Health Trotter

By BY GINA KOLATA from NYT Health https://ift.tt/2RVJvtB

By BY EMILY ANTHES from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3v2ZiVA

By BY RONI CARYN RABIN from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3szLikt

By BY ALINA TUGEND from NYT Health https://ift.tt/32xKJNs

April 21, 2021 at 04:30PM Forty years ago, as I was leaving my friend’s house to throw a baseball outside, his father stopped us for inspection. “Where are you going?” Peter’s father asked. “When will you be back?” And most pointedly: “Have you done your homework?” Peter had, but I had not. “I’ll get around to it,” I said. “Ah, well, here you go.” Peter’s father put a small round disk in my hand. I turned it over, and on the back printed in green was the word Tuit. “You said you’ll get around Tuit,” he laughed, every bit the corny dentist he was, “now here you go.” I still have my Tuit. It sits on my bookshelf, gathering questions. Did Peter’s father go to a woodworker to have these printed? Did he keep a bag in his car and refresh his pockets daily? Did anyone ever give it back? I wish there were more Tuits in the world, reminding us of what we have yet to do. We’d all have a few. All of us would have received a few when it comes to climate action . After all, when sci...

April 21, 2021 at 04:30PM However differently we register this pandemic we understand it as global; it brings home the fact that we are implicated in a shared world. The capacity of living human creatures to affect one another can be a matter of life or death. Because so many resources are not equitably shared, and so many have only a small or vanished share of the world, we cannot recognize the pandemic as global without facing those inequalities. Some people work for the common world, keep it going, but are not, for that reason, of it. They might lack property or papers, be sidelined by racism or even disdained as refuse—those who are poor, Black or brown, those with unpayable debts that preclude a sense of an open future. The shared world is not equally shared. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to “the part of those who have no part”—those for whom participation in the commons is not possible, never was, or no longer is. For it is not just resources and co...

By BY ALINA TUGEND from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3dBIUFJ

By BY PAM BELLUCK from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3tN26Ww

April 20, 2021 at 04:30PM The COVID-19 pandemic, like the climate crisis, is amplifying existing racial and gender injustices in our society. TIME editors Naina Bajekal and Elijah Wolfson moderated a conversation with two women working to create a more inclusive climate leadership space: American author, strategist and teacher Katharine Wilkinson , who co-founded and leads The All We Can Save Project to nurture a leaderful climate community; and queer Colombian activist Maria Alejandra Escalante, who is the climate and environmental justice advocacy officer at FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund, which supports young feminist organizers in the Global South. We know the pandemic has driven women out of the workforce , including out of academic research, in significant numbers. Do you have a sense of how this is playing out in terms of women’s leadership in the climate space — whether in your own life or from those in your network? Wilkinson : There’s been a lot of “behind ...

April 20, 2021 at 04:30PM In an earlier era, green referred to grass and trees and jealous eyes. But over the past half-century, green has taken on a life of its own. The Green movement deals with the collisions and contagions of the contemporary world—how to view them, and how to cure them. The book from which this essay is excerpted, The Spirit of Green , examines a wide array of social, economic and political questions from a Green vantage point. These questions include established areas such as pollution control and global warming . But they also involve new frontiers such as Green chemistry, taxes, ethics and finance. The example that follows concerns an approach to large corporations, or what is called social responsibility. One of the major developments in corporate management is corporate social responsibility , which is the projection of Green philosophy into the business world. The idea is that corporations are more than money­making machines that buy steel, ...

April 19, 2021 at 10:36PM American tailpipes have played an outsized role in global warming. In 2019, transportation accounted for 29% of the country’s human-generated emissions , the most of any sector tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency—and the U.S. is the world’s second-largest carbon emitter . The Biden Administration wants to clean up transportation’s dirty reputation, and make America the global leader in electric vehicle production in the process. At the moment, electric vehicles, or EVs, aren’t particularly common in the U.S. Only about 2% of vehicles sold in the U.S. last year were electric. “It looks like, somewhere around 5% of sales is where things really start to take off”—when EV’s transition from the novel to the ordinary—says Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at BloombergNEF. Experts say that smart government policy can nudge the consumer market towards that tipping point. Indeed, it’s already happened in other countries. In Norway, ...

