“Physicists like to probe the extreme,” said Garrett Goon, a physicist at Carnegie Mellon University. “The fact that you can’t go further, that something is changing, something is blocking you–something interesting is happening there.” For decades, black holes have played the headlining role in the thought experiments that physicists use […]
Archaeologists Discover the Largest, Oldest Maya Monument Yet
As far as we had determined, it took another few centuries, until around 350 BCE, for those early Maya villages to coalesce into the large city-states of the Classic Period. These were political, economic, and ceremonial centers that dominated the surrounding farmland and smaller communities, ruled by elite classes and […]
India Is Using More Solar Energy–but It Carries a Lead Risk
“When a battery becomes old, the lead comes out in the form of lead sulfate and corrodes,” said Amod Pokhrel, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. If particles from those corroding batteries end up on the floors of nearby houses, Pokhrel says, young children […]
Police Tactics Could Turn Protests Into Covid-19 Hot Spots
In law enforcement theory, it’s called the Miami model, or “strategic incapacitation.” Sometimes it’s just the “hard hat approach.” That’s when police and other security services show up at mass demonstrations or protests in full riot gear–helmets, face masks, clubs, shields, body armor, chemical weapons. At the first hint of […]
Covid-19 Cases Were Already Rising Before the George Floyd Protests
The easing of stay-at-home orders and Memorial Day travel have led to spikes in some parts of the country. That’s bad news for what comes next.
A Triple Threat Imperils Millions of People Across Africa
Driven by climate change, heavy rains this spring gave rise to vast swarms of locusts that have been obliterating crops across Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia, leaving a trail of destruction the likes of which haven’t been seen for generations. Over the past few months, the insects have rapidly spread north, […]
A Drop in Commercial Flights Is Bad for Hurricane Forecasts
As the hurricane season’s third tropical storm churns toward the US coast, forecasters lack some key data that helps them predict a hurricane’s size, speed, and path. Cruise ships and commercial airlines that collect weather information along their routes are now mostly grounded because of the coronavirus pandemic, forcing meteorologists […]
All This Chaos Might Be Giving You ‘Crisis Fatigue’
When you’re faced with a threat, the adrenal glands perched atop your kidneys flood your body with the stress hormone cortisol (which amps up your metabolism and fights inflammation) and adrenaline (which speeds up your blood circulation and breathing). This is the biochemistry of your fight-or-flight response–it helps you either […]
Major Hydroxychloroquine Trial Shows No Prevention Benefits
Diagnostic test kits might have shown that fewer people actually had the disease than the study claimed–what Wachter calls an “overcall,” something that might be more likely in a place like San Francisco, where the overall prevalence of infection was low. Just 4 percent of the people who came to […]
16 Health Workers Talk About Their Battles With the Pandemic
Health care workers the world over have never faced combat with anything quite like Covid-19, a disease that spreads rapidly and so far has killed more than 360,000 people worldwide. Health officials were so concerned that hospitals would be overwhelmed by patients that in March much of the world went […]