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In a wide-ranging interview with Undark, Ashish Jha, the former White House Covid-19 response coordinator for the Biden Administration, discusses what the nation got right and wrong during the pandemic, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the impact of partisan politics on public health.

Covid-19 has had had a disproportionate effect on Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities. One health policy researcher says the pandemic’s toll may have shaped the U.S. electorate in ways that cost Democrats the 2024 election. Health care, he argues, must be at the forefront in future elections.

Physician Health Programs aim to help doctors struggling with substance use and other problems while also keeping the public safe. But some medical professionals say the programs are overly punitive, trail best practices in addiction medicine, and do more harm than good.

The yearly COP climate conference is growing in size, but not in its ability to act on climate goals, experts say. A 2021 report suggests splitting the conference into three parts and changing the timing could have much more impact, and would also help address some conflicts of interest.

This week on Entanglements: Should citizens decide on risky science? Our hosts talk to an Oxford political scientist and a former law and ethics professor about how democracy should play a role in high-stakes decisions.

In an age where humans have learned to manipulate the very stuff of life, and to breathe a chilling and self-enhancing intelligence into algorithms, citizens of every nation have a right to know what’s being done and why. The lingering question — and one that will matter greatly amid the tectonic political shifts now underway — is whether more people should have a say...

In “The Living Medicine,” journalist Lina Zeldovich recounts the long history of bacteria-eating viruses called bacteriophages, first developed in the early 20th century. Unlike antibiotics, phages evolve alongside the bacterial hosts they destroy, and may be our best weapons for fighting antibiotic resistance.

Mpox has been declared a public health emergency of international concern. Yet on-the-ground responders in Africa report a lack of funding and supplies to address the disease. To prevent mpox from becoming a pandemic, donations need to go directly to local organizations, says one disaster advocacy nonprofit.

U.S. officials want to find domestic sources of metals that go in everything from green technology to cell phones. Science and defense agencies have teamed up to figure out how AI could help, from analyzing new satellite surveys, to scrubbing through older data, pulling obscure signals from the past.

Amid the war’s destruction, Ukrainian scientists are seeing signs of an ecological recovery. When the conflict ends, they say, the nation should not rebuild its massive Soviet-era infrastructure and instead continue the rewilding by letting nature keep restoring itself.

This week on Entanglements, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild talk to a former OpenAI employee and a Princeton professor about AI and doom. Could AI really become an existential threat to humanity? Or is the possibility — highlighted by some 300 AI experts in an open letter last year — overhyped?

Circadian rhythms are essential to all living things. For humans, our inner clocks regulate everything from the ebb and flow of hormones to the rise and fall of blood pressure and heart rate, and help our digestive and metabolic systems to gear up ahead of time for meals and to handle other activities.

The Nobel Prizes have long been celebrations of scientific innovation. In this month’s Selective Pressure column, C. Brandon Ogbunu explores how this year’s awards have highlighted the increased relevance of technology and magnified existing questions about where — and how — scientific discovery happens.

Severe side effects of Covid-19 vaccinations, like Guillain-Barré syndrome, are very rare. But, writes journalist Anthony Flint, the government currently does not sufficiently document or provide compensation for such cases. Doing so it vital to improving vaccines and engendering trust in vaccine safety.

A $1.7 trillion military program is advancing the American nuclear arsenal. While some analysts argue that the program is crucial to building — or rebuilding — a formidable arsenal that deters other nuclear powers, other say it raises questions for both nuclear deterrence and arms control.

The Undark podcast is back with a new format and a new name: Entanglements. Tune in as our hosts explore some of the most contentious topics in science today. Our first 8-episode season will launch November 11, with new episodes dropping every Monday through the end of the year.

Marty Makary, a surgeon, author, and one of medicine’s most prolific iconoclasts, takes aim at the medical establishment in “Blind Spots,” deploying behind-the-scenes case studies to reveal the many ways in which physicians often promote bad science and baseless opinions at the peril of their patients.

More than one-third of children in the U.S. experience a visit from child protective services during their childhoods. Most of these reports don’t stem from allegations of abuse but rather from signs of poverty. Direct, unrestricted financial support would do more to improve child welfare than these traumatic investigations.

A new study found promise in the “DebunkBot” — an AI chatbot used to challenge beliefs in conspiracies, such as that the 2020 election involved voter fraud. But experts say that while artificial intelligence could help combat falsehoods, it also raises concerns about potential misuse.

Researchers tracking the social and political impacts of storms, floods, and heat waves say their effects are often transient and short-lived. But for those who’ve experienced disasters, some recent research has found climate-disaster response is starting to bridge opposite sides of the climate debate.

Major crimes are falling by most official measures — murder and manslaughter cases fell by almost 12 percent last year, for example. But there is a serious disconnect between the data and public perception, with several surveys suggesting that many Americans still believe crime is increasing. Why is that?

In the field of public health, institutions still hold the power to set agendas and implement measures to protect people’s health. Instead, what’s needed is a bottom-up approach that gives local communities the opportunity to share their needs with and propose solutions to global health professionals.

To economist David Rothschild, “social media is the problem” makes for a good story, but the truth about online misinformation is much more nuanced. In a recent review, Rothschild and co-authors found that the average person isn’t actually exposed to false and inflammatory content very frequently — among other misperceptions.

For decades throughout the opioid crisis, most doctors have relied on medication-heavy regimens to treat babies who are born experiencing neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. But a newer, simpler approach that prioritizes keeping babies with their families is gaining ground.

