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...

October 06, 2021 at 04:41PM Two scientists, working independently of each other, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work into molecular construction and its impact on a range of uses from solar cells to battery storage. Benjamin List, from the Max-Planck-Institut in Germany, and David MacMillan, a professor at Princeton University, won the award for developing “an ingenious tool” for building molecules, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “Researchers can now more efficiently construct anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can capture light in solar cells,” the academy said. The two recipients will share the 10 million-krona ($1.1 million) award. BREAKING NEWS: The 2021 #NobelPrize in Chemistry has been awarded to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.” pic.twitter.com/SzTJ2Chtge — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2021 Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry...

October 06, 2021 at 03:21AM Almost a third of adult single men live with a parent. Single men are much more likely to be unemployed, financially fragile and to lack a college degree than those with a partner. They’re also likely to have lower median earnings; single men earned less in 2019 than in 1990, even adjusting for inflation. Single women, meanwhile, earn the same as they did 30 years ago, but those with partners have increased their earnings by 50%. These are the some of the findings of a new Pew Research analysis of 2019 data on the growing gap between American adults who live with a partner and those who do not. While the study is less about the effect of marriage and more about the effect that changing economic circumstances have had on marriage, it sheds light on some unexpected outcomes of shifts in the labor market. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Over the same time period that the fortunes of single people have fallen, the study shows, the proportion of Am...

October 06, 2021 at 01:07AM 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 . Anyone who has followed U.S. climate policy is familiar with the cycle of bold attempts to enact climate rules that eventually sputter, followed by years of inaction. President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax before backing away under industry pressure. President Barack Obama pursued cap-and-trade legislation before it stalled in Congress. Obama tried again using regulatory authority, but much of his moves were undone by a combination of the courts and the Trump administration. In short, every time the U.S. has tried to get its domestic house in order on climate in recent years, the world has instead been left waiting for the next opportunity: a new term, a new president or a new Congress. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Now, it’s President Joe Biden’s turn to go big. At the core of his c...

October 05, 2021 at 06:55PM ESG funds—investment funds that are supposed to include companies that score the highest marks in environmental, social and governance factors—have become increasingly popular as more people look to put their money where their environmental concerns are. When BlackRock debuted a new ESG-aligned fund in April, investors couldn’t get enough. They poured $1.25 billion into the U.S. Carbon Transition Readiness ETF (stock ticker LCTU) on its first day. No ESG fund, or any type of exchange-traded fund (ETF) for that matter, had ever received that much investment so quickly . But this wasn’t entirely a feel good story about investors betting on a more environmentally-sound future. BlackRock’s ETF included the pipeline company Kinder Morgan and oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It wasn’t all that unusual for an ESG. The story of LCTU and the companies within it is representative of both the immense popul...

October 05, 2021 at 05:56AM A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up to get a new edition from Susanna every Saturday. Recently, researchers reported that they’d found the oldest human footprints in North America. These fossilized tracks were made more than 21,000 years ago in what is now the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. It’s hard to comprehend that span of years and how many generations of humanity have come and gone since then. These were the slighted impressions on the earth—trace markings made by bare human feet pressing into the pliant mud of ancient lake. Yet they survived the Ice Age and everything since to represent people who left hardly any indications that they existed. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] I think about the mountain of documentation we each have of our lives in comparison to those ancient footprints. We’re sure we’ll leave acres of personal history when we go—thousands of photos on dozen...