“Sometimes so many people are vaping in the bathrooms, it’s hard to do anything about it,” Ms. Dhiman said, adding that she doesn’t vape. The F.D.A.’s efforts to limit teenagers’ access to flavored vapes had little effect on Lizzie Burgess’s ability to get them over the last four years in the Indianapolis suburbs. Within weeks […]
The fortunes of our (unofficial) national bird fluctuated. Exclusive to North America, bald eagles made fierce, handsome symbols for a new country, yet as actual birds they were often despised as thieves. They can, in fact, be talented kleptoparasites, stealing fish from others, though scientists now consider this a sign of intelligence, not moral corruption. […]
As Rutkow observes at the beginning of his book, it is a “reasonable certainty that no one in the industrialized world will escape having an illness for which effective treatment requires a surgical operation.” I myself would probably be blind in at least one eye (from retinal detachments), walk with a limp (from a complex […]
Mr. Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer M. Granholm, said on Twitter that the United States had not detected elevated radiation readings in the area, echoing an earlier assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency. “The plant’s reactors are protected by robust containment structures and reactors are being safely shut down,” she said. Prime Minister Boris Johnson […]
OneWeb, a satellite internet company partly owned by the British government, has canceled an upcoming satellite launch using a Russian rocket and suspended all future launches that relied on Russia, the company announced on Thursday after a tense public standoff with Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. Also on Thursday, Roscosmos announced it would stop selling rocket […]
War and politics are complicating the efforts of the two biggest polluters in history — the United States and Europe — to slow down global warming, just as scientists warn of intensifying hazards. On Tuesday evening, President Biden barely made a mention of his climate goals in the State of the Union speech despite promises […]
Few of Covid-19’s peculiarities have piqued as much interest as anosmia, the abrupt loss of smell that has become a well-known hallmark of the disease. Covid patients lose this sense even without a stuffy nose; the loss can make food taste like cardboard and coffee smell noxious, occasionally persisting after other symptoms have resolved. Scientists […]
When insects molt, their exuviae contain chitin, a hard polymer that also makes up the shells of crustaceans like shrimp. Microbes, such as the bacteria Bacilli, help plants break down chitin into usable forms. And when insect exoskeletons decompose, they spur the growth of Bacilli and other microbes that are already in the soil. The […]
In much of the world, the task of collecting, sorting and recycling plastics often falls to informal waste pickers who work among fires and toxic vapors for little pay. In a landmark move, the agreement in Nairobi for the first time formally recognized the importance of waste pickers in the plastics economy. “We waste pickers […]
It was not clear if Mr. Abbott’s order would survive judicial scrutiny. The order does not change Texas law, and several county attorneys and district attorneys have said that they would not prosecute families for child abuse under the new definition. Still, the directive by Mr. Abbott has had a chilling effect, and the ramifications […]
