• Biohazard: A Look at China’s Biological Capabilities and the Recent Coronavirus Outbreak

    When people think about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they tend to think of things that go “boom.” The bigger the weapon, the bigger the boom, and the worse the impact. However, not all weapons need a big boom to be effective. Every day, millions of people are affected by a weapon that has the potential to do far more damage than a nuclear bomb, a weapon we cannot see, a weapon we call germs.

  • Pathogens Have the World’s Attention

    The novel coronavirus has demonstrated just how devastating a transmissible pathogen can be—and just how difficult to contain. Nathan Levine and Chris Li write that “the sobering truth is that, as deadly diseases go, the world got lucky. The global case fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 2 percent. One need only compare this to SARS (10 percent), smallpox (30 percent), pulmonary anthrax (80 percent), or Ebola (90 percent) to consider that the coronavirus could easily have been much, much worse.”

  • Intentional Youth Firearm Injuries Linked to Sociodemographic Factors

    Firearm injuries are a leading and preventable cause of injury and death among youth - responsible for an estimated 5,000 deaths and 22,000 non-fatal injury hospital visits each year in American kids. The researchers  identified distinct risk profiles for individuals aged 21 and younger, who arrived at emergency departments with firearm injuries over an 8-year period.

  • One in Five Colorado High School Students Has Access to Firearms

    Twenty percent of high school students in Colorado have easy access to a handgun, according to a new study. “Our findings highlight that it is relatively easy to access a handgun in Colorado for high school students. This finding, combined with the high prevalence of feeling sad or depressed and suicide attempts, is concerning for the safety of adolescents,” said the lead author of the study.

  • Climate Change Has Cost 7 years of Ag Productivity Growth

    Despite important agricultural advancements to feed the world in the last 60 years, a Cornell-led study shows that global farming productivity is 21 percent lower than it could have been without climate change. This is the equivalent of losing about seven years of farm productivity increases since the 1960s.

  • Report on COVID Origins Highlights Clues to Animal-Human Jump

    The international team that traveled to Wuhan, China, to investigate the source of SARS-CoV-2 published its full findings Monday, which cover four possibilities, but the experts say a jump to humans from an intermediate animal carrier is the likeliest scenario based on promising clues. Release of the findings, however, prompted high-level calls for more transparency from China, including from the WHO’s director-general.

  • U.S. Leads Group of 14 Countries Casting Doubt over WHO Virus Origin Report

    The U.S. and thirteen other countries have lamented the lack of access given to WHO experts during an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. The U.S.-led group expressed skepticism over the investigation, saying it lacked the data and samples required. China has accused opponents of “politicizing the issue.”

  • World Leaders Call for Treaty to Prepare for Next Pandemic

    COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic. Leaders from 23 countries, the World Health Organization and the EU called for a new international treaty to better prepare for future pandemics in an op-ed published on Tuesday.

  • Pandemic Apologies and Defiance: Europe’s Leaders Increasingly Rattled

    European leaders are handling rising public frustration, economic distress and mounting coronavirus case numbers in different ways, with most showing the strain of dealing with a yearlong pandemic, say analysts and commentators, who add that the leaders seem to be rattled by a third wave of infections sweeping the continent.

  • Understanding Mass Shootings in America

    A mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, left 10 people dead less than a week after a spate of shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area claimed eight lives. There is no official definition of “mass shooting,” though it is often understood as an incident in a public place that claims four or more lives, and attracts widespread media coverage. In the last five decades, these events have become far more common. Mass shootings are both tragedy and spectacle. As a result, they attract a huge amount of attention, which tends to distort views about the prevalence of incidents, the most common victims, and how the weapons that are used are obtained.

  • Stanford’s John Donohue on Mass Shootings and the Uniquely American Gun Problem

    As Americans emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, the reality of the other U.S. epidemic—gun violence—has been made very clear after two mass shootings within a week. On 16 March, a gunman killed eight people at three Atlanta-area massage businesses, and on 22 March ten people were gunned down in a Boulder, Colorado grocery store. Stanford Law School’s John J Donohue III, a gun law expert, discusses mass shootings in the U.S., the challenges facing police when confronting powerful automatic weapons, and the prospect of gun control laws.

  • Homeland Security for Radiological and Nuclear Threats

    Radiation exposure events are complicated: there is a variety of radiation sources, and since radiation is invisible, and its effect may not always be immediately apparent, first responders and emergency services must prepare for a “worried well” of people requiring attention: individuals who do not have other physical injuries but are concerned about whether they have received a radiation exposure.

  • Many QAnon Followers Report Having Mental Health Diagnoses

    QAnon followers, who may number in the millions, are often viewed as a group associated with baseless and debunked conspiracy, terrorism, and radical action, such as the 6 January Capitol insurrection. But radical extremism and terror may not be the real concern from this group. A social psychologist who studies terrorists, and a security scholar, in their research for their forthcoming book — Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon — noticed that QAnon followers are different from the radicals they usually study in one key way: They are far more likely to have serious mental illnesses.

  • Scientists Chasing Origins of COVID-19 Add Southeast Asia to Search

    Scientists hunting the origins of the virus behind COVID-19 and clues for how to prevent the next pandemic say a growing body of evidence argues for expanding the search beyond China into Southeast Asia. The pathogen’s closest known relative, sharing some 96% of its genome, is another coronavirus found early last year in the southern province of Yunnan. But a spate of recent studies has found more viruses nearly as similar to SARS-CoV-2 as the one in Yunnan further afield, in Thailand and Cambodia. 

  • Why Certain Lifestyles and Interests May Have Influenced COVID-19 Decision-Making More than Others

    Although little studied, U.K. cabinet members’ lived experiences and interests likely impact the decisions they make. Certain such experiences have probably been better represented in COVID-19 decisions than others due to the profile of prominent politicians.