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Category: Health

Whether slow or fast, here’s how your metabolism influences how many calories you burn each day

Whether slow or fast, here’s how your metabolism influences how many calories you burn each day

Why does it seem like some people can eat anything and not gain a pound while others are the opposite? Heide Benser/The Image Bank via Getty Images Terezie Tolar-Peterson, Mississippi State University It’s a common dieter’s lament: “Ugh, my metabolism is so slow, I’m never going to lose any weight.” When people talk about a fast or slow metabolism, what they’re really getting at is how many calories their body burns as they go about their day. The idea is…

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U.S. confirms first case of the new Covid strain discovered in UK

U.S. confirms first case of the new Covid strain discovered in UK

CNBC reports: The first case of a new and potentially more infectious strain of Covid-19 has been confirmed in the United States, Colorado health officials said Tuesday. Colorado health officials confirmed the case and notified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The infected individual is in isolation in Elbert County, about an hour and a half south of Denver. Officials said the man, who is in his 20s, does not have a travel history. “There is a lot we…

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Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

Operation Warp Speed at a crawl: Adequately vaccinating Americans will take 10 years at current pace

NBC News reports: The Trump administration’s Covid-19 vaccine distribution program needs a major shot in the arm because at the current rate, it would take almost 10 years to inoculate enough Americans to get the pandemic under control, a jarring new NBC News analysis showed Tuesday. The goal of Operation Warp Speed, a private-public partnership led by Vice President Mike Pence to produce and deliver safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines to the public, is to ensure that 80 percent of…

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‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

‘Toxic individualism’: Pandemic politics driving health care workers from small towns

NPR reports: The virus infecting thousands of Americans a day is also attacking the country’s social fabric. The coronavirus has exposed a weakness in many rural communities, where divisive pandemic politics are alienating some of their most critical residents — health care workers. A wave of departing medical professionals would leave gaping holes in the rural health care system, and small-town economies, triggering a death spiral in some of these areas that may be hard to stop. Ten years ago,…

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L.A. was uniquely vulnerable to this Covid catastrophe. Here is what went wrong

L.A. was uniquely vulnerable to this Covid catastrophe. Here is what went wrong

The Los Angeles Times reports: Los Angeles is careening toward catastrophe. An explosion of COVID-19 patients has begun to flood hospitals and may soon force doctors to ration care. The number of available beds in intensive care units is rapidly dropping to zero, as healthcare providers plead with people not to come to emergency rooms unless it’s a matter of life or death. “Ambulances are circling hospitals for hours trying to find one that has a bed open so they…

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Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

Russia admits to world’s third-worst Covid-19 death toll

AFP reports: Russia said on Monday that its coronavirus death toll was more than three times higher than it had previously reported, making it the country with the third-largest number of fatalities. For months, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has boasted about Russia’s low fatality rate from the virus, saying earlier this month that it had done a better job at managing the pandemic than western countries. But since early in the pandemic, some Russian experts have said the government…

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Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

Chinese citizen-journalist sentenced to 4 years for Covid reporting

The New York Times reports: A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a citizen journalist who documented the early days of the coronavirus outbreak to four years in prison, sending a stark warning to those challenging the government’s official narrative of the pandemic. Zhang Zhan, the 37-year-old citizen journalist, was the first known person to face trial for chronicling China’s outbreak. Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai in February, at the height of…

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Texas fracking billionaires drew Covid-19 aid while investing in rivals

Texas fracking billionaires drew Covid-19 aid while investing in rivals

The Wall Street Journal reports: As the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices walloped U.S. frackers this spring, Texas billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks got a $35 million relief loan to help one of their fracking companies stay afloat. At the same time, they were on a buying spree in the country’s oil patch. Since spring, businesses controlled by the Wilks brothers have hunted for deals among fracking firms going through bankruptcy and taken or increased stakes in at least…

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A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

