NASA’s most prolific planet-hunter is powering down after nearly a decade of revealing the diversity of our galaxy’s planets.
The Kepler space telescope will be retired after running out of fuel nine years after its initial launch, the space agency announced Tuesday. But the innovative spacecraft enjoyed an illustrious career, discovering as many as 2,600 planets and inspiring…
Read moreAug. 20 was a good day in the pediatric intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital New Orleans. Carvase Perrilloux, a two-month-old baby who’d come in about a week earlier with respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19, was finally ready to breathe without the ventilator keeping his tiny body alive. “You did it!” nurses in PPE cooed as they removed the tube from his airwa…
Read moreYou can tell you’ve left the American segment of the International Space Station (ISS) and entered the Russian segment when the walls go from white to salmon-colored. It’s a singularly unlovely salmon, and if Russian designers had to do it over again perhaps they’d have picked up a different can of paint. Either way, the color had a meaning: the U.S. and Russia—old Cold …
Read moreThe FDA and CDC both approved the updated bivalent COVID-19 vaccines last week. The promise of the mRNA vaccine technology platform was always that we could update them quickly. We may finally have achieved an advantage over SARS-COV-2 as the updated vaccine recipe matches the current dominant circulating BA.5 strain (and slow growing BA.4.6 strain) without another more transmissible variant of…
Read moreLined up end-to-end, the disposable e-cigarettes sold and (presumably) trashed annually in the U.S. could stretch across the country and back again, according to a new report that highlights a growing problem: vape waste.
Disposable vapes typically have plastic bodies that are designed to be used until they’re empty and then tossed, as opposed to devices that can be refilled with ni…
Read moreThe U.S. led the world in quickly developing COVID-19 vaccines—one of the few bright spots in the country’s otherwise criticized response. But while injectable vaccines are effective in protecting people from getting sick with COVID-19, they are less able to block infection. In order to put the pandemic behind us, the world will need a way to stop infections and spread of the virus.…
Read morePresident Joe Biden’s medical adviser said a domestic travel vaccination rule should be considered as the omicron variant fuels record Covid-19 case loads in some states and holiday travel continues to be disrupted around the U.S.
Anthony Fauci said on MSNBC on Monday that it would be “reasonable to consider” a requirement to be vaccinated for coronavirus before getting …
Read more