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Unvaccinated Covid patients push hospital systems past the brink

Unvaccinated Covid patients push hospital systems past the brink

Bloomberg reports: In a Kentucky hospital bed at the end of November, a Covid-19 patient from the state’s latest wave of infections lay alone behind the glass isolation wall. A high-flow oxygen mask pushed extra air into his damaged lungs. His heart beat fast, though he lay frail and still. His mouth opened and closed to take tiny gulps of air. It looked like he was suffocating. Kentucky’s Covid landscape is a lot like what’s happening in the rest of…

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Will we always need Covid-19 boosters? Experts have theories

Will we always need Covid-19 boosters? Experts have theories

STAT reports: With the world facing the latest in a seemingly endless stream of coronavirus variants — and with bullish talk from manufacturers about a need for even more vaccine shots — you wouldn’t be alone if you were wondering: Are Covid boosters always going to be a fixture in our future? The simple truth is that, at this point, there’s no definitive answer to that question. But virologists, immunologists, and vaccinologists have opinions that are anchored in an understanding…

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January 6 investigators mull whether Trump violated obstruction law

January 6 investigators mull whether Trump violated obstruction law

Politico reports: Members of the Jan. 6 select committee are homing in on a politically explosive question: Did Donald Trump’s actions amid the Capitol attack amount to criminal obstruction of Congress? Twice this week, committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has raised the possibility that Trump’s conduct while a mob of his supporters overtook the Capitol could qualify as an effort to obstruct the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Cheney described that as a “key” topic facing the panel,…

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How Meadows and a band of loyalists fought to keep Trump in power

How Meadows and a band of loyalists fought to keep Trump in power

The New York Times reports: Two days after Christmas last year, Richard P. Donoghue, a top Justice Department official in the waning days of the Trump administration, saw an unknown number appear on his phone. Mr. Donoghue had spent weeks fielding calls, emails and in-person requests from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, all of whom asked the Justice Department to declare, falsely, that the election was corrupt. The lame-duck president had surrounded himself with a crew of unscrupulous…

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Global warming can set the stage for deadly tornadoes

Global warming can set the stage for deadly tornadoes

Inside Climate News reports: Adding a grim exclamation point to a year of deadly climate extremes, the early December tornadoes that killed at least 90 people in the Southeast were some of the most intense storms on record so late in the year. The storms fired up in Arkansas the night of Dec. 10, during weather far too hot and humid for the season, and raced across Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee and Kentucky on Dec. 11. It will take weeks of…

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What the Amish can teach us about technology

What the Amish can teach us about technology

In 1999, Howard Rheingold wrote: Collective negotiations over the use of telephones have ignited intense controversies in the Amish community since the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, a dispute over the role of the phone was the principal issue behind the 1920s division of the Amish church, wherein one-fifth of the membership broke away to form their own church. Eventually, certain Amish communities accepted the telephone for its aid in summoning doctors and veterinarians, and in calling suppliers….

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2021 Arctic Report Card reveals a (human) story of cascading disruptions, extreme events and global connections

2021 Arctic Report Card reveals a (human) story of cascading disruptions, extreme events and global connections

Community members from Utqiagvik, Alaska, look to open water from the edge of shorefast sea ice. Matthew Druckenmiller By Matthew Druckenmiller, University of Colorado Boulder; Rick Thoman, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Twila Moon, University of Colorado Boulder The Arctic has long been portrayed as a distant end-of-the-Earth place, disconnected from everyday common experience. But as the planet rapidly warms, what happens in this icy region, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the globe, increasingly…

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Omicron has all the makings of a massive wave

Omicron has all the makings of a massive wave

David Wallace-Wells writes: For all their limitations, the models right now are flashing bright red. Over the course of the pandemic, again and again, projections based on simplistic extrapolations of current trends have missed the mark when the trajectories turned. Sometimes this has been for the good, with dire warnings looking excessive after waves peaked and declined well before a full penetration of the population; sometimes, unfortunately, the turn has been in the other direction. But right now we don’t…

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How border walls are triggering ecological disaster

How border walls are triggering ecological disaster

George Monbiot writes: This is the century in which humanitarian and environmental disasters converge. Climate breakdown has driven many millions from their homes, and is likely to evict hundreds of millions more. The famine harrowing Madagascar at the moment is the first to have been named by the UN as likely to have been caused by the climate emergency. It will not be the last. Great cities find themselves dangerously short of water as aquifers are drained. Air pollution kills…

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New York City’s gas ban takes fight against climate change to the kitchen

New York City’s gas ban takes fight against climate change to the kitchen

The New York Times reports: New York City is set to ban gas-powered stoves, space heaters and water boilers in all new buildings, a move that would significantly affect real estate development and construction in the nation’s largest city and could influence how cities around the world seek to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, which drives climate change. The City Council is expected on Wednesday to approve a bill banning gas hookups in new buildings — effectively requiring all-electric…

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Lies about the January 6 Capitol attack and its significance

Lies about the January 6 Capitol attack and its significance

Politifact reports: Shortly after 2 p.m. on Jan. 6, supporters of President Donald J. Trump breached the U.S. Capitol, turning the seat of American democracy into the scene of an unforgettable crime. Inside, lawmakers had been preparing to count the Electoral College votes that would bring Trump’s presidency to a close. Outside, the rioters erected a hanging gallows. They waved “Trump 2020,” “Blue Lives Matter” and Confederate flags. Some were armed. After marching down Pennsylvania Avenue at Trump’s urging, the…

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The military-intelligence veterans who helped lead Trump’s campaign of disinformation

The military-intelligence veterans who helped lead Trump’s campaign of disinformation

Reuters reports: During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service. Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field…

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Mating between groups spread across vast areas drove human evolution

Mating between groups spread across vast areas drove human evolution

Science News reports: Evidence that cross-continental Stone Age networking events powered human evolution ramped up in 2021. A long-standing argument that Homo sapiens originated in East Africa before moving elsewhere and replacing Eurasian Homo species such as Neandertals has come under increasing fire over the last decade. Research this year supported an alternative scenario in which H. sapiens evolved across vast geographic expanses, first within Africa and later outside it. The process would have worked as follows: Many Homo groups…

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Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier ice shelf could collapse within five years

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier ice shelf could collapse within five years

Science News reports: The demise of a West Antarctic glacier poses the world’s biggest threat to raise sea levels before 2100 — and an ice shelf that’s holding it back from the sea could collapse within three to five years, scientists reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans. Thwaites Glacier is “one of the largest, highest glaciers in Antarctica — it’s huge,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the Boulder, Colo.–based Cooperative Institute for Research…

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