The drive from Ranchi to Hazaribagh in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand is only 65 miles, but it takes nearly three hours. We swerve to avoid schoolchildren chatting with friends and meandering down the highway, honk at cows to get out of the way, and accelerate past pickups reconfigured as makeshift transport vehicles overflowing with workers. Men in sandals push bicycles overloaded with bags of coal down the highway, while on the back roads close to Hazaribagh, women carry buckets of the stuff on their heads.
Coal is what brought me to Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest and most polluted states. The pedestrian colliers, illegal miners trying to make ends meet, are just the start. All along the route to our destination, the Topa Open Coal Mine, a caravan of large, color…
Crouching on all fours, wearing hard hats and knee pads, we shuffle and drag ourselves one by one through the small earthy hollow. When we reach the other side, a large cavern spreads out before us: countless stalactites hang suspended like icicles from the roof and mineral draperies dress large chalk columns. The floor beneath our feet is uneven, rising and falling like waves, before disappearing into a body of water at the other end.
There is no known public record of the enormous limestone cave we’re in, which is at least 100 meters (about 330 ft.) long, and somewhere underneath Tulum, a municipality in the Yucatan Peninsula known for its tourist beaches and Mayan ruins. It is one of an estimated 10,000 cenotes, water-filled sinkholes formed by the collapse of li…
Moderna reported on Dec. 20 that its currently authorized booster dose raises the level of antibodies able to neutralize the Omicron variant.
The company performed preliminary tests to determine how well blood sera from people who had received its booster dose could neutralize a version of the Omicron variant in the lab. Researchers collected sera from 20 people who had received the currently authorized booster—50 µg, which is half the dose authorized in the original two-dose regimen—and from 20 people who had received a full-dose booster of 100 µg. After about a month, the half dose increased antibodies that can neutralize Omicron by 37-fold compared to levels before the booster, while the full dose raised antibodies 83-fold.คำพูà¸â€¦