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Considering how bad stress is supposed to be for our bodies, it’s still a confusing concept. Is it worse for our health to have too much work or too little? To have too much responsibility or to be bored? The Covid-19 pandemic triggered lots of stress — even in people who never got the virus. It’s not clear how much the forced isolation, fear or job loss harmed our health. But scientists are starting to identify the kinds of stress that damage us physically by studying other species — not just lab rats, but animals from whales to iguanas to fish. That research has already generated some understanding of the harms we have imposed on them through captivity, pollution and underwater noise. It might also help us understand the harms we impose on each other. (Faye Flam, 6/19)

My personal journey with Alzheimer’s began in 2005 when my wife, Valerie, received her diagnosis with this terrible disease, one that robs the afflicted of their minds and forces family and friends to watch with dread as their loved one slowly disappears. Stunned by the news, I was overwhelmed with grief for my life partner and the loss of our future together. Valerie was a vivacious, energetic person with a passion for education, which we shared. After her diagnosis, I began a quest to better understand the cause of the disease and to find new approaches and therapies that might prevent, delay or reverse its spread in others. (Leroy Hood, 6/20)

Facebook unveiled a remarkable piece of internal infrastructure in the spring of 2020. Called Web-Enabled Simulation (WES), the platform is a detailed replica of Facebook, with artificial user accounts ranging from simple bots that browse the site to machine-learning-based agents that mimic social interactions. The sophistication of the platform is astonishing. (Gopal Sarma, 6/21)

The New York Times recently conducted an important investigation revealing the use of sickle cell trait (SCT) as a cover-up for the deaths of Black people at the hands of police while in custody. The newspaper reported finding 47 cases in the past 25 years in which medical examiners, law enforcement officials or defenders of accused officers cited the trait as a cause or major factor in a Black person’s death in custody, with 15 of these deaths occurring since 2015. As hematologists who specialize in both SCT and sickle cell disease, we appreciate the importance of highlighting the disturbing information uncovered by this investigation, including ascriptions of SCT as a causative factor in the death of individuals who have been “roughed up” by the police. (A. Kyle Mack, Rachel S. Bercovitz and Hannah Lust, 6/20)

While many of us were celebrating the ray of hope that was the COVID-19 vaccine in December, low-income Texans with HIV and their advocates were wrestling with bad news. A state program that pays for these patients’ life-saving medications was facing a significant budget shortfall that led officials to scale back who was eligible to have their costs covered. The program’s financial outlook was shaky for months, so we’re relieved to report that state and federal funds have come through to shore up this critical safeguard for uninsured and underinsured HIV patients. (6/21)

Why am I still alive? How have I survived this long? Those are the questions on my mind four years after being handed a death sentence in the form of Stage IV colon cancer. A death sentence rendered a month before my son’s first birthday. After years of fighting to survive, the moment I’ve dreading came to be – chemotherapy stopped working. My fight is not over, though. I’m still fighting, because I’ve realized the legacy I can leave behind. I’m a Vermont Army National Guard veteran, who completed combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. One thing they had in common was inescapable smoke emitted from burn pits outside the base where we lived. I still remember the oxygen being sucked from the air as burn pit smoke engulfed everything in its path. (Wesley Black, 6/20)

If Black patients hospitalized with covid-19 were cared for in the same hospitals where White patients went, their mortality rate would have been 10 percent lower. That’s the conclusion of a newly published study we authored in JAMA Network Open. In it, we look at data from 44,000 patients hospitalized with the disease from January through Sept. 21, 2020. Unlike prior studies based on single health system data, our study examined a diverse set of nearly 1,200 hospitals across 41 states and D.C. (David A. Asch and Rachel M. Werner, 6/18)