What Happens If a ‘Big One’ Strikes During the Pandemic?
Hundreds of preexisting plans deal with individual natural-disaster scenarios. But these plans haven’t accounted for COVID-19 happening at the same time.
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Life Up Close
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Melanie Lambrick The Rich Meals That Keep Wild Animals on the Menu
Samoa’s population of “little dodos” is dwindling down to nothing, but the appetites of wealthy people keep putting these rare birds at risk.
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Ye Aung Thu /AFP / Getty How Bats Might Have Tamed the Coronavirus
The animals have a remarkable resilience to all sorts of diseases that afflict humans.
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The Atlantic There’s One Big Reason the U.S. Economy Can’t Reopen
The country faces the same problem today that it did two months ago: There are not enough tests to contain the virus.
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Shutterstock / The Atlantic A Much-Hyped COVID-19 Drug Is Almost Identical to a Black-Market Cat Cure
Cat owners are resorting to China’s underground marketplace to buy antivirals for a feline coronavirus.
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The Atlantic You’ll Probably Never Know If You Had the Coronavirus in January
So far, all available evidence suggests that few Americans were infected in the first weeks of the year. It would be next to impossible to find out who they were.
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Getty / The Atlantic The Problem With Stories About Dangerous Coronavirus Mutations
There’s no clear evidence that the pandemic virus has evolved into significantly different forms—and there probably won’t be for months.
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ESO A Black Hole Is ‘Almost on Our Doorstep’
The invisible point of darkness resides in a double-star system just 1,000 light-years away.
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Soomin Jung ‘ICU Delirium’ Is Leaving COVID-19 Patients Scared and Confused
The mental toll of intensive care can be more severe than the physical one.
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Win McNamee / Getty / The Atlantic The Thorniest Subject at NASA Right Now
The space agency is carefully following pandemic measures. Elon Musk thinks they’re overblown. But they’re going to the moon together.
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Jacques Kluska, et al The Before Times of a Solar System
New observations of young stars capture the cosmic forces that can transform tiny particles into colossal worlds.
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Joan Wong Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing
A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend
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The Atlantic The False Hope of Antibody Tests
The immunity tests were supposed to be a “game changer,” but they are instead revealing that the majority of Americans are still vulnerable to COVID-19 infection.
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Arsh Raziuddin / Vishakha Darbha / The Atlantic One Thing Space Agencies Must Watch Out for Now: Cats
Operating a mission is a labyrinthian process from start to finish, with all kinds of checks and fail-safes along the way.
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What Life Is Like After Being Taken Off a Ventilator
A near-death experience in the ICU could have lasting effects on the brain—from PTSD to cognitive impairment on par with mild dementia.
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Lukas Vojir / Quanta The Case of the Missing Bacteria
Microbes in our gut are key to staying healthy, but scientists are coming to realize that isn’t the case for all animals.
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Constance Bannister Corp / Getty The New Cringeworthy
The response to the pandemic has created a collective aversion to previously innocuous behaviors and settings.
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Bettmann / Getty The People Who Risked Death for Immunity
When yellow fever swept through 19th-century New Orleans, immunity became so valuable, people were willing to go to extreme lengths for protection.
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Diy 13 / shutterstock / Paul Spella / ... Trump’s New Auto Rollback Is an Economic Disaster
According to the administration’s own math, the pollution rules could eliminate jobs, discourage driving, and inflict billions in damage.
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Edmon De Haro The Mission NASA Doesn’t Want to Postpone
So far, the pandemic isn’t stopping the space agency from moving forward with a historic SpaceX launch next month.
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Dave Whyte / Quanta Magazine What Einstein May Have Gotten Wrong
The Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin is using an old form of math to rethink the very basics of what we know about time.
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Johnson Space Center / NASA We’re All Living in the ‘From Now On,’ Now
Watching Apollo 13 for the first time, I couldn’t help fixating on how much the world has changed—not in the past half century, but in the past few months.
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