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“Big parts of our brains are devoted to making sense of touch and our skin has billions of cells that process information about it,”

“The right type of friendly touch—like hugging your partner or linking arms with a dear friend—calms your stress response down. [Positive] touch activates a big bundle of nerves in your body that improves your immune system, regulates digestion and helps you sleep well. It also activates parts of your brain that help you empathize.”

Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cited hugging specifically as a form of touch that can strengthen the immune system in a 2014 study investigating whether receiving hugs—and more broadly, social support that gives the perception that one is cared for—could make people less susceptible to one of the viruses that causes the common cold.

Broadly speaking, the participants who had reported having more social support were less likely to get sick—and those who got more hugs were far more likely to report feeling socially supported.

Everybody should be open to people being a little more socially distant and not touching as much. Some of it will return and some of it won’t.”

Although there’s no exact substitute for human touch, if you’re struggling with this aspect of self-isolating in particular, there are a few alternatives that can offer similar health benefits for people who are social distancing

“When we’re touched [in a positive way], a cascade of events happens in the brain and one of the important ones is the release of a neurochemical called oxytocin,”

Keltner adds that dancing, singing or doing yoga with others via an online platform can also be highly effective substitutes for physical contact

“Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease; it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country,”

Zak says U.S. customs like shaking hands and hugging may be changed forever and suggests that non-tactile greetings like a nod, bow or wave may come to replace them. However, he says it will still be important to find ways to reintroduce the humanity of positive touch into in-person interactions without putting anyone’s physical or mental health in jeopardy.

“In-person interactions have a big effect on the brain releasing oxytocin, but interacting via video is actually not that [different],” he explains. “It’s maybe 80% as effective. Video conferencing is a great way to see and be seen.”

But for those who are quarantining alone or with people with whom they don’t have physical contact, loneliness and social isolation are growing health concerns.

this process reduces stress and improves immunity. “That’s super valuable in a time of pandemic.”

If you’re using a video chat service for work or school, Zak recommends that you take five minutes at the beginning of the call to focus on interpersonal connection.

to illustrate how dance parties like Daybreaker can be beneficial for people’s physical and mental health. “When you create a dance experience driven by music, community and participation, that’s how you’re able to release all four happy brain chemicals,” Agrawal says.

But there is a shortage of lab technicians able to analyze coronavirus tests, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said, adding that even if he were able to obtain more machines for testing analysis, they wouldn't have enough people to operate them.

"This is going to be the disaster that defines our generation," said Collin Arnold

there’s no profit in leaving things as they are.Show me a body part, I’ll show you someone who’s making money by telling women that theirs looks wrong and they need to fix it. Tone it, work it out, tan it, bleach it, tattoo it, lipo it, remove all the hair, lose every bit of jiggle.

As a graphic designer and Photoshop teacher, I also have to note that Photoshop is used HEAVILY in these kinds of publications. Even on women with incredibly beautiful (by pop culture standards) bodies. It's quite sad because the imagery we're expected to live up to (or approximate) by cultural standards, is illustration. It's not even real. My boyfriend and I had a big laugh over a Playboy cover a few months ago where the Photoshopping was so extreme (thigh gap and butt cheek) it was anatomically impossible and looked ridiculous. I work in the industry.. I know what the Liquify filter and the Spot Healing Brush can do!

We may harp on gender inequality while pursuing stupid fetishes. Well into our middle age, we still try to forcefully wriggle into size 2 pair of jeans. We foolishly spend tonnes of money on fake ( these guys should be sued for false advertising )age -defying, anti-wrinkle creams. Why do we have to have our fuzz and bush diappear while the men have forests on their chests,abdomens,butts, arms and legs? For that we have only ourselves to blame. We just cannot get out of this mindset of being objectified. And we pass on these foolishness to our daughters and grand-daughters. They get trapped, never satisfied with what they see in the mirror. Don't expect the men to change anytime soon. They will always maintain the status quo. It is for us, women to get out of this rut. We have to 'snatch' gender-equality. It will never be handed to us. PERIOD

I spent years dieting and exercising to look good--or really to not look bad. I knew the calories (and probably still do) in thousands of foods. How I regret the time I spent on that and the boyfriends who cared about that. And how much more I had to give to the world. With unprecedented economic injustice, ecosystems collapsing, war breaking out everywhere, nations going under water, people starving in refugee camps, the keys to life, behavior, and disease being unlocked in the biological sciences . . . this is what we think women should spend their time worrying about? Talk about a poverty of ambition. No more. Won't even look at these demeaning magazines when I get my hair cut. If that's what a woman cares about, I try to tell her to stop wasting her time. If that's what a man cares about, he is a waste of my time. What a depressing way to distract women from achieving more in this world. Really wish I'd know this at 12.

