Citing new data, Pfizer outlined a case for booster shots, but there’s a debate over whether they’re needed.


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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering Michael Collins, Apollo 11’s Third—and Essential—Man

Image
April 29, 2021 at 12:26AM Few people think about the time Michael Collins didn’t go to the moon. Collins, who died of cancer on April 28 at age 90, is best remembered as Apollo 11’s command module pilot—in some ways the unluckiest man on the luckiest mission of all time. It was Apollo 11 that, in the summer of 1969, stuck the first crewed lunar landing, taking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface, while Collins, bless him, stayed aloft in the command module orbiting 60 miles above, keeping his uniform clean and white while his crewmates got dirty on the endless gray beach that is the moon. All three men got the credit, all three got the parades and the medals and the world tour and the TV appearances. But Armstrong and Aldrin were the two truly limned in the light of history. Collins? Well, said many, his was a yeoman’s job. It wasn’t, of course, but never mind. History had other plans for Collins, and in some ways he had already made his mark—a much subtle...
Read more

A Climate Change-Induced Landslide Is Wreaking Havoc on Denali National Park

Image
September 07, 2021 at 07:24PM For decades, the rangers at Denali National Park in Alaska were easily winning their battle against a slow-moving landslide underneath the park’s only road. Now, due in part to the effects of climate change, they are losing very badly. This summer, the National Parks Service has been frantically dropping 100 dump-trucks-worth of gravel every week on the top of the Pretty Rocks Landslide in an effort to keep up with its accelerating pace, which is the result of rapidly thawing permafrost in the country’s fastest-warming state . Two weeks ago, as the landslide hit unprecedented speed, causing the ground around it to undulate with each passing truck, the team conceded defeat and closed the back half of the park weeks earlier than anticipated. The closure is bad news both in the short term—with hundreds of camping and hotel reservations cancelled on a local economy that depends on tourism—and a scary omen for an entire state that rests on similarly t...
Read more

They’re Healthy. They’re Sustainable. So Why Don’t Humans Eat More Bugs?

Image
February 26, 2021 at 08:01PM Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian Ocean Islands . So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly. But the emails from Brian Fisher , an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein. ...
Read more