In 2017, an evolutionary biologist named R. Alexander Pyron ignited controversy with a Washington Post commentary titled “We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.” He wrote: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.” Pyron’s take challenged the decades-old idea that biodiversity is a good thing — that humans should strive to preserve all forms of life on Earth and their interconnectedness across ecosystems. It prompted scientist and writer Carl Safina to mount a passionate defense of biodiversity, calling Pyron’s stance “conceptually confused” and containing “jarring assertions.”…

Michael Miranda had been fully vaccinated for over four months when he tested positive for the coronavirus. “I stared at my phone for a few moments, wondering if this was a death sentence,” said Miranda, who works as a probation officer in Hawaii. After flying home from a trip to the West Coast, Miranda had experienced chills, sneezes, and a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit. “I immediately began blaming all the unmasked people,” he said. Daniele Selby, a writer in New York City, grappled with similar feelings when she started to experience exhaustion, significant congestion, headaches, and a loss of smell and taste. “I was pretty shocked to learn I’d…

There’s a cliché that has popped up for years in discussions of climate and weather disasters: You can’t blame any individual event on climate change. Climate is all about trends and statistics, the reasoning goes, so you can’t necessarily draw meaningful conclusions from a single data point, be it a heat wave, a hurricane, or a drought. But in recent years, climate scientists have been pushing back against this notion: Bolstered with better data and even clearer trends, they’re no longer reluctant to point the finger back at humanity for worsening these calamities. In the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a team of leading researchers…

There’s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We’ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus — make it less deadly — not eliminate it entirely. Click Here: This is not a surrender to the virus. For a long time, we’ve lived with the seasonal flu, a family of viruses that kills up to tens of thousands of Americans each year. While we can and should take steps to mitigate the risks of the flu (including getting vaccinated for it every year), we’ve never been willing…

Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” she wrote. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body and mind. Even weekly therapy has not been enough to dilute the horrors I carry with me from this past year and a half.” The nurse, Sara, who asked to be identified by her first name so she could speak freely about her experiences at work, told Vox that she’s been offered incredible bonuses in…

Vera Rubin didn’t “discover” dark matter, but she put it on the map. Dark matter is a wild concept. It’s the idea that some mind-boggling percentage of all the matter in the universe may be invisible, and wholly unlike the matter that makes up Earth. Rubin is celebrated because she forced much of the astronomy community to take it seriously. That reckoning moment came in 1985, when she stood in front of the International Astronomical Union and walked the audience through some of the data she had collected. Her data showed that stars at the edges of multiple galaxies were moving in ways that didn’t make sense, according to the…

Every several years — sometimes just once a decade — when the rains come in just the right amounts and at just the right times, rare flowers speckle the Mojave Desert in California. Some, like the Barstow woolly sunflower, emerge from plants no larger than a thumbnail. They spring forth from seeds that have persisted in the dry soil for years, waiting for just such a sporadic event. In these brief “super-blooms,” the desert floor looks “like a carpet of wildflowers unfurled across the landscape,” said Karen Tanner, a researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz. The quick flash of flora helps replenish the seeds for future generations. At other…

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed, and with it, so has the effectiveness of the vaccines. The bottom line remains the same: The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that are most prevalent in the US are still quite effective in preventing any illness from the novel coronavirus, and extremely effective in preventing the kind of severe illness that leads to hospitalization and death. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed those basic facts with its most robust data yet. But the statistics that were widely publicized when those vaccines were first approved in December — the ones that showed vaccines were 95 percent effective in preventing all…

Nearly nine months after the first Americans received their shots, the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration for people 16 and older on Monday. This could help increase the number of people willing to get vaccines and make it easier to compel those who are less willing — if health officials can cut through the mounting confusion around their efficacy, booster shots, and the threat of the delta variant. Covid-19 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer/BioNTech, and Moderna have thus far been distributed across the US under emergency use authorizations. This form of limited approval allows the FDA to fast-track the distribution of…

Since Covid-19 patients started showing up at clinics and hospitals a year and a half ago, doctors and researchers have been hard at work trying to figure out how to treat them. Most drugs and treatments haven’t panned out, producing either no results or small ones in large-scale clinical trials. Many of the few that work are expensive and difficult to administer. Hydroxychloroquine, enthusiastically endorsed by President Trump last year, has been shown to have no measurable benefits. New drugs like monoclonal antibodies — proteins meant to imitate the immune system’s response to the disease — have been approved by regulators but must be administered by a doctor through an…