Julie Lee, Binghamton University, State University of New York
People eat for many reasons – pleasure, emotional release, boredom or to connect with others. And then there is eating during a pandemic. Whether you find yourself working from home, in quarantine or transitioning back to an office, chances are good that COVID-19 has impacted how you eat.
Natalie C. Tronson, University of Michigan
Of all frightening ways that the SARS-COV-2 virus affects the body, one of the more insidious is the effect of COVID-19 on the brain.
It is now clear that many patients suffering from COVID-19 exhibit neurological symptoms, from loss of smell, to delirium, to an increased risk of stroke. There are also longer-lasting consequences for the brain, including myalgic encephalomyelitis /chronic fatigue syndrome and Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Shawna Foo, Arizona State University
Coral reefs support over 25% of marine life by providing food, shelter and a place for fish and other organisms to reproduce and raise young. Today, ocean warming driven by climate change is stressing reefs worldwide.
Taison Bell, University of Virginia
“Hospital Capacity Crosses Tipping Point in U.S. Coronavirus Hot Spots” – Wall Street Journal
This is a headline I hoped to not see again after the number of coronavirus infections had finally started to decline in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. However, the pandemic has now shifted to the South and the West – with Arizona, Florida, California and Texas as hot spots.
The 2018 Camp Fire north of Sacramento burned everything in its path: cars, power lines, and buildings – and contaminated local drinking water.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Andrew J. Whelton, Purdue University and Caitlin R. Proctor, Purdue University
In recent years wildfires have entered urban areas, causing breathtaking destruction.
The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise and Butte County, California was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history. It took 86 lives and destroyed more than 18,000 structures in a matter of hours.
Almost two years later, only a fraction of the area’s 40,000-plus population has returned. This disaster followed the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people in California’s Sonoma and Napa counties.
After both fires, drinking water tests revealed a plethora of acutely toxic and carcinogenic pollutants. Water inside homes was not safe to use, or even to treat. Water pipes buried underground and inside of buildings were extensively contaminated.
Corinna Hawkes, City, University of London
COVID-19 has shown how damaging ill-health can be for the economy. But it has also shown how measures that benefit health (lockdowns) can be seen as bad economic prosperity. A similar paradox is at the heart of promoting better diets.
Gunnar W. Schade, Texas A&M University
If you’ve driven through an area where companies extract oil and gas from shale formations, you’ve probably seen flames dancing at the tops of vertical pipes. That’s flaring – the mostly uncontrolled practice of burning off a byproduct of oil and gas production. Over the past 10 years, the U.S. shale oil and gas boom has made this country one of the world’s top five flaring nations, just behind Russia, Iran and Iraq.
Briony Horgan, Purdue University and Melissa Rice, Western Washington University
This summer, NASA is taking the next giant leap in the search for signs of life beyond Earth.
On July 30, if the weather in Florida holds, NASA will launch its most sophisticated and ambitious spacecraft to Mars: the aptly named Perseverance rover. This will be the third launch to Mars this month, following the UAE’s Hope and China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft. Perseverance will look for signatures of ancient life preserved in Mars rocks. And, for the first time, this rover will collect rock samples that will be brought back to Earth, where they can be scrutinized in laboratories for decades to come.
Kathryn Moffett-Bradford, West Virginia University; Martin Weisse, West Virginia University, and Shipra Gupta, West Virginia University
We are three pediatric infectious disease specialists who live and work in West Virginia. The West Virginia University health system serves 400,000 children and according to our internal data, to date, 2,520 children up to 17 years of age have been tested for the coronavirus. Sixty-seven of them tested positive and one became sick enough to be admitted to the hospital.
Michael Fakhri, University of Oregon and Ntina Tzouvala, Australian National University
According to a new United Nations report, global rates of hunger and malnutrition are on the rise. The report estimates that in 2019, 690 million people – 8.9% of the world’s population – were undernourished. It predicts that this number will exceed 840 million by 2030.
