Why vaccinated people are getting ‘breakthrough’ infections

Why vaccinated people are getting ‘breakthrough’ infections

The New York Times reports: A wedding in Oklahoma leads to 15 vaccinated guests becoming infected with the coronavirus. Raucous Fourth of July celebrations disperse the virus from Provincetown, Mass., to dozens of places across the country, sometimes carried by fully vaccinated celebrants. As the Delta variant surges across the nation, reports of infections in vaccinated people have become increasingly frequent — including, most recently, among at least six Texas Democrats, a White House aide and an aide to Speaker…

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Climate-driven changes in clouds are likely to amplify global warming

Climate-driven changes in clouds are likely to amplify global warming

Inside Climate News reports: Scientists know that global warming is changing clouds, but they haven’t been sure whether those changes would heat or cool the planet overall. It’s an important question, because clouds have been the main source of uncertainty in projecting just how sensitive the climate is to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, and because clouds have a huge effect on the climate system. Just a 20 percent change in their extent or reflectivity would have more of an impact…

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Startup claims breakthrough in long-duration batteries

Startup claims breakthrough in long-duration batteries

The Wall Street Journal reports: A four-year-old startup says it has built an inexpensive battery that can discharge power for days using one of the most common elements on Earth: iron. Form Energy Inc.’s batteries are far too heavy for electric cars. But it says they will be capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing. The work…

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Biden’s obsession with scoring a bipartisan deal suddenly looks quite doable

Biden’s obsession with scoring a bipartisan deal suddenly looks quite doable

Politico reports: President Joe Biden may finally be nearing the bipartisan win he’s long yearned for but that some in his party say is politically unnecessary and may ultimately prove fleeting. Despite a failed vote on Wednesday to advance the roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal, White House negotiators have been working aggressively to settle disagreements with GOP senators. The White House supported Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s move to force that vote, viewing it as necessary for kicking negotiations…

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Coexisting with the coronavirus

Coexisting with the coronavirus

Katherine S. Xue writes: In the spring of 1846, a Dutch physician named Peter Ludwig Panum arrived on the Faroe Islands, a volcanic chain about two hundred miles northwest of Scotland. He found the Faroes to be a harsh and unforgiving place. The islands’ eight thousand inhabitants, who were Danish subjects at that time, spent their days outdoors, buffeted by sea winds, fishing and tending sheep. The conditions, Panum wrote, were unlikely “to prolong the lives of the inhabitants.” And…

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New York air quality among worst in world as haze from Western wildfires shrouds city

New York air quality among worst in world as haze from Western wildfires shrouds city

The Guardian reports: New York City air quality was among the worst in the world as cities across the eastern US were shrouded in smoke from wildfires raging several thousand miles away on the country’s west coast. State officials in New York advised vulnerable people, such as those with asthma and heart disease, to avoid strenuous outdoor activity as air pollution soared to eclipse Lima in Peru and Kolkata in India to be ranked as the worst in the world…

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The Northern Hemisphere has a punishing heat wave infestation

The Northern Hemisphere has a punishing heat wave infestation

The Washington Post reports: As viewed on a weather map of the globe, no fewer than five powerful heat domes are swelling over the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere. These zones of high pressure in the atmosphere, intensified by climate change, are generating unforgiving blasts of heat in North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously. The heat domes, in a number of instances, are the source of record high temperatures and are contributing to swarms of wildfires in western North America…

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Personal threats, election lies and punishing new laws rattle election officials, raising fears of a mass exodus

Personal threats, election lies and punishing new laws rattle election officials, raising fears of a mass exodus

CNN reports: Maribeth Witzel-Behl had run elections in Madison, Wisconsin, for 15 years when the 2020 election arrived, bringing challenges like no other: a global pandemic, a crushing workload, lawsuits and a recount. Then the threats started. Wisconsin rules require the initials of the municipal clerk to appear on absentee ballots, but during a recount last November, people noticed her initials and seized on them as a sign that some kind of mischief must have occurred. An online discussion thread…

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Facebook and YouTube’s vaccine misinformation problem is simpler than it seems

Facebook and YouTube’s vaccine misinformation problem is simpler than it seems

Will Oremus writes: On Friday, President Biden said Facebook is “killing people” by spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines. On Monday, he changed his tune. “Facebook isn’t killing people,” he amended, instead blaming a handful of disinformation merchants who use the platform. Whether Facebook is or isn’t killing people depends on your definitions. What’s clear, regardless, is that Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms have played a major role in the anti-vaccine movement. And they continue to do so,…

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China’s prisons and detention camps now have the capacity to lock up one million Muslims

China’s prisons and detention camps now have the capacity to lock up one million Muslims

BuzzFeed News reports: For the first time, BuzzFeed News can reveal the full capacity of China’s previously secret network of prisons and detention camps in Xinjiang: enough space to detain more than 1 million people. BuzzFeed News calculated the floor areas of 347 compounds bearing the hallmarks of prisons and internment camps in the region and compared them to China’s own prison and detention construction standards, which lay out how much space is needed for each person detained or imprisoned….

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It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things

It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things

Peter Wohlleben writes: In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants). I was happy to say yes. The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this. It upends our view of the living world, putting plants…

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India’s true pandemic death toll likely to be well over 3 million, new study finds

India’s true pandemic death toll likely to be well over 3 million, new study finds

The New York Times reports: The number of people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic in India so far is likely to exceed three million — nearly 10 times the official Covid-19 death toll — making it one of the worst human tragedies in the nation’s history, according to a new study. In a comprehensive examination of the true toll of the pandemic in the sprawling nation of 1.4 billion, the Center for Global Development, a Washington research institute,…

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Ivermectin Covid-19 scandal shows how vulnerable science is to fraud

Ivermectin Covid-19 scandal shows how vulnerable science is to fraud

James Heathers and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz write: Most scientists assume they will never come across a single case of fraud in their careers, and so even the thought of checking calculations in reviewable papers, re-running analyses, or checking if experimental protocols were properly deployed is deemed unnecessary. Worse, the accompanying raw data and analytical code often needed to forensically analyze a paper are not routinely published, and performing this kind of stringent review is often considered to be a hostile act,…

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Is it time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

Is it time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, writes: Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by…

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