While All Eyes Were on Covid, HIV Researchers Were Making Progress on “The Holy Grail of Vaccines”
Mother Jones illustration; Boston Public Library/Unsplash Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Support our nonprofit reporting. Subscribe to our print magazine.It’s been an unprecedented two years for science, to put it mildly. We’ve seen a new virus spread across the world, entire cities go on lockdown, a devastating 6 million deaths…
The Nightmare Politics and Sticky Science of Hacking the Climate
Getty Images This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. One way to fight climate change may be to…do more climate change. “Geoengineering” is a broad term encompassing distinct techniques for hacking the climate, split into two main groups: There’s carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which could mean sucking carbon…
A Plane of Monkeys, a Pandemic, and a Botched Deal: Inside the Science Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of
Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Support our nonprofit reporting. Subscribe to our print magazine.On May 15, 2020, a US-bound cargo plane was scheduled to depart Mauritius, an island about the size of Maui that’s just east of Madagascar. There were four key things I knew about the flight: It…
We’re Running Out of Money to Track Covid Variants. An Expert Explains Why That Would Be Very Bad.
Mother Jones illustration; Getty Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Support our nonprofit reporting. Subscribe to our print magazine.The United States is at risk of running out of money to fight Covid. Without additional funds from Congress, the White House warned last month, the country will see immediate consequences. Additional, free booster…
Hero: Fernanda the Tortoise, Whose Species Everyone Thought Was Extinct
Mother Jones illustration; Magdalena Kula Manchee/Unsplash Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.As usual, the staff of Mother Jones is rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Find all of 2021’s heroes and monsters here. There is, quite possibly, no organism as…
The Mother of All Vaccines May Be Closer Than You Think
Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.In early 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to unfold, infectious disease researchers Matt Memoli and Luca Giurgea were already thinking about how the crisis might end. The two, both at the Laboratory of Infectious…