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A year ago, as we contemplated the prospect of weeks or months sheltering in place, we thought up a novel community service project. People were stuck at home. Could we help them use their free time to learn a valuable new skill? Could we teach an online course for thousands centered around real human community? […]

Since the start of the pandemic, the most terrifying task in health care was thought to be when a doctor put a breathing tube down the trachea of a critically ill covid patient. Those performing such “aerosol-generating” procedures, often in an intensive care unit, got the best protective gear even if there wasn’t enough to […]

Like great art, great thought experiments have implications unintended by their creators. Take philosopher John Searle’s Chinese room experiment. Searle concocted it to convince us that computers don’t really “think” as we do; they manipulate symbols mindlessly, without understanding what they are doing. Searle meant to make a point about the limits of machine cognition. […]

This week, the U.S. House of Representatives will likely vote to approve the American Rescue Plan, the final step toward sending COVID-19 legislation to President Biden’s desk. As the Biden administration works with states and cities to implement the bill over the coming months, they shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to combat the pandemic’s companion […]

In 2010, Japanese scientists from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Expedition 329 sailed into the South Pacific Gyre with a giant drill and a big question. The gyre is a marine desert more barren than all but the aridest places on Earth. Ocean currents swirl around it, but within the gyre, the water stills and […]

When Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th U.S. president on January 20, he inherited major crises, including a raging pandemic, a planet gripped by escalating climate change, a ravaged economy and a nation riven by hyperpartisanship, worsened by what amounted to an attempted coup inspired by his predecessor. But it is an older […]

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. In a 2/19/21 newsletter for The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes that some cautionary public health messages about COVID-19 vaccines, such as messages about risks, uncertainties, caveats and […]

By mid-December, the Northern Hemisphere is usually well into the start of its annual cold and flu season—but so far this year, even as the COVID-19 pandemic surges in dozens of countries, the levels of many common seasonal infections remain extremely low. The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has infected at least 67 million […]

Poachers take note. If you’re thinking about stealing eggs from the nests of sea turtles on the beaches of Costa Rica, well, you may wind up getting more than you bargained for. Because researchers have combined GPS technology with 3D printing to produce decoy eggs that look and feel like real turtle eggs…but can track […]

In 2012, the quantum physicist John Preskill wrote, “We hope to hasten the day when well controlled quantum systems can perform tasks surpassing what can be done in the classical world.” Less than a decade later, two quantum computing systems have met that mark: Google’s Sycamore, and the University of Science and Technology of China’s […]