Health Trotter

August 04, 2021 at 05:30PM On Sept. 15, if all goes according to plan, Jared Isaacman—the billionaire CEO of Shift4 Payments — and three other private citizens will strap into a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft—all four seats paid for by Isaacman—and blast off for orbit on the mission dubbed Inspiration4 . Three days later they will return to Earth. Unlike most of the rest of us, they will have spent time off of the planet. But will that earn them the label of “astronaut?” Time was, it was easy to recognize an astronaut. They were all test pilots, they wore silvery space suits and signature buzz cuts and they had perfect fly-boy names like Deke and Gus and Al and Gordo. That they were all white males was often overlooked in the fawning media coverage of the time, but that changed, happily if belatedly, as women and people of color joined the corps in later years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Now things are changing again—fast. With the opening of the private space sec...

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 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...

June 15, 2021 at 05:30PM The COVID-19 pandemic is increasingly becoming an arms race among the emerging variants of the virus, and at the moment, there’s no question which one is winning: the Delta variant—formally known as B.1.617.2—one of four strains to have emerged originally in India. It was just last month that the World Health Organization labeled Delta a “variant of concern”—joining with the Alpha strain, which emerged in the U.K.; the Beta strain, from South Africa; and the Gamma strain, first seen in Brazil. But Delta is fast becoming the most worrisome of the bunch. Health officials are sounding the alarm that Delta threatens to reverse the progress made in countries, like the U.S. and U.K., that have lately been beating the pandemic into retreat and worsen conditions in countries, like India, that are still deep in crisis. Researchers have found that Delta is at least 60% more transmissible within households than the Alpha strain, the dominant variant in the U.S....