As they traverse the Pacific Flyway, a strip of land that stretches along the Western coast of the Americas, migrating birds depend on wetland habitat. But in California’s Central Valley, 95 percent of those wetlands have disappeared. One program is paying farmers to bring them back.

In the past eight years, activists have successfully pushed for tighter restrictions on so-called forever chemicals, culminating in sweeping regulations that affect drinking water and toxic site clean-up. What will the upcoming presidential election mean for those policies?

All history is environmental history, according to Sunil Amrith, an historian and the author of “The Burning Earth,” which traces the disparate, and often disastrous, efforts by civilizations as far back as the Mongol empire to control nature in the name of exploration, expansion, and development.

Microsoft announced a deal to revive Three Mile Island and buy all of the nuclear power plant’s electricity as the demands of its artificial intelligence data centers increase. One anthropologist asks whether a dying 20th century technology that didn’t fulfill its promises should be used to power a new and similarly uncertain one.

Connecting the dots between armed conflict and health is not straightforward. But researchers are developing creative techniques to gauge the extent of armed conflict’s public health harms — an endeavor they say is essential to inform short-term relief efforts as well as long-term policies.

While some residents in hurricane-impacted areas can’t send texts or make calls, amateur radio enthusiasts are helping communicate requests for help and messages between loved ones.

In “Why Animals Talk,” zoologist Arik Kershenbaum casts a skeptical eye on grand claims about animal communication. Instead, he argues, the way information is conveyed is a product of the animal’s need to survive in specific circumstances, and is developed as far as it needs to be, no more and no less.

We humans harbor many cognitive biases — a legacy of the psychological adaptations early humans had to make to survive. In today’s world, could these deeply held thinking patterns be preventing us from breaking the harmful habits that fuel the many environmental threats facing Earth?

Scientists say droughts, wildfires, and volatile weather threaten acequias — ancient irrigation ditches in the Southwest. To safeguard their unique system, irrigators are working on boosting acequias as a sustainable resource, and strengthening legal protections around water rights.

Aging dams built for flood control a half-century ago are at risk of being breached during today’s major rainstorms, resulting in massive damage. But the high price tag to fix what’s broken leaves rural areas with hard choices. One Wisconsin county is considering a controversial plan to dismantle all of their dams.

A federal judge last week handed a major victory to opponents of water fluoridation — one that may highlight a path for other advocacy groups seeking to challenge environmental regulations. The ruling comes after a seven-year legal battle.

Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin’s “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine” explores the myriad ways in which playing and listening to music can help to heal our bodies and minds, including its therapeutic benefits in treating trauma, depression, movement disorders, and other afflictions.

Recent movements to ban books and modify school curricula will not be limited to subjects like U.S. history, argues C. Brandon Ogbunu in his column Selective Pressure. Biologists must recognize that these recent attacks on intellectual freedom are part of a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.

Genetic research disproportionately focuses on people with European ancestry. New research suggests that having more diverse genetic data could allow physicians to better target certain medical treatments to patients in Latin America, including Indigenous groups.

A 1970s theory proposed that baleen whales, like bowheads and humpbacks, travel in diffuse herds spanning up to hundreds of miles. Since then, anecdotes of whales seeming to coordinate behavior over long distances have circulated among the research community — but until recently, there has never been hard evidence.

Roughly half of all Britons have said they view the drug industry at least somewhat favorably. By contrast, just 18 percent of Americans report positive views of pharma. The discrepancy may be explained, in part, by the U.K.’s industry-run watchdog, which rules on drug companies’ untoward behavior.

Two Michigan health officials describe how the state is confronting an outbreak of avian influenza among dairy cattle through an aggressive approach that includes declaring an animal health emergency and compensating farmers who participate in research studies to determine the risks to humans and cattle.

Artificial intelligence-driven tools such as ChatGPT threaten to flood the internet with machine-generated content, making the question of what data to archive more challenging. Libraries, with their public support, are the best places to decide what on the web is worth keeping, one cryptographer writes.

In nursing homes, antipsychotic drugs are often used to sedate dementia patients who show agitation or aggression. New data shows that the use of such drugs remains stubbornly high. Some experts say that brings up troubling questions about how and why nursing homes prescribe the drugs.

A race-neutral algorithm for lung function was recommended by the American Thoracic Society last year. But making the change at thousands of clinics across the country comes with challenges — and thorny consequences.

Health authorities have said that stockpiled Tamiflu should work well against H5N1. But while the drug may help in cases of severe flu, research shows that it doesn’t help keep average-risk patients out of the hospital. Some experts are concerned that the U.S. is banking too much on a so-so drug.

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s “Living on Earth” is a natural history “of organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products.” His subject is the intricate connection between humans and nature, and the astounding creativity of life, not just to evolve new forms, but to continually remake the planet that hosts it.

In March, a cut to NASA’s proposed 2025 budget threatened to end the Chandra orbiting telescope’s mission early, with no replacement in the works. But a campaign by astronomers to restore that funding is demonstrating the importance of outreach and engaging the public in science.

The painful condition of not being able to burp has long gone unrecognized in medicine. But those with ‘no-burp syndrome’ have been gathering online, and gaining steam: A pioneering Botox treatment was was first published in 2019, the same year the condition got an official medical name.

The Consumer Brands Association believes companies should be able to stamp “recyclable” on products that are technically “capable” of being recycled, even if they’re likely to end up in a landfill. Experts say the proposal could worsen a crisis that is flooding the planet and our bodies with plastics.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s ambitious proposal to regulate and reuse wastewater discharged from oil and gas drilling for alternative energy projects has been blocked for now, though the debate over public safety continues as the state pursues plans for pilot projects.