Across the Northeast, forests are haunted by the ghosts of American giants. A little more than a century ago, these woods brimmed with American chestnuts—stately Goliaths that could grow as high as 130 feet tall and more than 10 feet wide. Nicknamed “the redwoods of the East,” some 4 billion American chestnuts dotted the United States’ eastern flank, stretching from the misty coasts of Maine down into the thick humidity of Appalachia.
Earlier this month, Taison Bell walked into the intensive-care unit at UVA Health and discovered that half of the patients under his care could no longer breathe on their own. All of them had been put on ventilators or high-flow oxygen.
In Linfa Wang’s ideal world, all humans would be just a bit more bat-like.Wang, a biochemist and zoonotic-disease expert at Duke-NUS Medical School, in Singapore, has no illusions about people flapping about the skies or echolocating to find the best burger in town. The point is “not to live like a bat,” Wang told me, but to take inspiration from their very weird physiology in order to boost the quality, or even the length, of human life.
In the early 1990s, while studying preeclampsia in Guadeloupe, Pierre-Yves Robillard hit upon a realization that seemed to shake the foundations of his field. Preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes some 500,000 fetal deaths and 70,000 maternal deaths around the world each year, had for decades been regarded as a condition most common among new mothers, whose bodies were mounting an inappropriate attack on a first baby.
As the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern Medicine, Catherine Spong is used to seeing a lot of baby bumps. But through her decades of practice, she’s been fascinated by a different kind of bump: Year after year after year, she and her colleagues deliver a deluge of babies from June through September, as much as a 10 percent increase in monthly rates over what they see from February through April. “We call it the summer surge,” Spong told me.
Paul Offit is not an anti-vaxxer. His résumé alone would tell you that: A pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine for infants that has been credited with saving “hundreds of lives every day”; he is the author of roughly a dozen books on immunization that repeatedly debunk anti-vaccine claims. And from the earliest days of COVID-19 vaccines, he’s stressed the importance of getting the shots.
Back in the spring, around the end of the COVID-19 public-health emergency, hospitals around the country underwent a change in dress code. The masks that staff had been wearing at work for more than three years vanished, in some places overnight.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.For years, the American approach to protein has been a never-ending quest for more. On average, each person in the United States puts away roughly 300 pounds of meat a year; we are responsible for more than a third of the multibillion-dollar protein-supplement market.
Anoles have always been happy in the heat. The svelte little lizards, a group some 400 species strong, thrive in the Americas’ warmest parts—from the balmy rainforests of South America up through the United States’ Sun Belt—where they spend their days basking on boulders and scurrying out to the sun-soaked tips of twigs, or even scampering over the blistering metal of exposed city pipes.
For more than a year, life for many sriracha lovers has been an excruciating lesson in bland. Shortages of red jalapeños—the key ingredient in the famous hot sauce—have gotten bleak, in particular for the ultra-popular version of the condiment made by Huy Fong Foods. Grocery stores have enforced buying limits on customers. Bottles on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon are selling for eye-watering prices—as much as $50 or more.
As recently as the 1990s, Jodi Stookey, a nutrition consultant based in California, remembers hydration research being a very lonely field. The health chatter was all about fat and carbs; children routinely subsisted on a single pouch of Capri Sun a day. Even athletes were discouraged from sipping on fields and race tracks, lest the excess liquid slow them down.
Since the pandemic’s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter peak, then a summer on sabbatical.
In the three-plus decades I’ve been alive, I have never been bitten by a tick. Actually, that may be a lie, and I have no way of knowing for sure. Because even though ticks have harpoonlike mouthparts, even though certain species can latch on for up to two weeks, even though some guzzle enough blood to swell 100 times in weight, their bites are disturbingly discreet.
Late last night, New Yorkers were served a public-health recommendation with a huge helping of déjà vu: “If you are an older adult or have heart or breathing problems and need to be outside,” city officials said in a statement, “wear a high-quality mask (e.g. N95 or KN95).”It was, in one sense, very familiar advice—and also very much not. This time, the threat isn’t viral, or infectious at all.
In March 2020, Yamagata’s trail went cold.The pathogen, one of the four main groups of flu viruses targeted by seasonal vaccines, had spent the first part of the year flitting across the Northern Hemisphere, as it typically did. As the seasons turned, scientists were preparing, as they typically did, for the virus to make its annual trek across the equator and seed new outbreaks in the globe’s southern half.That migration never came to pass.
