But state laws are a piecemeal approach, and workers’ protections or benefits largely depend on what employers will give. Ifeoma Ajunwa, an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says employers operate as their own private governments, with free rein over how they run their business. Covid exposed “the […]

In the end, she chose not to jump and let him hit her until she was bloody, she says. “Ultimately, I decided that I was the person who stayed in imperfect situations to try and fix them.” The next day, she wore a long sleeve shirt to cover up the bruises and prepared an excuse […]

“That’s true,” he said. “I believe it’s very good that they are checking, since we know the truth and we know that the list never existed and is not related to NSO.” The reports focused largely on the successful hacking of 37 smartphones of business leaders, journalists, and human rights activists. But they also pointed […]

“This is a really exciting result,” says Edward Cackett, an astronomer at Wayne State University who was not involved with the study. “Although we have seen the signature of x-ray echoes before, until now it has not been possible to separate out the echo that comes from behind the black hole and gets bent around […]

On Tuesday, July 27, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that vaccinated individuals wear masks in public indoor spaces in communities where covid cases are spiking. Along with the new policy, the CDC recommends that children in grades K–12 attend school in person while continuing to wear masks inside.  Why is the CDC making this switch?   The announcement comes on the heels of rising infections […]

That’s far above normal levels for this part of the year and comes on top of the surge of emissions from the massive fires across the American West in 2020. California fires alone produced more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide last year, which was already enough to more than cancel out the broader […]

In March 2020, when the WHO declared a pandemic, the public sequence database GISAID held 524 covid sequences. Over the next month scientists uploaded 6,000 more. By the end of May, the total was over 35,000. (In contrast, global scientists added 40,000 flu sequences to GISAID in all of 2019.) “Without a name, forget about […]

[Baric is referring to a 2015 collaboration with Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China, which created a so-called chimera by combining the “spike” gene from a new bat virus with the backbone of a second virus. The spike gene determines how well a virus attaches to human cells. A […]

NASA’s InSight robotic lander has just given us our first look deep inside a planet other than Earth.  More than two years after its launch, seismic data that InSight collected has given researchers hints into how Mars was formed, how it has evolved over 4.6 billion years, and how it differs from Earth. A set of three new studies, published in Science this week, suggests that Mars has a […]

“More than 600,000 people have been told to isolate by the NHS covid-19 app across the week of July 8 in England and Wales,” she says, “but that’s only a little more than double the number of new positive cases in the same period. While we had concerns about the justification for the contact tracing […]