Almost every country in the world signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a monumental accord that aimed to limit global warming. But it was forged on a contradiction: Every signatory agreed that everyone must do something to address the urgent threat of climate change, but no one at the time pledged to do enough. In…
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Biden’s $27 billion bet on forests
As the White House revealed Thursday, President Joe Biden has stripped a lot from his Build Back Better framework to placate moderate Democrats. Free community college is out, as is Medicare coverage of dental and vision services, among several other priorities. But there is one surprising area that’s so far survived the congressional gauntlet as…
Covid-19 vaccines for young kids are a big step toward a new normal
More than 28 million children across the US are now eligible to receive Covid-19 vaccinations, a step that could relieve anxiety for families, bring more kids back to schools, and slow the spread of the disease. On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for kids between the ages of…
The curious case of the ancient whale bones
Every year, thousands of whales strand — meaning that they wind up trapped on beaches or in shallow waters — and it’s really hard to figure out why. Click Here: It’s not for lack of trying. Teams of forensic researchers investigate stranded whales, studying organs, analyzing body parts with CT scanners, digging through stomach contents,…
Streaming space tourism is the new reality TV
When SpaceX launches its first all-civilian crew into space later this fall and takes a multi-day trip circling the Earth, humanity can follow along online thanks to an exclusive documentary deal Netflix sealed with Elon Musk’s private space company. The first two installments of the five-episode miniseries, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, will debut on…
The case against the concept of biodiversity
Click:Bread bag making machine In 2017, an evolutionary biologist named R. Alexander Pyron ignited controversy with a Washington Post commentary titled “We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.” He wrote: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge…
What it feels like to get Covid-19 after being vaccinated
Michael Miranda had been fully vaccinated for over four months when he tested positive for the coronavirus. “I stared at my phone for a few moments, wondering if this was a death sentence,” said Miranda, who works as a probation officer in Hawaii. After flying home from a trip to the West Coast, Miranda had…
Climate change worsens extreme weather. A revolution in attribution science proved it.
There’s a cliché that has popped up for years in discussions of climate and weather disasters: You can’t blame any individual event on climate change. Climate is all about trends and statistics, the reasoning goes, so you can’t necessarily draw meaningful conclusions from a single data point, be it a heat wave, a hurricane, or…
We have to accept some risk of Covid-19
There’s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We’ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus — make it less deadly — not eliminate it entirely. This is not a surrender…
Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses
Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” she wrote. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body…