Most bacteria are tiny. You could fit thousands of them on the period at the end of this sentence. But on submerged leaves in the Caribbean Sea, researchers have discovered a bacterial behemoth. Dubbed, a single bacterium is the size of a pea, 50 times larger than its nearest competitor.means “sulfur pearl” in Latin. The name refers to the bacteria’s luminescence due to microscopic sulfur granules that scatter light.
Smoky kerosene stoves might seem a remote risk to most Americans, but wildfire smoke is a comparable threat.The COVID pandemic has greatly strained health systems across the country, though not equally. Some systems and some places have fared better than others in handling not just COVID, but all of the other diseases and disorders that did not stop.
A new survey reports that all states experienced more deaths than typical, from COVID-19 and other causes, since February 2020, but there was a fivefold difference from best to worst, with Hawaii experiencing 110 deaths per 100,000 people to Mississippi at 596 per 100,000. Based on 56 health measures, Hawaii and Massachusetts topped the list while Mississippi, Oklahoma and West Virginia fared the worst.At this point, at least 6.3 million people worldwide have died from COVID-19, but new research suggests that without vaccines, the death toll would have been even more staggering. Mathematical models suggest vaccines prevented 14 million COIVD-19 deaths during the first year of the pandemic, and possibly saved closer to 20 million lives.
The bad news is that in low-income countries where vaccines arrived late or in insufficient quantities, the number of lives saved could have been more than doubled with sufficient, timely supplies.