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Every several years — sometimes just once a decade — when the rains come in just the right amounts and at just the right times, rare flowers speckle the Mojave Desert in California. Some, like the Barstow woolly sunflower, emerge from plants no larger than a thumbnail. They spring forth from seeds that have persisted […]

Since Covid-19 patients started showing up at clinics and hospitals a year and a half ago, doctors and researchers have been hard at work trying to figure out how to treat them. Most drugs and treatments haven’t panned out, producing either no results or small ones in large-scale clinical trials. Many of the few that […]

Nearly nine months after the first Americans received their shots, the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration for people 16 and older on Monday. This could help increase the number of people willing to get vaccines and make it easier to compel those who are less willing — […]

The origins of the novel coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic remain a mystery. US intelligence agencies have now completed a 90-day probe into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, but their classified findings, according to the New York Times, were inconclusive as to whether the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, or made a […]

Another explosive wildfire season is underway in California, with more than a million acres already burned in 2021. While still short of the unprecedented 2020 fire season, the blazes this year are well above average and are still gaining ground. The Caldor Fire burning near Lake Tahoe has forced thousands of people to evacuate as […]

During the pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time alone. I live by myself. I work from home. At times, I experienced fits of fidgetiness and restlessness, contributing to feelings of burnout. Here’s what helped: reappraising the situation. What I was feeling was isolation, and the loneliness that comes with it. Instead of letting it […]

On Monday, the United Nations announced an environmental and public health milestone: the end of the use of leaded gasoline in automobiles and road vehicles worldwide. The last holdout was Algeria, which had large stockpiles of leaded gasoline; in July, those stockpiles ran out, and Algeria has now made the transition to unleaded gasoline. Lead […]

Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers Americans over 65, is facing an impossible dilemma: Should it cover a new and expensive medication for Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts 6 million Americans and for which there is no existing treatment, even though the drug might not actually work? It is an enormous question. Alzheimer’s patients […]

The world’s leading health organization, the WHO, repeatedly broke its own rules and spent millions of dollars on high-priced management consultants, according to a new independent audit — even as the United Nations agency has struggled to pay for lifesaving equipment and vaccines in its global Covid-19 response. An unnamed consulting company, which Vox has […]

Tiny, wriggling horrors are hatching right now, under our feet, across the country. No, not the billions of Brood X cicadas emerging throughout the eastern US. I’m talking instead about baby invasive “crazy worms” that thrash through garden, farm, city, and forest soil, growing to 3 to 6 inches in length, sucking up nutrients, and […]