Hurricane Laura made landfall at 1 am ET Thursday in Cameron, Louisiana, as a fierce Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds. It has since downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, with wind speeds of 75 mph, and is moving north. But perhaps the most dangerous part of the storm may be the storm surge that still threatens coastal areas. Storm surge, or coastal flooding, tends to be the deadliest aspect of hurricanes. It results from the storm’s winds pushing water onshore several feet above the normal tide, and it can trap people in their homes, wash away houses, and make rescue missions harrowing and slow. Rising sea levels linked…

A couple of months ago, President Donald Trump said he told federal officials to “slow the testing down, please.” Now the Trump administration is taking a step that would, in effect, slow down testing. On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its testing guidelines to no longer recommend people get tested even when they’ve come into close contact with someone who’s infected. The previous guidelines stated, “Testing is recommended for all close contacts of persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Because of the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, it is important that contacts of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection be quickly identified and tested.” The updated guidelines claim,…

Before Hurricane Laura made landfall in the United States, it had already proved to be a deadly storm in three Caribbean countries, bringing torrential downpours, flooding, power outages, and other damage that killed over 20 people and has made life dangerous for millions more. As a tropical storm, Laura pummeled the Dominican Republic last weekend with heavy rains and winds, impacting the capital Santo Domingo and the rest of the nation’s 11 million people. According to the country’s United Nations office, a total of nine people died due to the conditions that also damaged around 2,000 homes and left about 700,000 without power and around 1.5 million people without access…

To get the US pandemic under control, a growing number of health and medical experts are making a clarion call for an additional testing approach to Covid-19. What we need, they argue, are at-home rapid tests that look for antigens, proteins the live virus makes. These kits would allow anyone to test themselves for the coronavirus any time (and anywhere) for between $1 and $5, and get results in about 15 minutes. No doctors, labs, expensive machines, or special chemicals required. “I see these [antigen] tests as a solution that’s literally sitting in front of us,” says Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,…

Tropical Storm Laura, which has been downgraded from a hurricane, made landfall early Thursday morning in Cameron, Louisiana — just 35 miles east of the Texas-Louisiana border — as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds. Already, pictures and videos of the storm from Lake Charles, Louisiana, a town about 50 miles north of Cameron, show torn-off roofs, downed power lines, blown-out windows, and dozens of trees ripped from the ground. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said he’d received a report Thursday morning of the first American fatality from Laura, a 14-year-old girl from Vernon Parish who died when a tree fell on her home. Edwards later said a…

As America, and even his own administration, woke up to the threat of Covid-19, President Donald Trump still didn’t seem to get it. Within weeks of suggesting that people social distance in mid-March, the president went on national TV to argue that the US could reopen by Easter Sunday in April. “You’ll have packed churches all over our country,” Trump said in March. “I think it’ll be a beautiful time.” The US wasn’t able to fully and safely reopen in April. It isn’t able to fully and safely reopen in September. The virus rages on, affecting every aspect of American life, from the economy to education to entertainment. More than…

At first, Lauren Nichols tried to explain away her symptoms. In early March, the healthy 32-year-old felt an intense burning sensation, like acid reflux, when she breathed. Embarrassed, she didn’t initially seek medical care. When her shortness of breath kept getting worse, her doctor tested her for Covid-19. Her results came back positive. But for Nichols, that was just the beginning. Over the next eight weeks, she developed wide and varied symptoms, including extreme and chronic fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, tremors, headaches, difficulty concentrating, and short-term memory loss. “The guidelines that were provided by the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] were not appropriately capturing the symptoms that I was…

Decades of research paint a clear picture: The No. 1 environmental health risk in the US is soot. Also known as particulate pollution, it is made up of extremely small particles spewed into the air by power generation, industrial processes, and cars and trucks. There are “coarse particles,” between 2.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter, and “fine particles,” at 2.5 micrometers and smaller. By way of comparison, the average human hair has a diameter of about 70 micrometers. Research has consistently found that inhaling these particles is incredibly harmful to human physiology, at high concentrations over short periods or low concentrations over extended periods. Particulate pollution is linked to increased…

Several states are now seeing a surge in new Covid-19 coronavirus infections and hospitalizations. And the states with more alarming outbreaks — Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee — generally saw few cases early in the pandemic. Many of these states have started to relax the restrictions on movement, businesses, and public gatherings that were meant to control the spread of Covid-19. But with infections rising, there will be more illnesses, deaths, and financial hardships for people who have already suffered immensely from this pandemic. If cases continue to rise and threaten to overwhelm the health system, officials may be faced with a daunting prospect:…

The search for life in our solar system got a lot more exciting this week. On Monday, a team of scientists announced its members had detected phosphine gas in the caustic, hot atmosphere of Venus. So what? The gas — which you’d recognize by its fishy odor — is thought to be a byproduct of life. “We did exhaustively search through all known chemistry … and we didn’t find anything that could produce more than the tiniest amount of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere,” says MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager, who was one of the co-authors on the discovery published in Nature Astronomy, says. That leaves us two possibilities: The gas…