In May researchers published the results of a sweeping study on the deaths of U.S. physicians. Appearing in the journal Academic Medicine,the study gathered data on more than 380,000 resident physicians—doctors who graduated from medical school and were training in their chosen specialties—between 2000 and 2014. The authors identified 324 resident deaths during that time period and compared them with data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Death Index.

Cancer was the most common cause of death among residents, although at lower rates than people of similar age and gender in the general population. Meanwhile, suicide was the second-leading cause of resident death—and the most common cause of death among male residents.

We’ve known for some time that doctors are dying by suicide. Over the last few years, suicides among U.S. doctors have stirred national discussion. In leading academic journals mental health experts have sought to address suicides among physicians and medical trainees. Media outlets have added coverage with headlines like “Why Do Doctors Commit Suicide?” and “The Hidden Epidemic of Doctor Suicides.” Pamela Wible, a family physician, gave a […]

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Chilean wind farm

CERRO PABELLÓN, CHILE — It looks and functions much like an oil drilling rig. As it happens, several of the men in thick blue overalls and white helmets who operate the hulking machine once made a living pumping crude.

But now they are surrounded by snowcapped volcanoes, laboring to breathe up here at 14,760 feet above sea level as they draw steam from the earth at South America’s first geothermal energy plant.

With the ability to power roughly 165,000 homes, the new plant is yet another step in Chile’s clean energy transformation. This nation’s rapidly expanding clean energy grid, which includes vast solar fields and wind farms, is one of the most ambitious in a region that is decisively moving beyond fossil fuels.

Latin America already has the world’s cleanest electricity, having long relied […]

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Massive Oklahoma tornado
Credit: CNN

In the midst of a stifling Washington, D.C. summer two years ago, former President Obama appeared in the White House to paint a grim picture of the challenge global warming posed to the country.

The August 2015 press conference, at which Obama announced the Clean Power Plan, was supposed to be held on the White House’s South Lawn, but it was moved indoors at the last moment, after officials decided it was too hot to do the event outside. Obama might have been tempted to reference D.C.’s heat wave in his remarks that day on global warming, but the President chose his words judiciously — careful not to overstep the scientific understanding of climate change and extreme weather. “While we can’t say any single weather event is entirely caused by climate change, we’ve seen stronger storms, deeper droughts, longer wildfire seasons,” he 

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Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka
Credit: Youtube

No one is quite sure what Sebastian Gorka, officially a deputy assistant to President Trump, actually does at the White House. This hasn’t stopped him, however, from being a near constant presence in the media.

Wednesday, Gorka appeared on Breitbart News Daily, the radio show of his former employer. Gorka responded to criticism stemming from a previous media appearance on MSNBC where he said “[t]here’s no such thing as a lone wolf” attack. The concept, according to Gorka, was “invented by the last administration to make Americans stupid.”

The idea of a “lone wolf attack,” Gorka says, is a ruse to point blame away from al Qaeda and ISIS when “[t]here has never been a serious attack or a serious plot that was unconnected from ISIS or al Qaeda.” Critics were quick to point to the example of Timothy McVeigh, who was not connected to ISIS or al Qaeda and killed 168 people when he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

On Wednesday, […]

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK AND BOULDER, COLORADO—Every four years, the nation’s scientists from myriad federal agencies come together to release a comprehensive report synthesizing the current state of climate science. It’s become a routine affair, with a predictable process involving extensive analysis of studies, numerous drafts, and eventual approval from the White House before the public release of the latest National Climate Assessment. But this year was different.

Rather than follow traditional protocols and await approval from the Trump administration, these scientists urged The New York Times to release the document in draft form out of fear that the White House might suppress the findings. That fear likely stems from a general skepticism of climate science that runs through the Trump administration. The report, these scientists say, is too important to be sidelined by politics.

“It’s the most comprehensive and up to date report on climate science in the world at this point,” says Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University who was one of the authors of the report. “This report covers the entire gamut of the science we need to know to make sound decisions about our future.”