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      A Summer Guide to Covid Testing, Symptoms and Treatment

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      Experts say cases could rise in the coming weeks. Here’s what to know about symptoms, testing and treatment.As the so-called “FLiRT” variants of the coronavirus continue to gain traction, doctors and researchers are bracing for a potential rise in cases this summer. KP.2, one of these variants, now accounts for 28.5 percent of cases, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a small increase in Covid-related emergency room visits and positive tests.Here’s what to know about symptoms, testing and treatment if you do fall ill:Symptoms to watch out forThere’s no evidence that symptoms of the FLiRT variants and other recent strains are any different, said Aubree Gordon, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.The symptoms still include sneezing, congestion, headaches, sore muscles, nausea or vomiting. Many people also report exhaustion and a general “blah” feeling.In general, the more immunity you’ve built up from vaccination or past infections, the milder your next bout with the virus is likely to be. (Though it’s possible to experience more intense symptoms with a new infection than you’ve had in past Covid cases.)The symptoms of Covid can look similar to those caused by allergies or other infections. The best way to tell the difference is to test.When (and how) to testIn an ideal world, experts said, people would take a Covid test as soon as they develop symptoms or learn they were exposed, and then test again a day or two later. But if you only have a limited number of at-home rapid tests, there are a few ways to maximize their usefulness: Test immediately if you have a fever and a cough, said Dr. Davey Smith, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Diego.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alzheimer’s Takes a Financial Toll Long Before Diagnosis, Study Finds

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      New research shows that people who develop dementia often begin falling behind on bills years earlier.Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.“The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency,” said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study’s authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, “consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we’re observing.”The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer’s patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.“There’s not just getting forgetful, but our risk tolerance changes,” said Lauren Hersch Nicholas, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has studied dementia’s impact on people’s finances. “It might seem suddenly like a good move to move a diversified financial portfolio into some stock that someone recommended.”Tell us about your family’s challenges with money management and Alzheimer’s. More

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      PTSD Has Surged Among College Students

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      The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among college students rose to 7.5 percent in 2022, more than double the rate five years earlier, researchers found.Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday.The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey.“The magnitude of this rise is indeed shocking,” said Yusen Zhai, the paper’s lead author, who heads the community counseling clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His clinic had seen more young people struggling in the aftermath of traumatic events. So he expected an increase, but not such a large one.Dr. Zhai, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Studies, attributed the rise to “broader societal stressors” on college students, such as campus shootings, social unrest and the sudden loss of loved ones from the coronavirus.PTSD is a mental health disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and heightened sensitivity to reminders of an event, continuing more than a month after it occurs.It is a relatively common disorder, with an estimated 5 percent of adults in the United States experiencing it in any given year, according to the most recent epidemiological survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Lifetime prevalence is 8 percent in women and 4 percent in men, the survey found.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rivers of Lava on Venus Reveal a More Volcanically Active Planet

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      New software let scientists re-examine old radar images, providing some of the strongest evidence yet that volcanoes continue to reshape the hellish planet.The planet Venus, with its active volcanic region highlighted in red in the Sif Mons area.IRSPS/Università d’AnnunzioWitnessing the blood-red fires of a volcanic eruption on Earth is memorable. But to see molten rock bleed out of a volcano on a different planet would be extraordinary. That is close to what scientists have spotted on Venus: two vast, sinuous lava flows oozing from two different corners of Earth’s planetary neighbor.“After you see something like this, the first reaction is ‘wow,’” said Davide Sulcanese, a doctoral student at the Università d’Annunzio in Pescara, Italy, and an author of a study reporting the discovery in the journal Nature Astronomy, published on Monday.Earth and Venus were forged at the same time. Both are made of the same primeval matter, and both are the same age and size. So why is Earth a paradise overflowing with water and life, while Venus is a scorched hellscape with acidic skies?Volcanic eruptions tinker with planetary atmospheres. One theory holds that, eons ago, several apocalyptic eruptions set off a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, turning it from a temperate, waterlogged world into an arid desert of burned glass.To better understand its volcanism, scientists hoped to catch a Venusian eruption in the act. But although the planet is known to be smothered in volcanoes, an opaque atmosphere has prevented anyone from seeing an eruption the way spacecraft have spotted them on Io, the hypervolcanic moon of Jupiter.In the 1990s, NASA’s spacecraft Magellan used cloud-penetrating radar to survey most of the planet. But back then, the relatively low-resolution images made spotting fresh molten rock a troublesome task.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A.I.’s Black Boxes Just Got a Little Less Mysterious

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      Researchers at the A.I. company Anthropic claim to have found clues about the inner workings of large language models, possibly helping to prevent their misuse and to curb their potential threats.One of the weirder, more unnerving things about today’s leading artificial intelligence systems is that nobody — not even the people who build them — really knows how the systems work.That’s because large language models, the type of A.I. systems that power ChatGPT and other popular chatbots, are not programmed line by line by human engineers, as conventional computer programs are.Instead, these systems essentially learn on their own, by ingesting massive amounts of data and identifying patterns and relationships in language, then using that knowledge to predict the next words in a sequence.One consequence of building A.I. systems this way is that it’s difficult to reverse-engineer them or to fix problems by identifying specific bugs in the code. Right now, if a user types “Which American city has the best food?” and a chatbot responds with “Tokyo,” there’s no real way of understanding why the model made that error, or why the next person who asks may receive a different answer.And when large language models do misbehave or go off the rails, nobody can really explain why. (I encountered this problem last year, when a Bing chatbot acted in an unhinged way during an interaction with me, and not even top executives at Microsoft could tell me with any certainty what had gone wrong.)The inscrutability of large language models is not just an annoyance but a major reason some researchers fear that powerful A.I. systems could eventually become a threat to humanity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Up to 70 Percent of People With Asthma and COPD Go Undiagnosed

