue reading "Hurricane Ida could ravage the Covid-strained Gulf Coast"

Another explosive wildfire season is underway in California, with more than a million acres already burned in 2021. While still short of the unprecedented 2020 fire season, the blazes this year are well above average and are still gaining ground. The Caldor Fire burning near Lake Tahoe has forced thousands of people to evacuate as … Continue reading "What’s causing California’s unprecedented wildfires"