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Native to East Asia, Jorōs are one of many so-called golden orb weavers, named after the shiny silk they use to spin webs (which can be a whopping 10 feet wide, by the way). The spider was first spotted in the US by scientists in Colbert, Georgia, in 2014, though local accounts suggest it may have been around for a few years prior. Colbert is near a hub of warehouses and distribution centers, making it likely that the spider arrived by unintentionally hitching a ride on an international cargo ship. 

In 2020, the Jorō population skyrocketed. Scientists believe they’re primarily dispersing via a technique called ballooning: Baby spiderlings climb up high, shoot out silk, and glide along the air currents to their next destination. That’s when the spiders first caught the media’s attention. A second wave of news came with the discovery that, unlike native orb weavers, Jorōs can tolerate

In 2016, astronomers led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University published a bombshell paper claiming the discovery of a galaxy so dim, yet so broad and heavy, that it must be almost entirely invisible. They estimated that the galaxy, dubbed Dragonfly 44, is 99.99 percent dark matter.

A heated debate ensued about Dragonfly 44’s properties that remains unresolved. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 similarly big but faint galaxies have turned up.

Dragonfly 44 and its ilk are known as ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs). While they can be as large as the largest ordinary galaxies, UDGs are exceptionally dim—so dim that, in telescope surveys of the sky, “it’s a task to filter out the noise without accidentally filtering out these galaxies,” said Paul Bennet, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. The bright star-forming gas that’s abundant in other galaxies seems to have vanished in UDGs, leaving only

This story originally appeared in Undark and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years old, his father decided it was about time he started learning to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq kid growing up in Kotzebue, a small city in northwest Alaska, where a healthy store of beluga meat was part of making it through the winter. Each summer, thousands of these small white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts were an annual tradition. Whale skin and blubber, or muktuk, was prized, not only as a form of sustenance and a trading commodity, but also because of the spiritual value of sharing the catch with the community.

Now, nearly seven decades later, Schaeffer is one of only a few hunters who still spend the late weeks of spring, just after the ice has melted, on Kotzebue Sound, waiting for belugas

Smith told WIRED that Amazon keeps patient health information confidential and secure in compliance with federal law and regulations, and in line with industry standards; Amazon Clinic customer data will be protected through the use of HIPAA-compliant encryption methods. “Protecting patient information is an important part of our business; we are not in the business of selling or sharing it,” Smith wrote.

Amazon’s recent efforts to break into health care raise a more fundamental question: Should Big Tech even be allowed in the sector? The motivations of a private company—efficiency, optimization, and above all, profit—don’t exactly square with serving the public good, says Tamar Sharon, a professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose work explores the politics and ethics of Big Tech in health and medicine—or as she dubs it, the “Googlization of health.” 

Amazon Care, a telehealth service Amazon piloted among its employees and then rolled out to

Scott Kennedy, senior adviser with the Washington, DC, think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, visited China in October. “When I was there, it seemed clear to me that, privately, officials understood they needed to exit zero-Covid, and that plans were in the works to do so that would be implemented after the 20th Party Congress,” he says. That took place later that month and cemented President Xi Jinping’s third term.

In fact, China did relax some zero-Covid rules in early November, including softening quarantine restrictions for overseas travelers. But when cases rose, officials brought lockdowns back. 

China faces a few specific problems that would exacerbate the spread of the virus if it entirely lifts the policy. The nation is an outlier in that its elderly population, one of the groups most at risk, is somewhat hesitant to get jabbed. Kennedy says the low uptake may be partly due