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      Here’s how to tell if you’re one of them.In spring 2020, Jazzminn Hein received an automated phone call from The Ottawa Hospital in Canada, asking if she or anyone in her household had experienced wheezing, shortness of breath or other breathing problems in recent months. The question caught her attention: Just a week earlier, Ms. Hein, then 24, had gone on a stroll with her mother-in-law and newborn only to end up feeling like her chest was burning.“I realized that I had had breathing issues from a very young age,” Ms. Hein said. As a child, she often had to catch her breath on the sidelines during gym class. As an adult, she frequently had to pause after carrying laundry up the stairs. So Ms. Hein pressed “1” to receive a follow-up call from a nurse.A few months later, as part of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Ottawa, a doctor diagnosed Ms. Hein with asthma.Estimates suggest that 20 to 70 percent of people with asthma or another group of conditions called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that causes similar symptoms, go undiagnosed.To look for patients with those diseases, researchers placed automated calls to more than a million households across Canada asking about breathing issues. Many people hung up. But the research team talked to more than 38,000 people experiencing such symptoms, and ultimately found more than 500 patients, including Ms. Hein, with either undiagnosed asthma or C.O.P.D who could participate in their clinical trial.Roughly half were told to follow up with their primary care provider and received standard care, such as a short-acting inhaler to be used as needed. The other half saw pulmonologists who frequently prescribed better, long-acting medication and worked with an educator who taught patients how to properly use an inhaler and avoid allergens, provided support to quit smoking, gave exercise and weight counseling, and more. These measures could help reduce symptoms, said Dr. Shawn Aaron, a lung specialist at The Ottawa Hospital and a professor at the University of Ottawa who led the research.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Comet Fragment Explodes in Dark Skies Over Spain and Portugal

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      A brilliant flash of blue, green and white on Saturday night came from a shard of an as yet unidentified comet that was moving around 100,000 miles per hour, experts said.A bright object broke up in Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday night, illuminating night skies over parts of Spain and Portugal. Experts say it was a fragment of a comet, perhaps only a few feet in size.ESA/PDO/AMS82 – AllSky7 via ReutersOn Saturday, revelers across Spain and Portugal ventured into the temperate springtime evening, hoping for a memorable night. None were expecting a visitor from outer space exploding above their heads.At 11:46 p.m. in Portugal, a fireball streaked across the sky, leaving a smoldering trail of incandescent graffiti in its wake. Footage shared on social media shows jaws dropping as the dark night briefly turns into day, blazing in shades of snowy white, otherworldly green and arctic blue.Rocky asteroids cause sky-high streaks as they self-destruct in Earth’s atmosphere with some frequency. But over the weekend, the projectile was plunging toward Earth at a remarkable speed — around 100,000 miles per hour, more than twice that expected by a typical asteroid. Experts say it had a strange trajectory, not matching the sort normally taken by nearby space rocks.That’s because the interloper wasn’t an asteroid. It was a fragment of a comet — an icy object that may have formed at the dawn of the solar system — that lost its battle with our planet’s atmosphere 37 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. None of the object is likely to have made it to the ground, the European Space Agency said.“It’s an unexpected interplanetary fireworks show,” said Meg Schwamb, a planetary astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast.It is not rare for comets to create shooting stars. “We have notable meteor showers throughout the year, which are the result of the Earth crossing debris clouds of specific comets,” Dr. Schwamb said. For example, the Perseids, which occur every August, are the result of our world’s sweeping through litter left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      TikTok Attempts to Rein In Diet and Weight Loss Content

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      The company said it will work to remove content about drugs like Ozempic, extended fasting and more from the “For You” feed.Emma Lembke did not know what an algorithm was when she started using social media.The then-12-year-old was thrilled when her parents gave her permission to join Instagram. She quickly followed all kinds of accounts — from Kim Kardashian to Olive Garden, she said — and was soon spending five to six hours a day on the app. Then one day she searched for “ab workouts,” and her feed shifted. She started seeing 200-calorie recipes, pro-anorexia posts and exercise routines that “no 12-year-old should be doing in their bedroom,” she said.Ms. Lembke, now 21, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2023 about how social media led her to disordered eating, and what she and other advocates see as a dire need for stronger regulation to protect social media’s youngest users.Social media platforms have promised to take more action. On Friday, TikTok enacted what some experts called one of the most well-defined policies by a social media company yet on weight and dieting posts. The company’s updated guidelines, which come as TikTok faces a potential ban in the United States, include new guardrails on posts that show “potentially harmful weight management behaviors” and excessive exercise.TikTok said it will work to ensure the “For You” page, which serves as the main content feed on TikTok and is driven by an algorithm that caters to a user’s interests, no longer shows videos that promote “extended intermittent fasting,” exercises designed for “rapid and significant weight loss” or medications or supplements that promote muscle gain. The new regulations also aim to crack down on posts from influencers and other users promoting products used for weight loss or to suppress appetite, such as drugs like Ozempic. They also aim to curb content promoting anabolic steroid use.Under the new policy, machine learning models will attempt to flag and remove content that is considered potentially dangerous; a human moderation team will then review those posts to see if they need to remain off the For You feed, should be removed from age-restricted feeds or should be removed from the platform altogether, said Tara Wadhwa, TikTok’s director of policy in the United States.The elimination of problematic TikToks from the main feed is meant in part to “interrupt repetitive content patterns,” the new guidelines said. Ms. Wadhwa said the company wants to ensure users aren’t exposed to diet and weight loss content “in sequential order, or repeatedly over and over again.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More