For 17 years, cicadas do very little. They hang out in the ground, sucking sugar out of tree roots. Then, following this absurdly long hibernation, they emerge from the ground,…
In the US, the first two available Covid-19 vaccines were those from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. Both vaccines have very high “efficacy rates” of around 95 percent. But the third vaccine…
This winter is brutal. The cold weather has made it hard to socialize outdoors, coronavirus variants are spreading, and the US is about to surpass half a million Covid-19 deaths.…
We’ve reached half a million deaths from the coronavirus in the US. But most of these deaths — and the grueling medical ordeals leading up to them — have remained…
The power was still out in my Dallas housing complex early last Tuesday, so I grabbed the survival hatchet from my emergency bag to chop up a couple of fallen…
When Hilda Bastian and I first caught up over Skype to talk about Covid-19 vaccines last autumn, she showed me the boxes and unfinished rooms in her new home in…
The world is now locked in an arms race with Covid-19, as multiple effective vaccines are being deployed (at staggeringly different rates) around the world. At the same time, new…
One big reason to be excited about the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine for Covid-19, which was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration over the weekend for emergency use…
When many Americans talk about returning to “normal life” after the pandemic, they might mean going back to the office, resuming in-person school or child care, or preparing for the…
I’ve learned more about how to think and reason well from Julia Galef than from almost anyone. Galef, a writer, researcher, and podcaster, is obsessive about improving her own reasoning…