In a glitzy Shanghai shopping district, about 40 people who happened to be at a Uniqlo store were informed that they would be spending the night there. A suspected Covid case had been traced to the shop. Elsewhere in the same city, Anna Rudashko was told to return to an office building she had visited […]
An underwater mapping project recently took an unexpected twist off the coast of Tahiti, where deep sea explorers said this week that they had discovered a sprawling coral reef resembling a bed of roses that appeared to be largely unscathed by climate change. Extending for about three kilometers (1.86 miles), the reef is remarkably well […]
Deborah Nickerson, a human genomics researcher who helped discover genes responsible for cardiovascular disease, autism and Miller syndrome, a rare condition that causes malformations of the face and limbs, died on Dec. 24 at her home in Seattle. She was 67. Her brother, William Nickerson, who is her only immediate survivor, said the cause was […]
To capture prey, humpbacks, minkes and other whales use a tactic called lunge feeding. They accelerate — their mouths open to nearly 90 degrees — and engulf a volume of water large enough to fill their entire bodies. “It’s crazy. Imagine putting an entire human inside your mouth,” said Kelsey Gil, a zoologist studying whale […]
According to the surgical team, the pig kidneys started functioning and making urine after about 23 minutes and continued to do so for three days, though one kidney made more urine than the other. The patients’s own kidneys were removed, and there were no signs indicating rejection of the pig organs. Dr. Jayme Locke, the […]
Hindsight is a series from the Headway team looking back at predictions and promises from the past. Robert C. Seamans, the man President Gerald Ford had entrusted to deal with the energy crisis of the 1970s, didn’t think wind power had much of a future. In 1975, at the dedication of an experimental turbine in […]
Just a bit too late for New Year celebrations, astronomers have discovered that the Milky Way galaxy, our home, is, like champagne, full of bubbles. As it happens, our solar system is passing through the center of one of these bubbles. Fourteen million years ago, according to the astronomers, a firecracker chain of supernova explosions […]
Dr. Garfinkel said the results of the Fragile Families study “provide no support for the culture of poverty thesis,” which posits that different values and behaviors among the poor trap them in self-perpetuating cycles of privation. Rather, he said, “circumstances and opportunities,” not value differences, have the greatest impact. Though her findings rankled some advocates […]
Just after 1 p.m. on Tuesday last week, my phone buzzed with a text message from my mother: “Well, came down with cold, aches, cough etc over wknd.” She had taken an at-home coronavirus test. It was positive. Having spent the past year writing about Covid-19 vaccines and treatments for The New York Times, I […]
The mammoth, ethereally beautiful glaciers of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, near the North Pole, bear the scars of climate change more than almost anywhere else on the planet. Over the past three decades, Svalbard has warmed twice as quickly as the rest of the Arctic region and seven times the global average. That is […]