A ‘great cultural depression’ looms for legions of unemployed performers

The New York Times reports: In the top echelons of classical music, the violinist Jennifer Koh is by any measure a star. With a dazzling technique, she has ridden a career that any aspiring Juilliard grad would dream about — appearing with leading orchestras, recording new works, and performing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. Now, nine months into a contagion that has halted most public gatherings and decimated the performing arts, Ms. Koh, who watched a year’s…

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The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

The mysterious link between Covid-19 and sleep

James Hamblin writes: The newly discovered coronavirus had killed only a few dozen people when Feixiong Cheng started looking for a treatment. He knew time was of the essence: Cheng, a data analyst at the Cleveland Clinic, had seen similar coronaviruses tear through China and Saudi Arabia before, sickening thousands and shaking the global economy. So, in January, his lab used artificial intelligence to search for hidden clues in the structure of the virus to predict how it invaded human…

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The U.K. coronavirus mutation is worrying but not terrifying

The U.K. coronavirus mutation is worrying but not terrifying

Sara Reardon writes: A new mutated form of the novel coronavirus that appears more transmissible than the original has raised alarm in the U.K. and around the world. It does not appear to cause more severe disease, and the newly available vaccines do seem to protect people against it. Yet on December 19—after an announcement that the variant, dubbed B.1.1.7, had suddenly accumulated 17 mutations and was spreading rapidly in the U.K.—the nation’s prime minister Boris Johnson announced stricter lockdowns…

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Could Covid-19 have wiped out the Neandertals?

Could Covid-19 have wiped out the Neandertals?

John Hewitt writes: Everybody loves Neandertals, those big-brained brutes we supposedly outcompeted and ultimately replaced using our sharp tongues and quick, delicate minds. But did we really, though? Is it mathematically possible that we could yet be them, and they us? By the same token, could not the impossibly singular Mitochondrial Eve, her contemporary Y-chromosome Adam, and even the “Out of Africa” hypothesis simply be convenient fictions paleogeneticists tell each other at conferences to give their largely arbitrary haplotype designations…

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Herd immunity may be further away than most Americans realize

Herd immunity may be further away than most Americans realize

Donald G. McNeil Jr. reports: At what point does a country achieve herd immunity? What portion of the population must acquire resistance to the coronavirus, either through infection or vaccination, in order for the disease to fade away and life to return to normal? Since the start of the pandemic, the figure that many epidemiologists have offered has been 60 to 70 percent. That range is still cited by the World Health Organization and is often repeated during discussions of…

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Millions of U.S. vaccine doses sit on ice, putting 2020 goal in doubt

Millions of U.S. vaccine doses sit on ice, putting 2020 goal in doubt

Reuters reports: Millions of COVID-19 vaccines are sitting unused in U.S. hospitals and elsewhere a week into the massive inoculation campaign, putting the government’s target for 20 million vaccinations this month in doubt. As of Wednesday morning, only 1 million shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had been given, about one-third of the first shipment sent last week. Over 9.5 million doses of vaccines, including Moderna’s, have now been sent to states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control…

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Covid-19 vaccines are safe. But let’s be clear about what ‘safe’ means

Covid-19 vaccines are safe. But let’s be clear about what ‘safe’ means

STAT reports: Unprecedented collaborative efforts in vaccine development have culminated in multiple vaccines being tested in advanced clinical trials all in less than one year since global leaders understood we were in the midst of a global pandemic. One is now being given to health care workers, and another will soon follow. As the first Covid-19 vaccines are being distributed in the United States and in other countries around the world, the main question now on many minds is, “Are…

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Hang on for three more months before holding family gatherings

Hang on for three more months before holding family gatherings

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Hunkering down to wait out the coronavirus isn’t easy. The costs of isolation are steep. Quarantine fatigue is real. The chance to gather with extended family and friends this holiday season is particularly alluring to those of us battling loneliness. Ritual is the bedrock of human society, and forsaking it feels even more destabilizing in a year that has already thrown us all off-kilter. Even so, I have a simple suggestion for anyone contemplating a large gathering…

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