By BY JASON DIAMOND from NYT Health https://ift.tt/2QeRKQW

April 19, 2021 at 06:25PM Mars is a lousy place to try to fly a helicopter. There’s the temperature, for one thing—a paralyzing -90º C (-130º F), frigid enough to cause nearly any machinery to freeze up and lock. There’s the remoteness too; Mars is currently 287 million km (178 million mi.) from Earth, meaning that radio signals, even moving at light speed, take nearly 16 minutes to travel just one way between the two worlds. And then there’s the tenuous Martian atmosphere—just 1% the density of Earth’s, making it awfully hard for rotating blades to get any bite at all. But flying a helicopter on Mars is precisely what NASA did today, when the little Ingenuity drone lifted off from the floor of Jezero Crater at 3:34 AM EDT (just after noon, Mars time), hovered at an altitude of 3 m (10 ft) for 40 seconds, and touched gently back down, kicking up a plume of rusty red dust. It was the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet, coming 118 years after the Wright Broth...

April 19, 2021 at 04:30PM 1171 Shoreham looks much like it did when Anna Zimmerman lived there: modest but presentable. A good starter home for Zimmerman and her husband when they bought it in 2005, for a while it provided an idyllic existence in suburban Charleston, S.C., a community of friendly neighbors for their young child, a quaint backyard and even space for Zimmerman’s mother-in-law. Then, in 2015, the first flood hit, taking most of their property with it after a heavy rain. This came as a shock; no flood risk had been disclosed when Zimmerman bought the house. But, determined to turn lemons into lemonade, she used the insurance money to fix it up just as she liked. “I would have been happy living in this house into retirement,” she says now, looking up at it from across the street. Then came Hurricane Irma in 2017. Water inundated the house, destroying virtually everything up to the waist. The insurance adjuster declared the home a total loss, and Zimmerman was ...

By BY APOORVA MANDAVILLI from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3n7SweJ

By BY APOORVA MANDAVILLI from NYT Health https://ift.tt/2QCbk9m

By BY KATIE THOMAS AND NOAH WEILAND from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3dnhMdr

April 17, 2021 at 04:30PM Last summer, I wrote a short story entitled Rat Island , set in a post-pandemic United States. In it, the rule of law and social order have broken down, with mobs roaming the streets of Los Angeles. A wealthy group of people stand on top of a skyscraper, waiting for the helicopter that will whisk them away, but the crowd storms the building, desperate to board. In the fall of 2020 my agent reported a surprising amount of interest from Hollywood in adapting my story for the screen—but this cooled off after the presidential election, when there appeared to be real danger of a coup, and came to a complete halt with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. We were told that fiction had come too close to our truly frightening reality . Creators have always pulled from history to explain the past as well as create apocalyptic visions of the future. But this moment seems particularly remarkable when you consider why so few creators have made shows a...

By BY GINA KOLATA from NYT Health https://ift.tt/3doswbq

By BY DENISE GRADY from NYT Health https://ift.tt/32sVPDn

April 16, 2021 at 11:38PM On Jan. 19, 2006, the Earth lost half a ton. More precisely, it lost 1,054 lbs (478 kg), but it’s O.K. to round down, since the 13 octillion-pound planet hardly noticed the missing weight. The flyweight fleck of matter was very much born of the planet, a collection of metal and silicon and copper and rubber and plastics and foil and a bit of plutonium hammered together into the New Horizons spacecraft. Launched atop an Atlas V rocket, New Horizons tore away from Earth at a blistering 58,500 k/h (36,400 mph), a record-breaking speed that seemed very much fitting, given that its destination was Pluto, 5.1 billion km (3.2 billion mi.) away. If you want to travel a distance like that, it’s best to make tracks. New Horizons reached Pluto on July 14, 2015, becoming the first spacecraft to barnstorm the dwarf planet. Less than four years later, on Jan. 1, 2019, it passed the peanut-shaped, 36-km long Kuiper Belt object known as Arrokoth , a rocky, icy ...