TimeMagazine

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted our lives in myriad ways, including the amount of time we spent glued to our devices. Research published in 2021 found that Americans in their early twenties used their phones an average of 28.5 hours per week in 2020—up from 25.9 hours per week in 2018. One review of studies conducted … Read more

It’s only been about six months since the Omicron variant emerged and changed the landscape of the pandemic, sending case-counts soaring and causing breakthrough infections even among those who were fully vaccinated and boosted. The virus continues to keep scientists guessing, mutating into subvariants almost as fast as researchers can assign them names. First there … Read more

Anti-vaccine sentiments have been simmering in the U.S. since at least 1998, when the Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, published—and later retracted—a fraudulent paper falsely linking childhood vaccines to autism. They’ve grown even stronger in the past two years, thanks to disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. Though the development of the COVID-19 vaccines happened at … Read more

Following through on a campaign promise, the Biden administration on Thursday announced a wide-ranging enforcement strategy aimed at holding industrial polluters accountable for damage done to poor and minority communities. The strategy includes creation of an Office of Environmental Justice within the Justice Department to focus on “fenceline communities” that have been exposed to air … Read more

(London) — The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 15 million people were killed either by coronavirus or by its impact on overwhelmed health systems in the past two years, more than double the official death toll of 6 million. Most of the fatalities were in Southeast Asia, Europe and the Americas. In a report … Read more

Since last autumn, doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Alabama have been wrestling with a mystery. From October 2021 through February of this year, nine children—the youngest 20 months old and the oldest 5 years and 9 months—were rushed to the hospital with concerning symptoms, all of which turned out to be due to unexplained … Read more

When Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine came down with a “blizzard” of allergy-like symptoms in March 2020, he blamed the layer of pollen coating his car. “It was Washington, D.C., in late March,” he says. I thought, “‘Okay, well, this is hay fever gone wild.’” Only when his wife, Anne Holton, developed “textbook” COVID-19 symptoms did … Read more

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving forward with plans to ban menthol cigarettes and all flavored cigars—policies that agency officials say could help prevent some of the roughly 500,000 U.S. deaths linked to tobacco each year. “The actions we are proposing can help significantly reduce youth initiation and increase the chances that … Read more

Grindr LLC, the dating app that specializes in connections for the LGBTQ+ community, is rolling out new benefits to support employees seeking gender affirmation surgery, joining other companies that are endeavoring to help employees receive care that is sometimes difficult to access. Under the new benefits, which have been in the works for about nine … Read more

They were the words everyone has been waiting to hear—that the COVID-19 pandemic is dialing down from the five-alarm fire that flared up in 2020 to a somewhat lesser conflagration. On April 27, the U.S.’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, described the country as in a “transitional phase, from a deceleration of the numbers … Read more