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Americans dream of living long. In a survey done by Stanford Center on Longevity several years ago, 77 percent said they’d like to make it to 100. And so we diet, count steps, pop supplements and hope for miracle immortality treatments. Yet although diet and exercise are certainly vital for health (some supplements may actually harm your centenarian potential), science shows there is another longevity ingredient we often overlook: finding purpose. (Zaraska, 1/3)

It was a year of relentless trauma, and day after day Americans who could afford to poured out their grief into the patient ears of the nation’s therapists. They were the confidants for feelings of disorientation, resentment and hopelessness. Secondhand witnesses to medical horror, cabin fever and money panic. The job was to catch grief and to try not to absorb it, or let it compound their own sorrow. New patient inquiries came in almost by the hour. We were hit with so much, and we needed to talk about it. The Washington Post talked to five counselors about what they heard in sessions with clients this year — and what they felt as the tumult of 2020 upended their own lives. (McCarthy, 12/29)

Heather Hussli never realized how often she spoke to her sister Heidi until she couldn’t anymore. There are still times when Heather reaches for the phone to call Heidi, forgetting everything for the briefest of moments. How their beloved mother, Kim, died in late August after months of declining health. How their family and friends gathered to say goodbye. They wore masks; they stayed apart the best they could. But Heather now believes that probably wasn’t enough. (Bailey, 1/2)

The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 killed as many as 100 million people over two years. It was one of the deadliest disasters in history, and the one all subsequent pandemics are now compared with. At the time, The Atlantic did not cover it. In the immediate aftermath, “it really disappeared from the public consciousness,” says Scott Knowles, a disaster historian at Drexel University. “It was swamped by World War I and then the Great Depression. All of that got crushed into one era.” An immense crisis can be lost amid the rush of history, and Knowles wonders if the fracturing of democratic norms or the economic woes that COVID-19 set off might not subsume the current pandemic. “I think we’re in this liminal moment of collectively deciding what we’re going to remember and what we’re going to forget,” says Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University. (Yong, 12/29)

Midway through a conversation about her 14-year-old, Claire, Jamie Davis Smith felt the need to change direction for a moment, to highlight the happiness her daughter can experience. “She likes to have ice cream and go to the playground with them. She loves to go swimming and to movies. Despite all of the problems, she’s very happy and lets us know what she likes and doesn’t like. ... Afflicted with a chromosomal abnormality so rare that it doesn’t even have a name, Claire suffers from epilepsy, chronic lung disease, asthma and autism. Part of her brain is missing. Her heart is in the wrong place, and she must wear a compression suit to keep other organs from misaligning. ... Claire has benefited from a nearly 40-year-old Medicaid program, the Katie Beckett Waiver Program, that enables families who earn too much to qualify for regular health care coverage to tap into home-based services. Without that aid, many families, including Claire’s likely would have to place their children in an institution. Tennessee this month became the 50th state to offer a Katie Beckett program or one like it. But the pandemic has worsened worker shortages in home health care, and advocates fear tightening budgets might mean cuts to the program. (Ollove, 1/7)

Critically ill babies are some of the patients who benefit most from volunteers. While doctors and nurses in adult ICUs worried about patients dying alone during the beginning of the pandemic, neonatologists worry about babies coming into the world alone. “The big difference for us is that once a mother goes home, we don’t have people coming in to help cuddle and nestle and sing to them and do the things they did before COVID,” said Dr. Jay Goldsmith, a neonatologist at Tulane Lakeside Hospital in Metairie. Lakeside, along with other hospitals around the United States, suspended volunteer services in March. Parents can't always be around to sit with their hospitalized newborns. Sometimes there are job and transportation conflicts. They often have other children to watch, and they go home to sleep. (Woodruff, 1/2)

Long before the pandemic arrived, Renée battled intense fears of getting sick from daily life. She worried she could get HIV from doorknobs or suffer brain damage from odorless carbon monoxide leaking from a faulty furnace. (Glaser, 1/6)

In garden ponds and in oceans, in desert soil and in industrial water-cooling towers, matters of life and death are playing out unseen by the human eye. Here, giant viruses prey on single-celled hosts such as amoebas or algae. This microscopic bloodbath can happen on such a large scale that massive algae blooms visible on the ocean surface turn white, as dead algae fade to reveal their colorless skeletons. Giant viruses, a group discovered only in 2003, are mysteriously large and complex, seemingly between bacteria and the tiny, simple viruses of classical biology. Scientists still don’t know much about what giant viruses do, other than kill amoebas and algae. Leave it to viruses, however, to keep surprising us: Giant viruses don’t just kill their hosts. In some cases, according to a recent study, they can keep their hosts alive and become part of them. (Zhang, 1/5)

Dr. Peter Salk vaguely remembers the day he was vaccinated against polio in 1953. His father, Dr. Jonas Salk, made history by creating the polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh and inoculated his family as soon as he felt it was safe and effective. Although the vaccine hadn’t undergone any trials yet, 9-year-old Peter was among the first children to ever receive the vaccine. “My father had brought home some vaccine (and) these terrifying pieces of equipment that neither I nor my brothers very much enjoyed seeing,” Salk told USA TODAY. “Big glass syringes and reusable needles that needed to be sterilized by boiling over the stove.” (Rodriguez, 12/25)

Law enforcement agencies across Alaska, including in the state capital, are failing to collect DNA from people arrested for violent crimes, violating a state law passed with great fanfare in 2007 that was going to put Alaska at the leading edge of solving rape cases. The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found that across the state, some law enforcement agencies are not aware of the law or are not following it. That lapse means the database is potentially missing thousands of people and may explain why the effort to test a backlog of unexamined rape kits for DNA has yielded only one new prosecution. (Hopkins, 12/31)

In October, Anna Sattler saw the man who raped her for the first time since she jumped from his van 19 years earlier. He wore a dark tie and a blue face mask, appearing in one of Alaska’s first felony jury trials of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sattler was committed to getting justice for what had been done to her. She had subjected her body to the swabbing and prodding and picture taking of a forensic exam after the 2001 kidnapping, so troopers could collect a sample of the rapist’s DNA. In court, where a jury of socially distanced strangers examined images of her genitalia, she answered the defense lawyer’s questions about why she was barhopping the night of her rape. In the end, all the little humiliations built a case. (Hopkins, 12/30)