What women really want

In the past, there has been much excitement over research that purported to show a link between changes in a woman’s cycle and how attracted she was to men behaving in different ways. However, research at the University of Göttingen using the largest sample size to date questions these results. The new research showed that…

The Coronavirus, by the Numbers

Adam Kucharski studies how diseases spread, but he’s not handling viruses in the lab or treating sick people in the hospital. He’s a mathematician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and he uses math to understand outbreaks of diseases like Ebola, SARS, influenza and now Covid-19. His goal is to design better…

How to Stop Touching Your Face

Now that we know that it’s bad to touch our faces, how do we break a habit that most of us didn’t know we had? Throughout the day, we touch a lot of surfaces — doorknobs, elevator buttons, subway poles — where viruses, including the new coronavirus, can linger for days. From there, microbes can…

My Quest for Pure Water

I live with my family in an almost 200-year-old house on the coast of Maine. Down a steep, wooded bank behind our house is an Audubon sanctuary and two vulnerable ecosystems: a saltwater marsh surrounding a tidal salt river, and a freshwater stream that travels through trees, over big granite rocks and finally through muddy…