Health Trotter

October 07, 2021 at 11:30PM The rule for most Mars missions, or at least those looking for signs of life? Follow the water. Choose a place that was once wet—and Mars’s now-dry riverbeds, sea basins and ocean floors offer plenty of those—and do your spelunking there. With limited missions and a multitude of promising sites, however, the trick is to choose just the right landing zone. Now, a new paper in Science suggests that when it comes to NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February, mission planners chose right indeed. Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater, a 45 km (28 mile) wide depression in Isidis Planitia, which is itself a 1,200 km (750 mi) plain in the northern Martian hemisphere. About 3.7 billion years ago, Jezero Crater was Jezero Lake—a standing body of water up to 2,500 m (1.5 mi.) deep. Pictures taken from orbit by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a fan-shaped formation along the crater’s western rim, which was once a broad...

October 07, 2021 at 03:30PM On Oct. 6, the World Health Organization recommended use of the first vaccine to fight malaria . The decision is momentous and highly anticipated for many reasons: among them is that this is the first vaccine to help reduce the risk of deadly severe malaria in young children in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease remains a leading killer. The vaccine offers hope that there can be a circle of learning from one pandemic to the next. Malaria, our oldest pandemic, may offer insights on how we can survive contemporary scourges like COVID-19. Malaria evolved at least 2.5 million years ago and first infected humans in rural parts of Africa. It then spread to all continents save Antarctica—notably, killing off armies ranging from those trying to conquer ancient Rome to those battling to control the Pacific in World War II. Malaria, according to historians, may have killed more people than any other pandemic. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Malaria cha...

October 07, 2021 at 06:52AM <strong>You’ve just got to be calm, and tell stories and try and get people to change from within.</strong> A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up to get a new edition from Susanna Schrobsdorff every Saturday. —Dr. Jane Goodall Facts never did change hearts. But until the era of alternative Facebook-style facts, it was a bit easier to pretend that we humans were logical creatures. Our inability to ingest inconvenient truths is not news to Dr. Jane Goodall , the legendary naturalist. She has spent decades persuading us to change the way we treat animals and the planet, and she does it by talking about her experiences, not with terrifying U.N. climate reports. “If one wants to change attitudes, you have to reach the heart. You can reach the heart by telling stories, not by arguing with people’s intellects,” she says on her new podcast, or as she calls it, her “ Hopecast ,” and this week...