Month: March 2022

You’ve been fully vaccinated: two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine, or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, plus several weeks for your immune system to fully respond. Now what can you do? New guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Monday, March 8, offer good news: You can see your family or have other vaccinated friends over, indoors, without a mask (with a caveat). “If you’ve been fully vaccinated,” the…

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The Senate on Wednesday took an important step forward on limiting emissions — and meeting its commitments to curb global warming — by voting to limit the unbridled release of methane molecules, often a byproduct of natural gas production, into the atmosphere. The 52-42 vote reinstates the Oil and Natural Gas New Source Performance Standards, a handful of Obama-era regulations on methane emissions rolled back by former President Donald Trump in August 2020. The measure…

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The Covid-19 pandemic now appears to be the worst it has ever been, with daily new cases worldwide topping 800,000 several times over the past week. More new cases have been reported in the past two weeks than in the first six months of the crisis. More than one in three of these new cases were reported in India, the world’s second-most-populous country and now the epicenter of Covid-19. The rising infections, deaths, and strained…

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The Biden administration has announced that it will work with the World Trade Organization (WTO) to negotiate a deal to suspend intellectual property rights associated with the Covid-19 vaccines — a surprise move for the administration, which had initially resisted taking such a step. The reversal came as Covid-19 deaths are mounting in India and elsewhere. The vaccination program in the US is going well, but much of the world is still waiting for vaccines,…

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The world may have undercounted Covid-19 deaths by a staggering margin, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The actual count may actually be 6.9 million deaths, more than double official tolls. The United States alone is estimated to have had 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, vastly more than the 579,000 deaths officially reported, and more than any other country. The…

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There’s a scene in The West Wing’s second season in which one of the protagonists is told a Chinese satellite is falling to Earth, but no one knew exactly when or where. “A satellite is crashing to Earth, and NASA sent us a fax?” Donna Moss says, clearly concerned. But few in the show shared her fear, because debris in space often falls out of orbit and is either burned up upon reentry or lands…

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While here in the US some are tentatively removing their masks and resuming small outdoor gatherings, others around the world are searching for air. In India, people need oxygen, and they need it now. Last week, Covid-19 became India’s No. 1 killer. One million people in a country with a population of 1.3 billion are predicted to die of Covid-19 by August. As of May 7, 150 people were reportedly dying every hour, and while…

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If a waiter at a restaurant brought you a murky, stinky glass of water, that would be unacceptable. But yet, many waiters — at least before the Covid-19 pandemic hit — were forced to breathe poorly ventilated air in restaurants and other indoor spaces where people packed together. And still today, “if anybody asks a restaurant owner, ‘what’s the ventilation here?’ they will probably look strangely at them,” says Lidia Morawska, a physicist and an…

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Now that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that people who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 can shed their masks, there are obvious questions: How do you verify that people are vaccinated? Especially in situations in which some people can’t get vaccinated, including young children, or may remain vulnerable after, like some immunocompromised people, how can we guarantee they’re safe from the unmasked as mandates disappear? Unlike many of the challenges…

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Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that nerve endings help carry the message from different parts of our bodies to our brains. But they didn’t know what kind of receptor on the nerve ending causes the message to fire — for example, when a person touches an ice cube or places a hand on a hot stove. You could say…

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