After hitting a historic low in the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of air travelers in the U.S has been slowly ratcheting up. On October 18, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened over 1 million air travelers in a single day, an emblematic number that hadn’t been reached since March. With the holiday season approaching, even more people may be encouraged to hop on a plane to visit their families.

“I do have a general sense that people are getting a little tired of not traveling or being isolated from their family and friends. They are…

As the Covid-19 pandemic disrupts the lives of billions around the world, two questions continue to linger: Where did the virus come from, and how did it find its way into humans?

Scientists have been hunting for those answers since the first cluster of unusual pneumonia cases emerged in China in December 2019. Investigating the origin of the novel coronavirus is a daunting task that can be compared with assembling a difficult jigsaw puzzle with most of its pieces missing. But mapping out the virus’s spread is of crucial importance to prevent new epidemics. …

Babies make up a tiny percentage of all diagnosed cases of Covid-19. In the United States, where 1.2% of the population are children under one year of age, they account for only 0.27% of the positive tests, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report. It’s not clear if babies are getting infected at a lower rate compared with other age groups or if they are just not being tested as much. But what is evident is that the ones who are diagnosed have, in general, significantly milder illness compared with adults.

The reason behind babies’ apparent…

María Branyas, 113 years old and believed to be the oldest woman in Spain, had only mild symptoms of Covid-19. In New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy praised Sylvia Goldsholl for beating the novel coronavirus at the age of 108. Connie Titchen, 106, received a round of applause from doctors and nurses as she was wheeled out of Birmingham’s City Hospital. She said she felt very lucky to have fought off the virus.

One of the established facts about Covid-19 is that it hits older people hardest — which is why stories of centenarians beating Covid-19 piqued the curiosity of geneticist…

Brazil is now the country with the second-highest number of Covid-19 cases and deaths — only the United States has a more devastating case count. Over 100 days after the first case was confirmed in Brazil, the curve is still going up, likely far from reaching its peak. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently declared South America the new epicenter of the disease, with Brazil being the most affected in the region.

Yet, many Brazilians seem to downplay the gravity of the pandemic. In my hometown, Ourinhos, a small city in the state of São Paulo, people crowded the…

It’s been five months since I last saw my husband, João. He is currently alone in our apartment in Newark, New Jersey, while I’m staying with my parents in Ourinhos, a small town in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Due to U.S. immigration procedures, we had been in long-distance relationship mode even before Covid-19, but at least the situation was eased by the perspective of him visiting me in Brazil every three months.

Then, the pandemic hit, and his plans of spending Easter in Brazil were abruptly shattered. We suddenly found ourselves heavily quarantined in our respective homes, hoping…

With roughly one in five American adults regularly wearing a smartwatch or a fitness tracker, people are becoming more and more familiar with their own heart rates — a simple measure defined by the number of heartbeats per minute. When measured at rest, heart rate can be an important health indicator (generally speaking, lower resting heart rates are associated with longer lives). And when measured during exercise, heart rate is becoming a widespread tool to plan and monitor physical activity.

Exercise programs like the one created by Orangetheory, a large chain of fitness studios, are heavily based on achieving certain…

Everyone knows what a tired face looks like. Hanging eyelids, dark circles under the eyes, pale skin, droopy mouth corners, wrinkles, and fine lines—these were some of the cues a group of volunteers interviewed during a study associated with tiredness. The participants were shown photos of 10 individuals, each photographed while well-rested and while sleep-deprived, and were able to judge with a fair amount of precision the level of fatigue of the people in the headshots.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that lack of sleep has such a visible impact on one’s face—more specifically on the skin. “Sleep is…