we believe we're all competing against one another to procreate and participate in evolution. So women (and men) compete ferociously, and body image is a subset of all that. Then there's LeMarckian evolutionary theory and epigenetics...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpigeneticsBottom line is that we can't stop this train any more easily than we can stop the anthropocene's Climate Change. Human beings are tempted. Sometimes we win the battle, other times we give in to vanity, hedonism, and ego. This is all a subset of much larger forces at play. Men and women make choices and act within that environment. Deal with it.

Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.

Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.

Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.

Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies

when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.

In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.

empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”

Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”

Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.

To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.

A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:

When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.

in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.

To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.

Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.

Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.

If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.

Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.

Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.

nd this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South.

But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy.

The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues.

The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?”

Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People:

you might wonder if things have changed since then. Unfortunately, the answer is that they haven’t, as you can see by looking at how states are implementing — or refusing to implement — Obamacare.

states were being offered a federally-funded program that would provide major benefits to millions of their citizens, pour billions into their economies, and help support their health-care providers. Who would turn down such an offer?

The answer is, 22 states at this point, although some may eventually change their minds. And what do these states have in common? Mainly, a history of slaveholding

it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy.

Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking; we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin

Suicide rates are now at a 30-year high. Depression rates have increased tenfold since 1960, which is not only a result of greater reporting.

Most children born to mothers under 30 are born outside of marriage.

There’s been a steady 30-year decline in Americans’ satisfaction with the peer-to-peer relationships at work.

“During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.”

Weak social connections have health effects similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and a greater negative effect than obesity, he said.

In 2012, 5.9 percent of young people suffered from severe mental health issues. By 2015 it was 8.2 percent.

More and more Americans are socially poor. And yet it is very hard for the socially wealthy to even see this fact.

Most of the questions he faced at the congressional hearings and most of the analysis in the press were about Facebook’s failure to protect privacy. That’s the sort of thing that may be uppermost on your mind if you are socially wealthy

But the big issue surrounding Facebook is not privacy. It’s that Facebook and other social media companies are feeding this epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.

heavy internet users are much less likely to have contact with their proximate neighbors to exchange favors and extend care. There’s something big happening to the social structure of neighborhoods.

The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar observes that human societies exist on three levels: the clan (your family and close friends), the village (your local community) and the tribe (your larger group)

In America today you would say that the clans have polarized, the villages have been decimated and the tribes have become weaponized.

That is, some highly educated families have helicopter parents while less fortunate families have absent parents. The middle ring cross-class associations of town and neighborhood have fallen apart. People try to compensate for the lack of intimate connection by placing their moral and emotional longings on their political, ethnic and other tribes, turning them viciously on each other.

many of us who are socially wealthy don’t really know how the other half lives.

what it means to have been in “close contact”

cumulative

He wore a mask, but there were times during the day when he was with individuals who did not.

nd it will likely change how schools and offices handle positive cases. If, say, a child is exposed to a person with COVID-19 for five minutes at three points during the day, there may need to be considerations for quarantine

his second round of illness was much more severe and required hospitalization.

virus twice

it appears to be extremely rare as of now.

There just has not been a lot of data so far.

Also, just because a person no longer has antibodies does not mean they’ve necessarily lost immunity

Researchers analyzed child care centers that stayed open throughout the pandemic and found that employees who watched those kids all day were not at any greater risk of contracting COVID-19 than they would have been otherwise.

wear a mask.

five months

under the age of 6

Perhaps most importantly, day cares were generally very good about preventive measures, especially hand-washing and disinfecting frequently.

the virus may be associated with significant mental decline in some cases.

They found that some test-takers who had had COVID-19 had an “equivalent to the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70,” the researchers said.

Still, the new research provides clues about COVID-19′s long-term effects, and it’s certainly something experts will be paying attention to moving forward.

From there, the masks and gowns will be distributed to hospitals and emergency personnel in Pennsylvania.

"We're certainly really excited for baseball and Fanatics to come together and take this incredible factory and manufacture op to a million masks over the next couple of months," Ruben said. "We can make a huge difference."

Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.

“We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”

They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”

In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.

The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior

In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.

“Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.

Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years,

said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas

His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.

In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.

Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.

Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.

Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.

“Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”

“Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.

The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could get only about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.

In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.

According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.

In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.

The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.

One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.

Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store free of charge.

In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.

Mothers are desperate to have their children vaccinated; patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes struggle to get medicine; and there is “huge anxiety in the population,”

On Aug. 21, the group got word from some of its “silent partner” hospitals of a flood of patients with “neurotoxic symptoms” — roughly 3,600 in a period of three hours, including 355 who died.

The debate over whether doctors should expose human rights abuses has long been “one of these inside baseball arguments within the humanitarian community,” said Len Rubenstein, an expert on human rights and medical ethics at Johns Hopkins University. While Doctors Without Borders has a culture of “bearing witness,” he said, not all humanitarian organizations do.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, for instance, adheres to a strict code of political neutrality;

Companies that are forced to pay higher health-insurance premiums for their workers are less inclined to raise salaries, says Steve Miller, the chief medical officer of Express Scripts, a company that manages drug benefits for insurers.

studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller

The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.

nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest.

Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.

Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.

The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.

even for medicine’s most influential studies, the evidence sometimes remains surprisingly narrow. Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested

even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades.

much, perhaps even most, of what doctors do has never been formally put to the test in credible studies, given that the need to do so became obvious to the field only in the 1990s

Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right

His PLoS Medicine paper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history, and it’s not even Ioannidis’s most-cited work

while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”

“Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line.

What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care. “When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo. And no one tested how they worked in combination with the other drugs,” she says. “Just taking the patient off everything can improve their health right away.” But not only is checking out the research another time-consuming task, patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.

Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.

We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough

Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”

It’s hard to think of anyone on the American right who even considered the possibility that Obamacare might work, or at any rate who was willing to admit that possibility in public. Instead, even the supposed experts kept peddling improbable tales of looming disaster long after their chance of actually stopping health reform was past, and they peddled these tales not just to the rubes but to each other.

The idea behind the class is deceptively simple, and many of the lessons — such as gratitude, helping others, getting enough sleep — are familiar.

“A lot of people are waking up, realizing that we’re struggling,

All semester, hundreds of students tried to rewire themselves — to exercise more, to thank their mothers, to care less about the final grade and more about the ideas.

But in ways small and large, silly and heartbreakingly earnest, simple and profound, this class changed the conversation at Yale. It surfaced in late-night talks in dorms, it was dissected in newspaper columns, it popped up, again and again, in memes.

It’s the application that’s difficult, a point Santos made repeatedly: Our brains often lead us to bad choices, and even when we realize the choices are bad, it’s hard to break habits.

In a way, the class is the very essence of a liberal-arts education: learning, exploration, insight into oneself and the world. But many students described it as entirely unlike any class they had ever taken — nothing to do with academics, and everything to do with life.

There’s no longer the same stigma around mental-health issues, he said. “Now, so many people are admitting they want to lead happier lives.”

The impact is not limited to Yale. Stories about PSYC157 spread around the world. Santos created a pared-down version of the class and offered it to anyone on the online education site Coursera.

She taught students about cognitive biases.

“We called it the ways in which our minds suck,” Forti said. “Our minds make us think that certain things make us happy, but they don’t.”

Then, they had to apply the lessons

There was a palpable difference on campus, several students said, during the week when they performed random acts of kindness.

The biggest misconception people have about the class is that Santos is offering some kind of easy happiness fix. “It’s something you have to work on every day. . . . If I keep using these skills, they’ll, over time, help me develop better habits and be happier.

So many students have told her the class changed their lives. “If you’re really grateful, show me that,” she told them. “Change the culture.

for now students stood and clapped and clapped and clapped, beaming, drowning out even Kanye with their standing ovation. As if they had nothing but time.

The case is in question involves a 12-year-old girl known under the pseudonym Andrea, who was impregnated by her father and prevented from terminating her pregnancy.

On the other, the majority-Catholic country is not secular. And abortion continues to be taboo for health-care workers.

Andrea is depressed, says her mother, barely eating, suffering extreme nausea from the pregnancy and – critically – says she does not want to have the baby.

The case demonstrates that even when confronted with a 12-year-old incest victim, who says that she wants to die and to abort her pregnancy, Costa Rica’s legal and medical establishment do not offer legal or medical responses

Other Central American countries, including Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua also violate women’s rights by outlawing abortion under any circumstances, even when a woman’s life is in danger.

The highly visible international cases of Ana and Aurora have compelled the Costa Rican government to write a technical norm that it insists will further enshrine legal protection for medical personnel who perform an abortion to avoid endangering the life and health of a pregnant woman.

