Butter chicken has disappeared from some restaurant menus in India. Sri Lanka declared every Wednesday a public holiday. Laos cut its school week to three days. Egypt ordered shops and cafes to close by 9 pm. In Thailand, government workers were told to take the stairs instead of the elevator. And in South Korea, the […]

I have yet to see Project Hail Mary, the buzzy space blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling. But who needs science fiction when you have…science reality?  At 6:24 pm Eastern, NASA is scheduled to launch four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon. The launch is part of the Artemis program, which hopes to return humans […]

On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a brief, clinical report in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report about five young men in Los Angeles who had developed a rare and deadly form of pneumonia.  The write-up, barely a page long, ran in between a report on dengue infections among […]

Since it first began in 1981, the HIV epidemic has killed more than 44 million people. For a generation, a diagnosis was essentially a death sentence, and for much of the world it remains a daily threat, with some 1.3 million people newly infected in 2024 alone. But something remarkable has happened. Deaths from HIV-caused […]

The United States is one of the only countries on Earth that doesn’t guarantee new parents paid leave after a child is born — time to recover, bond with a newborn, and get on your feet as a new family. Only about one in four private-sector workers has access to it, and among the lowest-wage […]