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…

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…

White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci said he will not go into restaurants or movie theaters, even though he’s vaccinated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says vaccinated people should continue masking up indoors and avoiding large gatherings. News outlets have reported on “breakthrough infections” of Covid-19 among the fully vaccinated. Click Here:…

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…

Every year, malaria kills more than 400,000 people, most of them children. There has been significant progress against the disease in the past few decades — death rates have fallen nearly in half since 2000 — but there’s still a long way to go. For decades, researchers have been working on developing a vaccine. It…

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 —…

Kids are back in school. The federal government seems to be on the verge of approving vaccines for younger children. And as more adults are fully vaccinated, much of the US is slowly returning to normal. But there remains a lingering question, particularly for parents of young children: What is the risk of Covid-19 to…

It’s become a time-honored tradition in certain segments of American society: two families cross-reference their respective calendars to find a spot free of school or soccer or other obligations. On the appointed day, one child travels to the other’s house, typically accompanied by a parent. The children build a Lego village or glue googly eyes…

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has made our future vulnerability to biological pathogens — and what we can learn to help prevent the next pandemic — a salient concern. We don’t have much evidence one way or the other whether Covid’s emergence into the world was the result of a lab accident or a…

Four executives from Big Oil — “the richest, most powerful industry in human history,” according to environmentalist Bill McKibben — testified before Congress on Thursday at a hearing meant to reveal how the oil business has undermined government action on climate change. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform questioned the CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP,…