If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump this November and ends up in the Oval Office in January, he’ll quickly face one of the gravest challenges any president has seen in the modern era: Hundreds of thousands of Americans will be dead from Covid-19. Public trust in scientific and government institutions will be depleted. If the…
Mushrooms that don’t brown. A treatment for sickle-cell anemia. Driving malaria-carrying mosquitoes to extinction. Resurrecting the woolly mammoth. Editing genes in human embryos to make them less susceptible to HIV. These are just a handful of the possibilities of the versatile gene editing tool known as CRISPR that scientists have explored in the few years…
Researchers at the University of Nevada have reported that a 25-year-old man was reinfected in June with SARS-CoV-2, the virus the causes Covid-19. He joins a handful of other confirmed cases of reinfection in people without immune disorders — in Belgium, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Ecuador — where researchers have demonstrated that the genetic…
Much ink has been spilled over the “replication crisis” in the last decade and a half, including here at Vox. Researchers have discovered, over and over, that lots of findings in fields like psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics don’t hold up when other researchers try to replicate them. This conversation was fueled in part by…
Germany gets a lot of favorable Covid-19 press — and for good reason. Its daily new cases per million people have been persistently lower than any of its Western European neighbors, and its death rate, from the beginning of the outbreak, has been among the lowest in Western Europe: currently 0.15 deaths per million people,…
At the second and final 2020 presidential debate on Thursday, when asked by President Donald Trump if he would “close down the oil industry,” former Vice President Joe Biden said that he intends to “transition away from the oil industry, yes.” Republicans are working furiously to make this supposed admission into a scandal, hoping it…
Early results from the two leading US Covid-19 vaccine trials are expected in November, in what will likely be a major milestone in the race to end the pandemic. The final leg of the race, however, will be actually getting people vaccinated. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has offered guidance on…
For the past five months, Melinda Webster has lived on an icebreaker ship frozen in an ice floe near the North Pole. For Webster, a sea ice geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, it was an ideal observatory. She and a team of 14 other scientists set out, as part of the largest polar…
The fossil fuel industry has not been doing well lately. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, growth in global demand had slowed to 1 percent annually. Now, lockdowns and distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus have decimated the industry. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently released projections of rapid short-term decline in global…
Europe suffered a big Covid-19 outbreak in the spring, then subsequently suppressed the virus while the United States continued to struggle. But now cases in Europe are surging once again: France is bringing back a lockdown, the UK is escalating restrictions, and even Germany, widely seen as a coronavirus success story, is again imposing closures,…