Skip to main content

Tools

Memory Is a Muscle

The numbers appear on the screen. Five of them. Then they’re gone. Three seconds. That’s all you get. Then a joke shows up — something about a bear with no teeth or a seafood diet — and by the time you’ve read it and smiled (or groaned), the numbers feel like they belonged to someone else.

What's in the Water (and How I Check)

The CDC has been tracking COVID-19 by measuring RNA concentrations in sewage. No, really. Public health departments collect wastewater from treatment plants, test it for SARS-CoV-2 genetic material, and publish the data. The idea is that people shed the virus in stool days before symptoms show up — which means wastewater is an early warning system that doesn’t depend on anyone getting tested.