For the past five months, Melinda Webster has lived on an icebreaker ship frozen in an ice floe near the North Pole. For Webster, a sea ice geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, it was an ideal observatory. She and a team of 14 other scientists set out, as part of the largest polar…
The fossil fuel industry has not been doing well lately. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, growth in global demand had slowed to 1 percent annually. Now, lockdowns and distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus have decimated the industry. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently released projections of rapid short-term decline in global…
Europe suffered a big Covid-19 outbreak in the spring, then subsequently suppressed the virus while the United States continued to struggle. But now cases in Europe are surging once again: France is bringing back a lockdown, the UK is escalating restrictions, and even Germany, widely seen as a coronavirus success story, is again imposing closures,…
The third — and largest — coronavirus wave is hitting the US just in time for the presidential election, with surges in key Midwestern swing states. Numerous polls suggest voters may be taking their pandemic pain and panic with them to the ballot boxes in these places: President Donald Trump isn’t just down in national…
Reluctance to share information about coronavirus infections or contacts seems to run deep in the US — all the way to the White House, where an investigation into the spread of the virus there was called off soon after the outbreak was discovered. According to results from a survey released Friday by the Pew Research…
This piece was originally published August 27, and has been lightly updated. During the final presidential debate, both candidates were asked how they would combat climate change and support job growth. President Donald Trump offered few specifics, merely saying that that, “We have the Trillion Trees program. We have so many different programs. I do…
President Donald Trump is closing his 2020 presidential campaign by arguing that his only mistake in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic was mishandling “public relations.” “We got hit with the ‘China virus,’” Trump said on Tuesday during a stop at his campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. “We’ve done an incredible job with respect to that…
More frequent Covid-19 testing is one key to help end the pandemic. But as individuals, we can’t rely on testing alone to protect ourselves and others. Take this recent example: Public health officials in New Zealand reported on a cluster of cases that likely spread aboard a long-haul flight. Yet the suspected index cases —…
Over Thanksgiving, in between mouthfuls of turkey and sweet potato pie, many of us will be asking ourselves: What are we grateful for? Taking a moment to practice gratitude like this isn’t an empty holiday tradition. It’s good for our mental and physical health. And here’s another thing: It can actually change our brains in…
The recent results of Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials from teams at the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer and BioNTech have been some of the most exciting and promising developments in the pandemic to date. All three vaccine candidates appear to be highly effective against Covid-19, the research teams say. Pfizer and BioNTech…