The New York Times: The pandemic has laid bare gender inequities across the country, and women in academia have not been spared. The outbreak erupted during universities’ spring terms, hastily forcing classes online and researchers out of their laboratories. (Read more.)
Undark: Sometimes overlooked, vaccine messages — from brochures in doctor’s offices to Instagram posts — are as vital to a vaccine campaign as the vaccine itself, some experts say. But results have been mixed, and fundamental debates remain over the best messaging strategies. (Read more.)
The New York Times: Every time an astronaut puts on an American spacesuit to conduct a spacewalk at the International Space Station, they pass through a portal installed in part by Janet Kavandi. It isn’t the only thing the former astronaut did that changed the work of her successors in space. (Read more.)
Scientific American: On a recent weeknight, biochemist and postdoctoral researcher Emilia Arturo read to her two children, tucked them into bed, then slipped into her car and drove 15 minutes to the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, arriving just after 10 P.M. In the lab, Arturo prepared grids of viral proteins to better visualize a particular pathogen — a type of arenavirus — and discover how to neutralize it. (Read more.)
National Geographic: You walk toward the arena, ready for a big game, tickets in hand. But what you see is a long line wrapping around the corner of the building and a bottleneck at the entrance as people search their pockets and purses for a small piece of paper. To be cleared to enter, you’ll also need that document — proof that you’ve received a COVID-19 vaccination. (Read more.)
Elemental: Robert Carnahan woke up at 5 a.m. to no fewer than 20 voicemails. Each message was more frantic than the last, but they all repeated the same thing: Carnahan, associate director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, had to hop on the phone — right now! — and track down the donor who had given their blood last night for the center’s coronavirus antibody research. (Read more.)
Elle: For Melissa, a 29-year-old resident of Tampa, happy hours look much different now: They’re more frequent, start earlier, and she’s often alone. While she rarely drank at home without company before the coronavirus pandemic, now she reasons that “desperate times call for desperate measures.” (Read more.)
Elemental: Along a winding roadway festooned with lanky longleaf pines, a sign welcomes you to Meadville, Mississippi, population 519. “Oh, we’re bigger than that,” says Cynthia Ann Wilkinson, a Mississippi State Extension agent, to the journalist who mentioned the sign in passing. (Read more.)
National Geographic: Insurgents swarmed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to create chaos and defy legislators who had gathered to certify electoral votes. The presidential election, they say, was stolen—a belief encouraged by a powerful and trusted leader. (Read more.)
EatingWell: When chef Ben Bebenroth first laid eyes on what is now his farm, it was anything but pleasing to the eye: The land was overgrown with thicket, fallen logs and towering grass. It had succumbed to disarray when its owner could no longer care for the property. But past the disorder, the Cleveland-based chef saw what others couldn’t: A trash-strewn barn that could host dinners, quiet fields that would buzz with beehives, and empty plots ready to be planted with rare chestnut trees. (Read more.)
Food & Wine: The best decisions are obviously made after a couple drinks. Case in point: my husband and I had seen no fewer than 23 New York City apartments in a seven-day period and our last showing — a 304-square-footer without a closet or an oven, perched on the fifth floor of a walkup building in the West Village — had left us desperately in need of a drink. We hunkered down at a bar and, as he sipped on bourbon and I gulped red wine, discussed our options. Ultimately, we called our broker and jubilantly slurred: we’ll take the tiny one! (Read more.)
Travel + Leisure: Picture a mountaintop so dark you can just make out the outline of your partner’s body, but not his face; so dark you stumble, embarrassingly, on its rocky surface — a place illuminated only by keychain-sized flashlights with red light bulbs so small they’d fit on your pinky nail. That’s how dark it is at Mount John Observatory, an astronomical research observatory in New Zealand’s Aoaki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve — one of only four such dark sky reserves in the world and one of the premier spots on Earth to explore the stars. (Read more.)
Press Register: In September 2007, Kieu Ngoc Phan gave birth to the last of her four children. In January 2008, she lost them all. Their father, Lam Luong, sits in a cell at Mobile County Metro Jail as police and prosecutors build their case against him. They say Luong has admitted to throwing the children off the side of the Dauphin Island bridge. Phan once clung tightly to her young children’s hands. Now, she holds onto these memories. (Read more.)
National Geographic: Jason McLellan was wandering around a ski shop of Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort, waiting for his new snowboarding boots to be heat-molded to his size-nine feet, when his smartphone rang. It was Barney Graham, deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center. (Read more.)
Travel + Leisure: We board the vessel Atika Putri, a lanky wooden boat painted bright turquoise to match the sea, with two stiff benches and a hole in the ground where a toilet should be — an indignity its six passengers are willing to endure for the three-and-a-half-hour ride through choppy waters to Komodo National Park, where real-life dinosaurs (OK, dragons) still live. (Read more.)
Cleveland Magazine: As I sit wedged in the passenger’s seat of Brandon Chrostowski’s cluttered black Audi sedan, a French baguette stashed between our seats, the world-traveled chef and restaurateur asks me about the South. You know, what it’s like, because he’s never been there. (Read more.)
National Geographic: As COVID-19 cases surge across the U.S., officials are facing increasing pressure to dole out vaccine doses as quickly as possible. (Read more.)
The New York Times: Winter is a 4-year-old chocolate-colored llama with spindly legs, ever-so-slightly askew ears and envy-inducing eyelashes. Some scientists hope she might be an important figure in the fight against the novel coronavirus. (Read more.)