Health Trotter

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July 30, 2021 at 05:30PM When school facilities closed for in-person learning in early March 2020 , the assumption was that the shutdown and pandemic would be temporary blips in the memory of our students. Some 16 months later, school facilities are finally preparing to re-open for in-person learning . We could go about business as usual, but after the devastation of the pandemic, and the increasingly widespread climate-change-linked weather disasters, it’s obvious we should not. Emerging from the crisis of COVID-19 gives us an opportunity to rethink our public schools, to simultaneously the structural inequalities that pervade the system, and prepare it for the climate emergency ahead. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Lawmakers have had difficulty grappling with the layering of immediate and longer-lasting crises. That’s where we think the Green New Deal for Public Schools , introduced to Congress by Representative Jamaal Bowman (NY) on July 16, comes in. Building on the

July 30, 2021 at 04:30PM The best way to appreciate the planet fully is to leave the planet entirely. To inhabit a world is to get awfully used to it. The sky is up there—big as ever. The ground is down there—solid as ever. The ocean is over that way. Canada is up the other way. There are happy places—Paris, Bora Bora. There are parts of the world—North Korea, Afghanistan—where people suffer tremendously. Our own place in all of that determines who we become. We’re like wine grapes; we have a terroir, a home soil that flavors us and changes us, and once we’ve become one thing it’s hard to become—or even understand—something else. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But for a tiny handful of us—fewer than 600 in all of human history—there’s been a way outside of all of that, and it’s by flying above all of that. Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, 60 years ago this April, astronauts have come home to describe what they call the Overview Effect: the ch

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July 29, 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 . As the U.S. approached a coronavirus peak last July, a noticeably eerie Disney World reopening advertisement began making the rounds online. Cases were rising, driven by a false sense of security in much of the country and bad faith arguments around masking and social distancing. But at Disney World, the sun was shining, and rides were open. Low-paid service workers waved while wearing surgical masks, apparently thrilled (or at least willing) to come in contact with crowds of tourists braving the pandemic for a spot on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Often, rather than reassuring us, such mass recreations of normalcy in the midst of a disaster can deepen our sense of unease, because they reveal an unsettling truth: the people who should take responsibility ei

By BY CARL ZIMMER, APOORVA MANDAVILLI, SHARON LAFRANIERE AND REBECCA ROBBINS from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3BJMLdQ

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July 28, 2021 at 01:40AM One of the greatest lessons of the pandemic is that we can meet the challenges of existential threats when we combine the collective power of our creativity, innovation and industry. As the climate crisis worsens, we need to address protecting and preserving water with the same urgency that we put into creating vaccines. We need to act like lives are hanging in the balance—because they are. Water is already shaping our politics, our economy and our national security too. Whether it’s floods or droughts, storms or wildfires—too much water, or too little—water shapes lives in the United States and around the world. We are currently seeing this play out in real time in the West, which in many ways is ground zero for climate change, as we see the intersection between mega-drought and fire season colliding with one another. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Back in 2012, the intelligence community prepared a report on global water security, forecasting

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July 26, 2021 at 05:30PM Visitors entering a code-locked central control room at Green Mountain Power (GMP)’s Colchester, Vt., headquarters instinctively lower their voices, whispering in deference to operators relaying orders from behind semicircular clusters of screens. It’s an intimidating space; one side of the black-walled room is taken up by a display showing a sprawling, yellow-lit maze of connections and symbols: a map of electricity flowing across the local grid. Technicians here have the daunting job of managing that vast, interconnected network; controlling hundreds of breaker switches; monitoring solar and hydroelectric electrical output; and anticipating energy demand spikes to keep Vermont’s lights on. When there’s an outage, these operators help coordinate the painstaking work of bringing the system back online. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “It’s basically like a puzzle,” says Jeff Lawrence, a seven-year control-room veteran. “When a storm comes through, t

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July 22, 2021 at 01:42AM When Annlyse Retiveau leaned in to sniff my armpits, I held my own breath as she inhaled. I’ve spent a vast majority of my life using products to avoid this precise critique—another human intentionally evaluating my armpit aroma. Yet, whether we like it or not, humans do smell each other, and we can glean useful social cues and health information from the body odor of others, albeit sometimes unconsciously. There’s nothing unconscious about Retiveau’s sniffing. As a professional nose at the New Jersey-based company Sensory Spectrum , she smells things for a living, to help companies assess the aromas in a new coffee brew, or to evaluate whether a deodorant successfully blocks body odor. She’s neither chagrined nor embarrassed, just professional, as she demonstrates exactly how far her nose must be from my armpit—6 inches—to properly assess my aroma, as well as the correct inhaling technique: short bunny sniffs to avoid sensory overload. And yes, “bunn