They can help, but there are some things you need to know — Over the summer, the owners of Boedecker Cellars in Oregon could leave their doors open to let fresh air circulate while socially distanced customers enjoyed glasses of the company’s prize pinot noir. But now winter is coming. “We wanted to make sure that every table in here had coverage,” says…

The race is on to contain it while it’s still possible — The new border fences stretch for hundreds of kilometers. Helicopters and drones circle overhead, scanning for sick individuals while biological samples are ferried to labs for analysis. As fatalities mount, soldiers scour wide areas, searching for corpses. Sniffer dogs have been trained to locate the dead. This is not a…

Intensive care has risen to the challenge of 2020. Here’s what has changed. — This story is part of “Six Months In,” a special weeklong Elemental series reflecting on where we’ve been, what we’ve learned, and what the future holds for the Covid-19 pandemic. Matt Morgan, MD, an intensive care doctor at the University Hospital of Wales, in the United Kingdom, vividly remembers his…

A.I. researchers are turning to neuroscience to build smarter, more powerful neural networks — In 1998, an engineer in Sony’s computer science lab in Japan filmed a lost-looking robot moving trepidatiously around an enclosure. The robot was tasked with two objectives: avoid obstacles and find objects in the pen. It was able to do so because of its ability to learn the contours of…

The desert locust upsurge is yet another of 2020’s horrors — In June, remote sensing analyst Raj Bhagat noticed a strange signal on India’s weather radar. It looked like a small band of rain near Delhi, moving southwest, but Bhagat was convinced it was a locust swarm. “People began to report it,” he says, referring to sightings on the ground. Giant…

Search data holds great potential for predicting the spread of a disease — Even if all you could see of humanity during the pandemic was our internet search data, you’d know something was wrong. Google searches for the word “prayer” have boomed to the highest level ever recorded in a sample of 95 countries, according to a recent preprint. And Google’s predictive search…