Health Trotter

July 01, 2021 at 01:37AM For the past few days, a heatwave has glowered over the Pacific Northwest , forcing temperatures in the region to a record-breaking 118ºF. Few people in the region—neither Americans nor Canadians—have air-conditioning. Stores sold out of new AC units in hours as a panicked public sought a reasonable solution to the emergency. Unfortunately, air-conditioning is part of what’s causing the unusual heatwave in the first place. We came close to destroying all life on Earth during the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear annihilation. But we may have come even closer during the cooling war, when the rising number of Americans with air conditioners—and a refrigerant industry that fought regulation—nearly obliterated the ozone layer. We avoided that environmental catastrophe, but the fundamental problem of air conditioning has never really been resolved. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Mechanical cooling appeared in the early 1900s not for comfort but for

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June 30, 2021 at 10:47PM A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here . Portland General Electric (PGE) Vice President Larry Bekkedahl seemed remarkably cool considering the 110°F temperatures outside the window of his Portland office—and the unprecedented energy demand his system is facing. “We were at over 4,225 megawatts yesterday,” said the three-decade utility veteran, speaking on Monday afternoon. “As we speak right now we’re over 4,445 megawatts.” The Oregon-area utility’s previous electricity demand record came in 1998, when 4,078 megawatts of power coursed through its more than 27,000 miles of distribution wire. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] That unprecedented demand came as a result of unusual record-breaking heat, which baked the Pacific Northwest over the weekend and has continued into this week. As millions of residents blasted air conditioners in an

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June 26, 2021 at 12:07AM (CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Virgin Galactic finally has the federal government’s approval to start launching customers into space from New Mexico. Richard Branson’s rocketship company announced the Federal Aviation Administration’s updated license on Friday. It’s the final hurdle in Virgin Galactic’s yearslong effort to send paying passengers on short space hops. The company is working toward three more space test flights this summer and early fall, before opening the rocketship’s doors to paying customers. The original plans called for company engineers to launch next to evaluate equipment, followed by a flight with Branson and then a science mission by Italian Air Force officers. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In the meantime, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos earlier this month announced plans to ride his own rocket into space July 20 from Texas. Virgin Galactic officials acknowledged the growing chatter over whether Branson will try to beat Bezos into

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June 23, 2021 at 12:38AM (CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — How do astronauts do laundry in space? They don’t. They wear their underwear, gym clothes and everything else until they can’t take the filth and stink anymore, then junk them. NASA wants to change that — if not at the International Space Station, then the moon and Mars — and stop throwing away tons of dirty clothes every year, stuffing them in the trash to burn up in the atmosphere aboard discarded cargo ships. So it’s teamed up with Procter & Gamble Co. to figure out how best to clean astronauts’ clothes in space so they can be reused for months or even years, just like on Earth. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Cincinnati company announced Tuesday that it will send a pair of Tide detergent and stain removal experiments to the space station later this year and next, all part of the galactic battle against soiled and sweaty clothes. It’s no small problem, especially as the U.S. and other countries look to establis

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June 22, 2021 at 12:50AM (JOHANNESBURG) — The World Health Organization is in talks to create the first-ever technology transfer hub for coronavirus vaccines in South Africa, a move to boost supply to the continent that’s desperately in need of COVID-19 shots, the head of the U.N. agency announced. The new consortium will include drug makers Biovac and Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a network of universities and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. They will develop training facilities for other vaccine makers to make shots that use a genetic code of the spike protein, known as mRNA vaccines. “We are now in discussions with several companies that have indicated interest in providing their mRNA technology,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus at a virtual press briefing on Monday. That technology is used in the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Africa will soon be able to “take responsibility for the he

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June 18, 2021 at 03:26PM JIUQUAN, China — Three Chinese astronauts have begun making China’s new space station their home for the next three months, after their launch and arrival at the station Thursday marked further advances in the country’s ambitious space program. Their Shenzhou-12 craft connected with the station about six hours after taking off from the Jiuquan launch center on the edge of the Gobi Desert. About three hours later, commander Nie Haisheng, followed by Liu Boming and space rookie Tang Hongbo, opened the hatches and floated into the Tianhe-1, the core living segment of the station. Pictures showed them busy at work unpacking equipment and at one point turning to the camera to greet and salute audiences back on Earth. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “This represents the first time Chinese have entered their own space station,” state broadcaster CCTV said on its nightly news. China has now sent 14 astronauts into space since 2003, when it became only t

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June 18, 2021 at 02:06AM We’re not going to vaccinate our way completely out of this pandemic. With epidemiologists around the world increasingly accepting the reality that SARS-CoV-2 and its variants will become endemic viruses—like the seasonal flu—the push is on to develop antiviral medications that can be taken at home to prevent infections from leading to hospitalization and death. Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the Biden Administration has authorized $3.2 billion to accelerate the development of antivirals already in the R&D pipeline, with the hope that at least one will be ready for release before the end of the year. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “The remarkable and rapid development of vaccines and testing technology has shown how agile scientific discovery can be,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in an HHS statement. “We will leverage these same strengths as we construct a

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June 17, 2021 at 06:57PM A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here . For years, climate policy experts have watched as the issue has been pushed off the stage at global summits to make way for the geopolitical conflict dujour. That trend has long frustrated climate advocates who sought to make leaders understand that the scientific reality of climate change is just as urgent—if not more so—than other flavor-of-the-month topics. With this in mind, it was notable when many of these same climate advocates sharply criticized last week’s G7 leaders summit hosted by the United Kingdom for failing to adequately address another issue: the COVID-19 pandemic . In statement after statement, climate watchers homed in on what they often characterized as inadequate support from the world’s wealthy nations to address the pandemic in their poorer counterparts. Tasneem Essop, exec

June 17, 2021 at 09:07AM JIUQUAN, China — Under bright-blue morning skies, China launched its first crewed space mission in five years Thursday, sending three science-minded military pilots rocketing to a new orbiting station they’re expected to reach around midafternoon. The astronauts, already wearing their spacesuits, were seen off by space officials, other uniformed military personnel and a crowd of children waving flowers and flags and singing patriotic songs. The three gave final waves to a crowd of people waving flags, then entered the elevator to take them to the spaceship at the Jiuquan launch center in northwestern China. The astronauts are traveling in the Shenzhou-12 spaceship launched by a Long March-2F Y12 rocket that blasted off shortly after the target time of 9:22 a.m. (0122 GMT) with near-perfect visibility at the launch center on the edge of the Gobi Desert. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The two veteran astronauts and a newcomer making his first spac

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June 16, 2021 at 02:45AM A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up here to receive a new edition every Sunday. I’m a tech believer. My first job with TIME was to set up new communications systems and convince cranky foreign correspondents to trust them. Alexa and Google Home have colonized my apartment. And not only did I give my DNA to 23andMe , but I even answer their follow-up questions about whether I like olives or get carsick so they can map those genes. (Naturally, I also want to donate my body to research after I’m done with it–and if there were a way to send me a report in the afterlife about what they find, I’d request it.) [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] So you can imagine how very excited I was when Fitbit and other wearable health trackers, including Amazon’s Halo and the Apple Watch , started coming up with ways to show us data on our stress levels. There’s a bevy of new devices that monitor not just our he