Category: Science

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A traditional Ugandan healer holds a referral card, developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, to give to villagers suspected of having plague. The card directs them to a local clinic that uses antibiotics, rather than prayer and herbs, to treat the symptoms of plague.

Centuries after the Black Death, Plague Still Kills

ARUA, Uganda — Isaac Baniyo stumbled through his final exam in English last November as a pounding headache and chest pain made it difficult to focus. The teenager’s parents sent him on foot to a drug shop not far from their grass-roofed hut in the

The WHO vs the Tea Doctor People drinking

The WHO vs. the Tea Doctor

ENTEBBE, Uganda—It’s a little after 9 a.m. on the Wagagai Flower Farm, and Robert Watsusi pedals a bicycle laden with two 3-gallon jugs of a hot, bitter black tea. As he rounds a corner, workers emerge from football field–size growing houses to imbibe their weekly dose of the elixir they say keeps them free from malaria.

3 men in stream in stream - Photo Credit: Cameron Ghalambor

Climate adaptation: Survival of the flexible

Up in the foothills of the Rockies last summer, researchers from Colorado State University in Fort Collins fanned out along the banks of a stream. Some took the water’s temperature and measured its speed and chemistry. Others waded in to catch insects using flat-bottomed nets.

An Ash Meadow Amargosa pupfish.

Should we Dilute Genes to Save a Species?

West of Pahrump, Nevada, in a corner of the Mojave Desert a couple thousand feet above Death Valley, a warm aquifer provides a home for one of the world’s rarest animals. It’s a tiny silvery-blue fish, smaller than your pinkie toe, and in the past 50 years it has survived real-estate speculators,

Golden Toad, Monte Verde

A Rise in Fungal Diseases is Taking A Growing Toll on Wildlife

On the southeastern outskirts of Washington, D.C., inside the Smithsonian Institution’s cavernous Museum Support Center, one can see some frogs that no longer exist. Alcohol-filled glass jars hold preserved specimens of Incilius periglenes, the Monte Verde golden toad;