And none too soon; stories of dangerous clandestine abortions circulate.

some paid as little as half as much as the M.T.A. employees who did the same work before the pandemic began, and many without access to health insurance.

a labor force that has been desperate for work at a time when hundreds of thousands have lost jobs in cleaning, construction and restaurants.

she had worked for nearly three months without a place to eat lunch or access to the station bathroom.

Contractors are required to supply proper personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., and cleaning materials to their employees, officials said.

were alarmed by workers’ accounts.

Their accounts paint a picture of dismal working conditions, and highlight their unequal treatment compared with transit cleaners, who are paid up to $30 an hour and enjoy health insurance and other benefits, uniforms and MetroCards to swipe themselves into the system.

A worker named Juan described chasing down purse-snatchers and running to help co-workers threatened by homeless people who had commandeered their brooms and mops.

“Many people were getting paid minimum wage or just a dollar or two more,” Mr. Tecaxco said. “The conditions were terrible.”

When inspectors came, she said, no one said a word. “Truthfully, we were all afraid.”

Ms. Muñoz said she was fired in November without explanation. As the sole provider for her four children and parents in Puebla, Mexico, she pleaded to keep her job.

"This is a senior citizen for whom English is not her first language. She doesn't have the resources to fight this,"

Nonetheless, that slight location change allowed the hospital system to bill what's called a "facility fee," laid out on Lee's bill as "operating room services."

comes without warning, as hospitals are not required to inform patients of it ahead of time.

But she's worried her mom will delay getting the shots now, putting up with the pain longer, as she knows they are more expensive.

as more private practices have been bought by hospitals and facility fees are tacked on to their charges.

Ohio, where Lee lives, is considering legislation that would prohibit facility fees for telehealth services.

it's difficult to fight powerful hospital lobbyists in a pandemic political climate, where hospitals are considered heroic.

"Even if it was a lot of money for services properly rendered, then of course she would pay it. But that's not the case here."

"Facility fees are designed by hospitals in particular to grab more revenue from the weakest party in health care: namely, the individual patient,"

Ask outright if there will be a facility fee — and how much — even if there has not been one before.

The state of California is also reporting staggering numbers with more than 2.9 million confirmed cases, according to NBC News counts. Texas, with 2 million cases, and Florida, with 1.5 million, are the next two states with the most infections. New York, which was one of the country’s first and biggest hot spots, has recorded 1.2 million cases to date.

But its faster spread will lead to more cases overall, the study authors wrote, "exacerbating the burden on an already strained health care system, and resulting in more deaths."

Since then, rates have increased by 1,000 percent and have disproportionately affected Latinos, who comprise roughly half of the total population.

It will take a number of months to reach the level of vaccination needed in the population to curb ongoing transmission of the virus."

Perinatal Depression

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD):

Psychotic Depression:

Depression can occur along with other serious illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Parkinson’s disease. Depression can make these conditions worse and vice versa.

Depression affects different people in different ways.

Medications called antidepressants can work well to treat depression.

Worldwide fossil fuel emissions are expected to be up 0.6% in 2019 over 2018, according to projections from the Global Carbon Project. In the past decade, humans have put more than 350 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes, according to calculations provided by the World Resources Institute.

Meanwhile, scientists are becoming even more concerned about tipping points in the climate system that could lead to rapid rise in sea levels, the deterioration of the Amazon and so on. One particularly frightening commentary last month in the journal Nature, by several notable climate scientists, says the odds we can avoid tipping points in the climate system "could already have shrunk towards zero." In non-science-speak: We're there now.

This was the decade when some people finally started to see the climate crisis as personal. Climate attribution science, which looks for human fingerprints on extreme weather events, made its way into the popular imagination. We're starting to realize there are no truly "natural" disasters anymore. We've warmed the climate, and we're already making storms riskier.

The news media is picking that up, using terms such as "climate emergency" and "climate crisis" instead of the blander "climate change." Increasingly, lots of people are making these critical connections, which should motivate the political, social and economic revolution necessary to fix things.

Only 52% of American adults say they are "very" or "extremely" sure global warming is happening, according to a report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which is based on a 1,303 person survey conducted in November 2019. Yale's been asking that question for a while now. Go back a decade, to 2009, and the rate is about the same: 51%.

The bright spot -- and it truly is a bright one -- is that young people are waking up. They are shouting, loudly and with purpose. Witness Greta Thunberg, the dynamic teenager who started a one-girl protest outside the Swedish Parliament last year, demanding that adults take seriously this emergency, which threatens young people and future generations disproportionately.