The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that zoonotic diseases – infections that pass from animals to humans – can present tremendous threats to global health. More…
The pandemic has brought many tricky terms and ideas from epidemiology into everyone’s lives. Two particularly complicated concepts are vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. These are…
The deadly tornado outbreak that tore through communities from Arkansas to Illinois on the night of December 10-11, 2021, was so unusual in its duration…
Three-quarters of your poop consists of water and most of the rest is food your body didn’t digest. Once it exits the digestive system, poop…
Now that kids ages 5 to 11 are eligible for COVID-19 vaccination and the number of fully vaccinated people in the U.S. is rising, many…
If the omicron variant of the coronavirus is different enough from the original variant, it’s possible that existing vaccines won’t be as effective as they…
A quiet months-long legal fight between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drugmaker Moderna over COVID-19 vaccine patents recently burst into public view. The…
Record numbers of Americans have quit their jobs in recent months, with more than 4.4 million submitting their resignation in September alone. Millions more may…
A new variant named omicron (B.1.1.529) was reported by researchers in South Africa on November 24, 2021, and designated a “variant of concern” by the…
If you’ve pumped gas at a U.S. service station over the past decade, you’ve put biofuel in your tank. Thanks to the federal Renewable Fuel…
Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in…
Earth hasn’t always been a blue and green oasis of life in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. During our planet’s first 50 million years, around…
Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and…
What you like to listen to is also important for choosing the right pair. Between music, podcasts, gaming, and the unlimited supply of online content,…
Intensive livestock farming is a huge global industry that serves up millions of tons of beef, pork, and poultry every year. When I asked one…
On November 15, 2021, U.S. officials announced that they had detected a dangerous new debris field in orbit near Earth. Later in the day, it…
Since early in the COVID pandemic, the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa has been monitoring changes in SARS-CoV-2. This was a valuable tool…
There are three reasons we see so many red American barns. It’s traditional, it’s practical and the color looks good. Although a main reason to…
