UK’s Third Wave of COVID-19 Pushes Health System Into Crisis

Dr Rachel Clarke never dreamed that in her medical career, she would say out loud that hospitals in Britain are running out of oxygen. Yet some hospitals in the U.K. are now in that critical situation, as doctors say the U.K.’s third wave of the coronavirus pandemic is pushing the country’s National Health Service to its limits. “We’re seeing younger patients, we’r…

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Cities Have Firefighters and Trash Collectors. As the Climate Breaks Down, Do They Also Need Resilience Corps-

When Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans in early September, Tonya Freeman-Brown made the difficult decision to stay in the city. The 53 year-old and her family sheltered in an old brick hotel in the downtown area, watching fierce winds of up to 150 mph pelt rainwater at the windows, and remembering the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, 16 years earlier to the day. It was stressful, but Freem…

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Uber’s Flying-Car Plan Will Have a Hard Time Getting Off the Ground

If you ever find yourself at the San Jose airport hailing a cab to take you into San Francisco, prepare for your own little bit of hell. The ride will take about an hour and 40 minutes—assuming average traffic—and set you back $110 or more (not including tip). The good news is that Uber plans to fix that—slashing the time to 15 minutes and the cost to $20. The wrinkle is that …

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Rising Seas Will Create a Huge Property Tax Headache

People are becoming increasingly worried about how they’ll be impacted when rising seas swallow up coastal properties. For starters, there are the homeowners who live on the threatened land. And then there are the mortgage lenders and home insurers who have a financial stake in those properties. But indirectly, anyone who relies on public education, fire departments, and other municipal s…

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How We Know Mars Once Had More Water Than Ever Imagined

There’s a very good reason NASA planners chose Mars’s Gale Crater as the landing site for the Curiosity Rover when it touched down on the Red Planet in the summer of 2012. Gale Crater was once Gale Lake, a brimming body of water that could have given rise to microbial life in the first billion years of Martian history, before the planet lost most of its atmosphere and water to space…

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TikTok Is Treating Ozempic Side Effects

Every day dozens of people come to Jennifer Witherspoon—a former dental office manager with zero medical training—for help managing nausea, headaches, and other side effects that can come with taking weight-loss shots. She even crafted a template response to help her quickly get through the messages.

“People have offered to pay me, begged me to start a podcast, asked me to call the…

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Can Cruises Become Climate Change Friendly-

To future archeologists, mega cruise ships might be some of the strangest artifacts of our civilization—these goliaths of mass-engineered delight, armed with dangling water slides and phalanxes of umbrellas. Looking up at one, you might gain the impression that cruise companies are trying to awe their customers into having a nice time. We have built battleships of pleasure, toiling the wo…

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Testosterone Treatments Aren’t Linked to Heart Risks

Advertisements for treatments for “low T,” or low testosterone levels in middle-aged and older men, have led to spikes in demand. But the safety and legitimacy of those testosterone therapies hasn’t been clear.

In a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting, researchers provide the mo…

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Moderna Booster May Wane After 6 Months

Moderna reported today the first data on how well its currently authorized vaccine and booster hold up against the Omicron variant, which quickly dominated new infections around the world after health experts first described the variant last November. The company also announced that it is starting to study its Omicron-specific vaccine.

In a correspondence published in the New England …

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Why the Respiratory Disease RSV Is Having an Off-Season Surge

Dr. James Antoon, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, often goes an entire summer without diagnosing a single case of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The common illness, which typically results in mild, cold-like symptoms but can be severe in infants and elderly adults, usually goes along with the winter flu season.

But this summer, RSV cases a…

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