Nearly one out of every 100 people living in Lamb County, Texas, died of COVID-19, one of the highest death rates in the nation. But in June 2022, more than two years after the start of the pandemic, many residents in the rural towns making up the panhandle county say things are back to normal. At a fundraiser for a Catholic church in Olton in the northeast part of the county, local families had set up stands selling gorditas and aguas frescas, and a live band belted out Tejano crowd pleasers while couples danced. Javi Lopez, 17 at the time, told me that people were comfortable gathering in groups now. Some of his friends had lost parents and other family members to the virus. “Now they’re better,” he said. “They cope with it.” He was standing a few feet aw…
Jay-Z and Beyoncé Almost Named Blue Ivy WHAT???
What's in a name? A lot, according to these stars.
After all, a unique moniker sticks in the mind better than a catchy jingle. Take Miley Cyrus, who was born Destiny Hope Cyrus but adopted a stage name based on her childhood nickname "Smiley" when she started acting in Hannah Montana. Fast forward to 2008, the singer legally changed her full name to Miley Ray Cyrus, with her new middle name serving as a nod to both her dad Billy Ray Cyrus and grandfather Ronald Ray Cyrus.
"A lot of people say Miley changed her name to Miley Ray because of Billy Ray, but that's not true," Billy Ray told CNN in 2009. …
One cold winter morning in 2008, 8-year-old Isaiah Wilkins decided to try on his mother’s National Guard uniform, something he always wanted to do. She was away at training in Texas, but she kept an extra uniform at home in Temple, Georgia.
Young Isaiah climbed up to the attic of his parents’ single-story house and spotted the blue 30-gallon bin where his mother stored her military clothes. He unclicked the clips on the sides, lifted the lid, and rummaged through the neatly organized items. After carefully shuffling through a few patches and her combat boots, he spotted her uniform.
He unfolded the garment and draped it against his own body to see if it fit. He turned it around and moved his fingers across the digital camouflage pattern, feeling the stitched text…
The COVID-19 outbreak is a global tragedy. Hundreds of thousands have died, healthcare systems are buckling, and the future is uncertain for millions of people whose livelihoods are collapsing. It is absolutely right that the focus today is on saving lives here and now. In the same spirit of doing what we can to safeguard people’s wellbeing, we must not content ourselves with containing the acute crisis. We must also look ahead to what we can learn from this crisis to prevent future risks. COVID-19 is a reminder of how vulnerable even our modern, technologically advanced societies are.
The biggest lesson is that COVID-19 is more than an illness. It is a symptom of the ailing health of our planet. Humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with nature has caused this wider d…
If there has been one silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been the rise of rapid self-tests, which provide results at home in minutes. Researchers are hard at work at developing similar tests for other diseases—including Lyme.
Lyme disease is transmitted by the black-legged (or deer) tick and infects about 476,000 Americans each year. The faster those people can get treated with the antibiotics doxycycline or amoxicillin, the better their chances of having a short, mild case of the disease.
But despite the clear need, there’s a problem when it comes to speed and ease of testing for the tickborne illness.
How Lyme disease tests are currently done
Most tests are performed in a doctor’s office and require a blood…