The European Union and China on Tuesday moved closer to a political standoff over the COVID-19 crisis, with Beijing vehemently rejecting travel restrictions some EU nations have started to impose that could be expanded in coming days. An EU offer of help, including vaccine donations, was also as good as slapped down, with Beijing insisting the situation [...]

Severance, a popular Emmy Award-winning show streaming on Apple TV+, is a rich cultural artifact. It concerns a team of office workers at a morally questionable company that performs brain surgery on employees to sever the consciousness of their work and personal lives. The four of us were so taken by the show that we wrote [...]

A baby has been born in the United Kingdom from 26-year-old sperm. His 47-year-old father, Peter Hickles, describes it as a miracle. “ The fact that he was basically ready to go just before Euro 96 and was born before the World Cup is amazing,” he told The Guardian. Mr Hickles froze his sperm in 1996 [...]

President Joe Biden has made abortion a cornerstone of his mid-term campaigning. In a speech at a Democratic National Committee event in Washington last week, he promised the first bill he will send to Congress after the mid-terms will be a codification of Roe v. Wade, restoring a right to abortion across the country. Read [...]

Hospitalizations are rising again in New York City with the spread of new COVID-19 subvariants that are better at evading immunity. Cases of flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, are also increasing. Read more here.

Evidence is building that the northern hemisphere is on course for a surge of COVID-19 cases this autumn and winter. New immune-evading strains of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant, behaviour changes, and waning immunity mean that many countries could soon see large numbers of COVID infections — and potentially hospitalizations — say scientists. Read more here.

Bioethics guides us in how to use the rapidly advancing power of life science and the resulting technologies responsibly and ethically to the ultimate benefit of society, humans and other living beings. However, factors such as diverse cultural backgrounds have led to heated debates on divisive bioethical topics and issues arising from the explosive progress [...]

The Biden administration declared the ongoing monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency on Thursday, a move that comes amid growing case counts and a groundswell of criticism over the way the administration has handled the outbreak. The declaration comes as news stories chronicle a series of missteps in the administration’s response to the outbreak, from [...]

I found myself unshocked by the abortion vote in Kansas, and I don’t understand the shock of others. America has come to poll consistently in favor of abortion in the first trimester with support declining in the second and cratering in the third. The people of Kansas were asked if they’d like to remove any [...]

Nobody saw SARS-CoV-2 coming. In the early days of the pandemic, researchers were scrambling to collect samples from people who had mysteriously developed fevers, coughs, and breathing problems. Pretty soon, they realized that the disease-causing culprit was a new virus humans hadn’t seen before. And the world, lacking a coordinated global response, was unprepared. Some [...]