Updated at 2:45 p.m. on March 21, 2023
Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue.
Updated at 1:40 a.m. ET on March 17, 2023For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab.
In the spring of 1986, in their rush to flee the radioactive plume and booming fire that burned after the Chernobyl power plant exploded, many people left behind their dogs. Most of those former pets died as radiation ripped through the region and emergency workers culled the animals they feared would ferry toxic atoms about. Some, though, survived. Those dogs trekked into the camps of liquidators to beg for scraps; they nosed into empty buildings and found safe places to sleep.
In the early days of the pandemic, one of the scariest and most surprising features of SARS-CoV-2 was its stealth. Initially assumed to transmit only from people who were actively sick—as its predecessor SARS-CoV did—the new coronavirus turned out to be a silent spreader, also spewing from the airways of people who were feeling just fine.
For the past few weeks, my daily existence has been scored by the melodies of late winter: the drip of melting ice, the soft rustling of freshly sprouted leaves—and, of course, the nonstop racket of sneezes and coughs.The lobby of my apartment building is alive with the sounds of sniffles and throats being cleared. Every time I walk down the street, I’m treated to the sight of watery eyes and red noses.
In one very specific and mostly benign way, it’s starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2020: Disinfection is back.“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.
Eleven years ago, on the remote Japanese island of Kojima, a female macaque walked backwards into a stray heap of primate poop, glanced down at her foot, and completely flipped her lid.
For all the legwork that public-health experts have done over the past few years to quash comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu, there sure seems to be a lot of effort nowadays to equate the two. In an advisory meeting convened earlier today, the FDA signaled its intention to start doling out COVID vaccines just like flu shots: once a year in autumn, for just about everyone, ad infinitum.
Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, has not shaken a hand in several years. The last time he did so, it was only “because I knew I was going to go to the bathroom right afterwards,” he told me. “I think it’s a really bad practice.” From where he’s standing, probably a safe distance away, our palms and fingers are just not sanitary. “They’re wet; they’re warm; they’re what we use to touch everything we touch,” he said.
In the two-plus years that COVID vaccines have been available in America, the basic recipe has changed just once. The virus, meanwhile, has belched out five variants concerning enough to earn their own Greek-letter names, followed by a menagerie of weirdly monikered Omicron subvariants, each seeming to spread faster than the last. Vaccines, which take months to reformulate, just can’t keep up with a virus that seems to reinvent itself by the week.
After months and months of SARS-CoV-2 subvariant soup, one ingredient has emerged in the United States with a flavor pungent enough to overwhelm the rest: XBB.1.5, an Omicron offshoot that now accounts for an estimated 75 percent of cases in the Northeast. A crafty dodger of antibodies that is able to grip extra tightly onto the surface of our cells, XBB.1.5 is now officially the country’s fastest-spreading coronavirus subvariant.
Roughly a century ago, a new fad diet began to sweep the United States. Hollywood starlets such as Ethel Barrymore supposedly swore by it; the citrus industry hopped on board. All a figure-conscious girl had to do was eat a lot of grapefruit for a week, or two, or three.The Grapefruit Diet, like pretty much all other fad diets, is mostly bunk.
Glass frogs do not live a life of modesty. With their semitransparent skin—green on the back, clear on the belly—the tree-dwelling, gummy-bear-size amphibians, which are native to the tropics of Central and South America, have little choice but to put their organs on display. Gaze up at certain species from below, and you’ll be treated to an aquarium of innards: a beating heart, a matrix of bones, the shimmering silhouette of the gut.
Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, a niche subset of experimental vaccines has offered the world a tantalizing promise: a sustained slowdown in the spread of disease. Formulated to spritz protection into the body via the nose or the mouth—the same portals of entry most accessible to the virus itself—mucosal vaccines could head SARS-CoV-2 off at the pass, stamping out infection to a degree that their injectable counterparts might never hope to achieve.
In her two decades as a genital morphologist, Patricia Brennan has looked at a lot of animal clitorises. She’s seen female lizards’ two spike-studded protrusions, which are almost identical to their counterparts on males. She’s glimpsed the prominent appendage through which female spotted hyenas urinate and give birth. She’s even studied the thin-skinned, nerve-laced organ of a female dolphin, which Brennan’s work suggests makes sex pleasurable.