Ed Yong

Everyday tiredness is nothing like the depleting symptom that people with long COVID and ME/CFS experience.

Humans talk to their babies in a very particular way—and so do dolphins.

Fourteen crucial chemotherapies are currently in shortage. Why does this keep happening?

Snow flies have adapted to keep running in subzero temperatures, but their time is running out.

Forget changing only the names that honor the horrors of the past. Some biologists now argue no species should ever be named after a single individual.

A unique experiment shows how multicellular organisms might have evolved from single-celled ancestors.

Most such mysteries go unsolved. But in this case, a crack team of scientists quickly found a culprit.

What was once outright denial has morphed into a subtler dismissal.

All of this will happen again.

Only a couple dozen doctors specialize in chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Now their knowledge could be crucial to treating millions more patients.

Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard.

When a sleeping animal’s eyes twitch beneath its eyelids, is it looking around a dream world?

It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a kidney.

Even before the pandemic began, more people here were dying at younger ages than in comparably wealthy nations.

A new study refutes the widespread idea that woodpeckers have shock-absorbing heads.

The latest surge is a test of our pandemic priorities.

In the face of government inaction, the country’s best chance at keeping the crisis from spiraling relies on everyone to keep caring.

A newly identified population in Greenland is less dependent on the vanishing sea ice. But even they can’t hold out forever.

Every creature lives within its own sensory bubble, but only humans have the capacity to appreciate the experiences of other species. What we’ve learned is astounding.

To study something as freewheeling, spontaneous, and variable as play, researchers had to get creative.

A new viral outbreak is testing whether the world has learned anything from COVID.

As COVID numbers tick up, hospitals are supposed to be ready to jump in as needed. Only, they never really had a reprieve.

By completely rewiring the network of animal viruses, climate change is creating a new age of infectious dangers.

Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic.

After the vicuñas in Argentina’s San Guillermo National Park caught mange from domesticated llamas, the world around them changed.  

All epidemics trigger the same Sisyphean cycle of panic and neglect. Even so, that cycle isn’t meant to spin this quickly.

The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?

What does society owe immunocompromised people?

Scientists had no idea how an underwater Arctic volcano could sustain so much life. And then they noticed the black tubes.

COVID has pushed one Chicago institution into crisis again and again. The Omicron surge is receding. Now what?

Omicron is pushing hospitals to their limit, but the medical system still has an ethical responsibility to all patients—no matter the choices they make.

Many supposedly “incidental” infections aren’t really incidental, and cannot be dismissed.

Omicron is inundating a health-care system that was already buckling under the cumulative toll of every previous surge.

We’ve been making the same errors for nearly two years now.

Here’s how I thought through the decision.

The new variant poses a far graver threat at the collective level than the individual one—the kind of test that the U.S. has repeatedly failed.

Medical professionals are used to being believed, but as patients, they found that their expertise didn’t matter.

About one in five health-care workers has left their job since the pandemic started. This is their story—and the story of those left behind.

The mass slaughter of whales destroyed far more than the creatures themselves.

The field’s future lies in reclaiming parts of its past that it willingly abandoned.