This past week, the FDA and CDC recommended new COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for anyone over the age of six months. They’re expected to be in larger pharmacies by the end of the week. It’s welcome news for some, as cases have ticked up over the summer, accompanied by higher hospital admissions and deaths.

The boosters join a suite of other vaccines to combat respiratory illness this fall, including this year’s flu shot and the new RSV vaccine, recommended especially for children and the elderly.

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, epidemiologist, adjunct professor at UTHealth School of Public Health, and author of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter, joins Ira to talk about the details of the new boosters, how long you should wait to get one if you were recently infected, masking recommendations, and if you can get all three shots at once.

On September 8, 2023 at 11:11 PM local time, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Morocco’s High Atlas mountains. So far, more than 2,500 people died and thousands more were injured or lost.

Other natural disasters usually give off warning signs; we can predict when a volcano will explode, ring the alarms when a tsunami starts to build, or evacuate before a hurricane makes landfall, but we still can’t detect earthquakes before they strike. And victims are left to face “the particular trauma that comes from watching the world around you crumble in an instant,” writes science journalist Robin George Andrews for The Atlantic.

Ira talks with Andrews about the specifics of this earthquake, where the science stands with earthquake detection, and the particular kind of trauma that comes from watching the world crumble.

When you think ‘bees,’ you probably think of a neat stack of white hive boxes and the jars of honey on the store shelves.  But there’s a lot more to bees than the agricultural staple, the European honey bee. Around the world there are over 20,000 known bee species, and around 4,000 of them are native to the United States. While these native bees play a key role in pollinating our plants and ensuring the health of ecosystems, they don’t get a ton of recognition or support. 

Around three-quarters of flowering plant species rely on insects for pollination, and some native plants have evolved a partnership with specific native bee pollinators. Squashes, pumpkins, gourds, and the annual sunflower all have specific species of native bees as part of their life cycles. Native plants such as blueberries, cherries, and cranberries all developed without the European honeybee, which arrived in North America in 1622. 

Dr. Neal Williams, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, joins Ira to talk about native bees, bee behavior and pollination.

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