Month: March 2022

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 —…

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…

After months of discussion and debate, Democrats are at an impasse on a raft of infrastructure legislation that could make or break President Joe Biden’s effort to fight climate change. The rift, as it’s framed in countless news stories, is between progressives who want an ambitious social and climate spending bill and moderates who have…