A powerful storm barreled toward Southern California after flooding highways, toppling trees and causing mud flows in areas burned bare by recent fires across the northern part of the state. Drenching showers and strong winds accompanied the weekend’s arrival of an atmospheric river — a long and wide plume of moisture pulled in from the...
In a pair of Cape Town warehouses converted into a maze of airlocked sterile rooms, young scientists are assembling and calibrating the equipment needed to reverse engineer a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to reach South Africa and most of the world’s poorest people. The energy in the gleaming labs matches the urgency of their...
Starting around 3,000 years ago, a wave of innovation began to sweep through human societies around the globe. For the next millennium the continued emergence of new technologies had a dramatic effect on the course of human history. This era saw the advancement of the ability to control horses with bit and bridle, the spread...
Like most other kids with covid, Dante and Michael DeMaino seemed to have no serious symptoms. Infected in mid-February, both lost their senses of taste and smell. Dante, 9, had a low-grade fever for a day or so. Michael, 13, had a “tickle in his throat,” said their mother, Michele DeMaino, of Danvers, Massachusetts. At...
The health outreach workers who drove past Lama Mballow’s village with a megaphone handed out T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “I GOT MY COVID-19 VACCINE!” By then, the women in Sare Gibel already had heard the rumors on social media: The vaccines could make your blood stop or cause you to miscarry. Women who took...
Nine out of 10 startups fail, and even among venture-backed fledgling companies, the success rate is only about 25%. It’s even tougher for women entrepreneurs, who face challenges their male counterparts don’t, according to new Cornell University research. One reason is noncompete agreements – legal compacts or clauses in a contract specifying that an employee...
A widely accepted theory of Native American origins coming from Japan has been attacked in a new scientific study, which shows that the genetics and skeletal biology “simply does not match-up”. The findings, published today in the peer-reviewed journal PaleoAmerica, are likely to have a major impact on how we understand Indigenous Americans’ arrival to the Western Hemisphere....
The high-profile disappearances of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa in England and Gabby Petito in the US have brought renewed attention to media bias in coverage of missing person cases. In 2019-2020, over 150,000 people were reported missing to police in England and Wales. Of those whose ethnicity was known, about 80% were white, and 14% were black. The rate of black...
In 2003, the Coca-Cola Foundation announced a $1 million donation to the American Association of Pediatric Dentistry, supposedly to “improve child dental health.” Shortly after receiving the gift, the children’s dental group changed its stance on sugary beverages, no longer calling them a “significant factor” in causing cavities, but instead saying the scientific evidence was...
The Covid-19 pandemic and its solution has only partially displaced other social and political concerns – and not persistently, despite the pandemic’s high and constant media presence. This is shown by an international team of researchers led by the economist Esther Blanco from the University of Innsbruck. The results were recently published in the journal...
