The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency use authorization for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, clearing the way for it to be the second vaccine distributed in the United States. The decision follows a vote on Thursday by an advisory committee to the FDA which found that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh its harms for people ages 18 years old and older. “With the availability of two vaccines now for the prevention of COVID-19, the FDA has taken another crucial step in the fight against this global pandemic that is causing vast numbers of hospitalizations and deaths in the United States each day,” said FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn,…

Jupiter and Saturn are due to converge in their orbits on Monday, appearing as a double planet in the night sky — the first such occurrence in almost 800 years. The two planets have been near one another throughout the year, according to Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan. They will reach their closest approach, passing within 0.1 degrees of each other during the winter solstice on December 21, the longest night of the year. The two celestial bodies pass one another about every 20 years, according to the Mount Wilson Observatory, in Los Angeles County, in what is referred to as a “great conjunction,” because they are the two largest…

Americans have spent much of the Covid-19 pandemic blaming one another for the coronavirus’s spread. Don’t go to that beach or park. Don’t go to that bar or restaurant. Don’t do anything for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Wear a mask! You don’t want to kill Grandma, do you? Public officials have joined in. Increasingly, they are blaming private gatherings, not the restaurants and bars they insist on keeping open, for the spread of the disease. In some places, such as the Dakotas, framing Covid-19 prevention as an individual responsibility became the core of the strategy to fight Covid-19. As cases and deaths climbed to among the highest rates in the world,…

Many of us dread being alone. We find isolation uncomfortable or downright scary. If you want to know just how eager we are to avoid it, consider a scientific study that offered people a choice between giving themselves electric shocks or being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. Believe it or not, many chose the electric shocks. But here’s the good news: Being alone is a skill. And, just like any other skill, you can get better at it with practice. I want to suggest that honing this skill now can help you get through this pandemic winter. Instead of dreading being alone, you can lean into it. Whether…

Fourteen thousand years ago, a star called Vela died. Its core collapsed first and then, in a violent burst, propelled the shattered star’s body out into space. Vela’s death bled into the interstellar medium, blasting cosmic radiation out in every direction. For 800 years, the guts of this star traveled from its location in the Milky Way galaxy toward Earth. It took several years for the cosmic rays to permeate our atmosphere and settle to the ground, where they were absorbed into trees, ocean coral, and lakes around the planet. Hundreds of years after that, in Tasmania, a dead tree was discovered, turned by time into a log and buried…

“I am seeing tons of hair loss,” Mona Gohara says. Patients come to Gohara, a dermatologist and professor at the Yale School of Medicine, for all kinds of reasons from skin cancer screenings to cosmetic procedures. But this year more than ever, they’re worried about their hair. It’s not a coincidence. Stress — like, say, that brought on by living through a deadly pandemic — is known to cause hair loss. Ordinarily, “90 percent of the hairs on our head are in the growing cycle; 10 percent are in the shedding cycle,” Gohara explained. “But when we’re subject to some type of physiologic or emotional stress, that cycle shifts to…

There are around 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild, and about 460 of them live in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. In the park’s very dense, high-altitude forest (hence the name “impenetrable”), veterinarian Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is working to keep them alive through the Covid-19 pandemic. No gorilla has come down with Covid-19, but Kalema-Zikusoka fears what might happen if one did. Gorillas live in tight-knit groups, so a respiratory infection could easily spread among them. Infected gorillas could get sick and die, or possibly suffer long-term consequences from the disease. Kalema-Zikusoka founded the nonprofit Conservation Through Public Health, where she works with the local community, and the park,…

Winter and the holidays can be hard even in typical years: short days, cold winds, and family stress, to name a few. But the ongoing US Covid-19 surge, with more than 200,000 new virus cases reported every day since December 7 (about double what they were a month before), is putting the hallmark activities that help sustain us — holiday gatherings, meals with friends, volunteering, or a visit to see Santa — in more dire limbo. Despite being more than nine months into the pandemic, figuring out whether and how to approach a previously routine event is still complicated. And the calculus seems to change with new case rates and…

As of mid-December, hospitals on average had just 22 percent of their intensive care unit (ICU) beds available across the country, and many were completely full. As the Covid-19 surge continues to intensify, lack of ICU beds can have dire consequences, including not being able to properly care for the sickest patients, potentially rationing lifesaving care. But even these bed capacity numbers don’t tell the whole story. Adding extra critical-care beds in other departments or buildings takes precious time, resources, and space. But adding trained staff is much more difficult, especially deep into a pandemic. When trained staff are in short supply, it’s even harder for hospitals to best meet…

Governors, mayors, and public health officials are sounding the alarm about rising levels of Covid-19 across every part of the country. The disease is surging, the death toll is soaring, and it’s clear that some states need more restrictive measures to control the spread. What continues to frustrate so many leaders is that nine months into this pandemic, science and data have painted a clear path for how to beat the virus and reduce transmission. But the disappointing and deadly truth is that in many cases, it’s difficult to get Americans to follow the rules. Boosted by a president who celebrates breaking rules and deliberately defies science and time-tested norms…