This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.

Yesterday, the official U.S. death toll from the pandemic reached 500,000 people. Half a million husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, friends, lovers. Covid-19 is now the leading cause of death in the U.S., …

For this science-writing basketball fan, one of the few good things to come out of the pandemic has been the collaboration between the NBA and epidemiologists. Last summer, the league had the money and motivation to enshrine players, coaches, and staff in a “bubble” for four months — a fascinating premise for any science experiment.

The NBA tested its players and staff every day, at a time when there wasn’t a lot of testing going on in the United States. This setup enabled scientists at Yale University to pilot a new type of diagnostic test that relied on spit instead…

This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.

Like nearly all complex machines, your brain runs on electricity. Every time a neuron fires in order to communicate with another neuron, a little burst of electricity courses through the cell to power the message. …

One of the biggest stories to emerge about the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines has been that it has been wildly inequitable, just like the pandemic itself. In some states, vaccination rates among White residents are two- to threefold higher than they are for Black and Brown residents. Last week, I wrote about this disparity and what’s behind it for our sister publication, Momentum, which is dedicated to fighting anti-Black racism.

In another piece this week, I wrote that one way to close this gap and make vaccination distribution more equitable would be to include asthma as a prioritized condition.

Black…

On Monday, Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tweeted that excluding asthma from the list of medical conditions eligible in phase two of the state’s vaccine rollout was “devastating for Black & Brown communities in MA with disproportionately higher rates of asthma” and “both a racial & environmental justice issue.”

Pressley was referring to well-established data showing that Black and Brown people have higher rates of asthma because they have been historically redlined into polluted areas. These communities have also been hit harder by the Covid-19 pandemic, with disproportionately high rates of severe disease and death compared to White Americans.

The U.S…

This is a modified excerpt from Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by me, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.

I’m fascinated by the field of evolutionary psychology, which you can think of as the eventual landing site of virtually every line of questioning about human behavior that starts with “why.”

Why do we give gifts for holidays and birthdays? Because we’re a social species that is hardwired to express altruism in order…

Another day, another lesson in our really, really complicated immune system. We know now that vaccines are super-effective against Covid-19, which is phenomenal news, but scientists still aren’t sure how well they fare against the coronavirus itself. How is that possible, you say? In a new article for Elemental, I asked six scientists and physicians how the vaccines could protect against disease but not necessarily prevent infection or transmission of the virus.

Experts say that the virus could still enter cells in a vaccinated person’s nose and mouth and begin to replicate there. The immune response generated by the vaccine…

The vaccines are here, they’re safe, and they’re extremely effective at preventing both mild and severe cases of Covid-19. But whether a vaccinated person could still become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and pass it on to other people is another question, one the public and scientists alike are desperate to know the answer to.

Experts say that the virus could still enter cells in a vaccinated person’s nose and mouth and begin to replicate there. The immune response generated by the vaccine would quickly defeat the virus, so the infection wouldn’t last long, and the virus likely wouldn’t be…