The pandemic is not over, despite some proclamations to the contrary. The good news is that we now have some effective therapeutics that are helping drive fatality rates down. Chief among these is Paxlovid, which significantly reduces the risk of hospitalization and death and was first granted an emergency use authorization by the Food and […]
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This Change Could Reduce Police Brutality against Black Drivers like Tyre Nichols
Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was severely beaten by five Memphis police officers during a traffic stop in January. Shocking footage of the assault highlights what researchers describe as deeply ingrained racial biases that fuel police brutality. Black drivers are more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers. Once stopped, they are […]
Black Inventor Garrett Morgan Saved Countless Lives with Gas Mask and Improved Traffic Lights
Just before midnight at the close of a hot summer day in 1916, a natural gas pocket exploded 120 feet beneath the waves of Lake Erie. It happened during work on Cleveland’s newest waterworks tunnel, a 10-foot-wide underwater artery designed to pull in water from about five miles out, beyond the city’s polluted shoreline. The […]
We Can’t Solve Our Climate Problems without Removing Their Main Cause: Fossil-Fuel Emissions
Toward the end of 2022, I was a panelist at a session on climate change held by a major scientific society. Near the end of the session, a prominent scientist declared that we needed to be “realistic”: oil and gas weren’t going away anytime soon, and we had to accept that as we attempted to […]
Can We Predict Earthquakes At All?
My hometown of Los Angeles is home to the earliest reported earthquake dating back to 1769 (and, of course, many more since then). The largest recorded earthquake in the world occurred in Chile in May of 1960 measuring at a magnitude of 9.5 moment magnitudes. A single earthquake can cause destruction costing hundreds of millions of dollars to repair and, far more […]
Why the Earthquake in Turkey Was So Damaging and Deadly
A major earthquake struck southern Turkey early on Monday, causing extensive damage and killing thousands there and in neighboring Syria. Rescue workers have been searching the rubble of buildings for survivors, who face bitterly cold winter temperatures, as well as electricity and water outages—and the terror of continuing aftershocks. The magnitude 7.8 temblor struck close […]
Antibiotic-Resistant UTIs Are Common, and Other Infections May Soon Be Resistant, Too
About half of women and more than one in 10 men will get a urinary tract infection (UTI) in their lifetime, with many people experiencing recurrent UTIs. These common bacterial infections, which can lead to painful urination, have been easily treated and cured with antibiotics for decades. But as a result of antibiotic resistance—when bacteria […]
Can We Stop Aging?
What really happens to our bodies when we age — and could we find a way to slow it down? Source link
‘Unbelievable’ Spinning Particles Probe Nature’s Most Mysterious Force
The strong force is an enigma. Through gluons, it binds together quarks, one of the two basic building blocks of matter, into the protons and neutrons at the center of every atom. True to its name, it is the strongest of the four known fundamental forces, but it only exerts its might across subatomic distances. […]
Mystery Portrait May Be a Raphael, Artificial Intelligence Suggests
In a meeting of high art and state-of-the-art facial recognition, researchers say they’ve used artificial intelligence to determine that a circular painting of the Virgin Mary and the child Jesus, known as the de Brécy Tondo, or the Tondo for short, was likely painted by the Italian master Raphael. Many art historians, however, insist the […]