About 2 percent of new cars on US roads right now run on electricity. The auto industry expects that by 2030, half of new car sales will be electric. And President Joe Biden is stepping on the gas pedal to make that happen. Among the many provisions of the White House’s $2 trillion infrastructure and…
New data disproves a big concern about Covid-19 lockdowns
Last year, as then-President Donald Trump railed against Covid-19 lockdowns and called on states to reopen their economies, he claimed the shutdowns would lead to a spike in suicides: “You’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You’re going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides…
Where billions of cicadas will emerge this spring (and over the next decade), in one map
For 17 years, cicadas do very little. They hang out in the ground, sucking sugar out of tree roots. Then, following this absurdly long hibernation, they emerge from the ground, sprout wings, make a ton of noise, have sex, and die within a few weeks. Their orphan progeny will then return to the ground and…
Why you can’t compare Covid-19 vaccines
In the US, the first two available Covid-19 vaccines were those from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. Both vaccines have very high “efficacy rates” of around 95 percent. But the third vaccine introduced in the US, from Johnson & Johnson, has a much lower efficacy rate: just 66 percent. Look at those numbers next to each other,…
How to make this winter not totally suck, according to psychologists
This winter is brutal. The cold weather has made it hard to socialize outdoors, coronavirus variants are spreading, and the US is about to surpass half a million Covid-19 deaths. Many of us are feeling anxious about how we’re going to make it through the lonely, bleak weeks ahead. I see a lot of people…
What it’s like to die from Covid-19
We’ve reached half a million deaths from the coronavirus in the US. But most of these deaths — and the grueling medical ordeals leading up to them — have remained largely hidden from view. The majority of terminally ill Covid-19 patients typically spend their last days or weeks isolated in ICUs to keep the virus…
The Texan dream of going it alone was never real
The power was still out in my Dallas housing complex early last Tuesday, so I grabbed the survival hatchet from my emergency bag to chop up a couple of fallen trees, which were covered with six inches of down-soft snow dropped by Winter Storm Uri. The trees broke easily, and after 30 minutes of hacking,…
The scientist who’s been right about Covid-19 vaccines predicts what’s next
When Hilda Bastian and I first caught up over Skype to talk about Covid-19 vaccines last autumn, she showed me the boxes and unfinished rooms in her new home in Victoria, Australia. She’d been so busy tracking the global vaccine effort, she hadn’t had time to settle in. Bastian — an expert in analyzing clinical…
Why Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot Covid-19 vaccine is a game changer
One big reason to be excited about the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine for Covid-19, which was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration over the weekend for emergency use in the US: Unlike the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines already in use, it requires only one shot for full protection. That’s a big deal. From…
The vaccine race against the coronavirus variants, explained
The world is now locked in an arms race with Covid-19, as multiple effective vaccines are being deployed (at staggeringly different rates) around the world. At the same time, new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been rapidly spreading. The Covid-19 vaccines that are being distributed in the US, as well as the newly authorized…