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New federal figures show a deeper than previously reported decline in U.S. life expectancy last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. Final data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Americans’ life expectancy fell 1.8 years to 77 years in 2020. The drop was 0.3 years more than that of provisional estimates released in July 2021 and remains the biggest life-expectancy decline since at least World War II. Covid-19 was the nation’s third leading cause of death last year, behind heart disease and cancer, and was the underlying cause in about 351,000 deaths, the...

More than a constitutional right, they represent an important fragment of the culture of a country which, year after year, suffers a terrifying number of mass shootings. Photographer Gabriele Galimberti set out to meet these gun enthusiasts.

Every day, law enforcement agencies across the country search thousands of cellphones, typically incident to arrest. To search phones, law enforcement agencies use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), a powerful technology that allows police to extract a full copy of data from a cellphone — all emails, texts, photos, location, app data, and more — which can then be programmatically searched. As one expert puts it, with the amount of sensitive information stored on smartphones today, the tools provide a “window into the soul.” This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United States. Based...

German dog owners are barking mad about a planned new law that would force them to take their pooches on at least two walks a day. The country’s Agriculture Minister, Julia Kloeckner, announced this week she will introduce legislation requiring that man’s best friend get at least two 30-minute walks daily, according to the BBC. “Pets are not cuddly toys — their needs have to be considered,” said Kloeckner, adding that it’s important for dogs to get exercise and not be left alone for too long.

What if mental disorders like anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder aren’t mental disorders at all? In a compelling new paper, biological anthropologists call on the scientific community to rethink mental illness. With a thorough review of the evidence, they show good reasons to think of depression or PTSD as responses to adversity rather than chemical imbalances. And ADHD could be a way of functioning that evolved in an ancestral environment, but doesn’t match the way we live today. Adaptive responses to adversity Mental disorders are routinely treated by medication under the medical model. So why are the anthropologists who...

Fitness junkies locked out of gyms, commuters fearful of public transit, and families going stir crazy inside their homes during the coronavirus pandemic have created a boom in bicycle sales unseen in decades. In the United States, bicycle aisles at mass merchandisers like Walmart and Target have been swept clean, and independent shops are doing a brisk business and are selling out of affordable “family” bikes. Bicycle sales over the past two months saw their biggest spike in the U.S. since the oil crisis of the 1970s, said Jay Townley, who analyzes cycling industry trends at Human Powered Solutions. “People...

Police say a very drunk man claimed he was shot in his buttocks in Dutchess County, but no injury to his buttocks was found. Stay Informed: CDC Website About Coronavirus On Sunday around 2:30 a.m., the City of Poughkeepsie 911 received a call reporting a person shot in the area of 69 Spruce Street. The caller reported the shooting happened just after 2 am. in the area of Mill and North Clover Street. Responding officers found a highly intoxicated 35-year-old Bronx man who told people he was walking when suddenly he realized he was shot in the buttocks, fell and...

A link to chart from the economist, which shows where different countries are in their journey.

One of Donald Trump’s special talents is to hold every conceivable position on a given subject at the same time. So it is with voting by mail in American elections. The president used a postal ballot to vote in Florida’s Republican primary last month. He has also denounced postal voting as an invitation to fraud. He has said voting by mail “doesn’t work out well for Republicans”. And he has said that postal voting should be expanded for older voters and for members of the armed forces, two groups he assumes would favour him in November. The president’s interventions have...

New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia. “The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review. A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.

Most coronavirus patients who end up on ventilators go on to die, according to several small studies from the U.S., China and Europe. And many of the patients who continue to live can't be taken off the mechanical breathing machines. "It's very concerning to see how many patients who require ventilation do not make it out of the hospital," says Dr. Tiffany Osborn, a critical care specialist at Washington University in St. Louis who has been caring for coronavirus patients at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. That concern is echoed by Negin Hajizadeh, a pulmonary critical care doctor at the Donald and Barbara...

As the number of people infected with the coronavirus surpasses 450,000 worldwide, and more than one billion are locked in their homes, scientists are wrestling with one of the most pressing questions of the pandemic: Do people who survive the infection become immune to the virus? The answer is a qualified yes, with some significant unknowns. That’s important for several reasons. People who are confirmed to be immune could venture from their homes and help shore up the work force until a vaccine becomes available, for example. In particular, health care workers who are known to be immune could continue...

Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted. Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world. While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don’t support such a dire scenario — especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place. “What we need is...