Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
A new video rings in the rover’s ninth year on Mars, letting viewers tour Curiosity’s location on a Martian mountain.
Sanjay Mishra, PhD, Vanderbilt University
If you’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, maybe you figured you no longer need to worry about contracting the coronavirus. But along with the rising number of new COVID-19 cases globally and growing concern about highly transmissible strains like the delta variant come reports of fully vaccinated people testing positive for COVID-19.
William G. Bain, University of Pittsburgh; Georgios D. Kitsios, University of Pittsburgh, and Tomeka L. Suber, University of Pittsburgh
A year ago, when U.S. health authorities issued their first warning that COVID-19 would cause severe “disruption to everyday life,” doctors had no effective treatments to offer beyond supportive care.
There is still no quick cure, but thanks to an unprecedented global research effort, several treatments are helping patients survive COVID-19 and stay out of the hospital altogether.
With the delta variant making up over 93% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. at the end of July 2021, questions arise about how to stay protected against evolving forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here, pediatrician and infectious disease specialist Dr. Lilly Cheng Immergluck of Morehouse School of Medicine answers some common questions about variants and what you can do to best protect yourself.
Viruses mutate over time to adapt to their environment and improve their survival. Over the course of the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, has mutated enough to change both its ability to spread through the population and its ability to infect people.
U.S. National Institutes of Health
Mathew Barlow, University of Massachusetts Lowell
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The world watched in July 2021 as extreme rainfall became floods that washed away centuries-old homes in Europe, triggered landslides in Asia and inundated subways in China. More than 900 people died in the destruction. In North America, the West was battling fires amid an intense drought that is affecting water and power supplies.
A new online visualization tool will enable anyone to see what sea levels will look like anywhere in the world in the decades to come.
NASA’s Sea Level Change Team has created a sea level projection tool that makes extensive data on future sea level rise from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) easily accessible to the public – and to everyone with a stake in planning for the changes to come.
Michael Paul Nelson, Oregon State University and Peter Mark Groffman, CUNY Graduate Center
Record-breaking heat waves and drought have left West Coast rivers lethally hot for salmon, literally cooked millions of mussels and clams in their shells and left forests primed to burn. The extraordinary severity of 2021’s heat and drought, and its fires and floods, has many people questioning whether climate change, fueled by human actions, is progressing even faster than studies have predicted and what that means for the future.
Marc Zimmer, Connecticut College
Watson and Crick, Schrödinger and Einstein all made theoretical breakthroughs that have changed the world’s understanding of science.
Today big, game-changing ideas are less common. New and improved techniques are the driving force behind modern scientific research and discoveries. They allow scientists – including chemists like me – to do our experiments faster than before, and they shine light on areas of science hidden from our predecessors.
Stephen P. Leatherman, Florida International University
Here’s a handy geography question for your next trivia match: What is the world’s only sea that doesn’t have a land border?
The answer is the Sargasso Sea – a 2-million-square-nautical-mile haven of biodiversity that lies east of Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean. Rather than beaches, it’s bounded by rotating ocean currents that form the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre.
