The new best hope for treating seriously ill coronavirus patients may come from a synthetic steroid that has been around for roughly 60 years.
Why it matters: Because it's an old, inexpensive drug, dexamethasone may have a leg up on remdesivir and other new, potentially costly treatments — especially if they don't work as well.
As society at large confronts how racism has shaped our world, astronomers and physicists say it's long past time for their field to experience its own reckoning.
What's happening: From strikes to reports to calls for action, astronomers and physicists are calling for an end to the systemic racism that has shaped their fields and the sciences at large.
NASA last week announced that the company Astrobotic will deliver the agency's VIPER rover to the lunar surface, bringing the space agency another step closer to understanding exactly how much water is on the Moon.
Why it matters: Companies and space agencies hope to one day mine the Moon for water that can be turned into rocket fuel that could be used to get spacecraft to other, distant targets like Mars. But how much water is actually there is unknown.
Current and former astronauts are speaking out on social media and in interviews in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police violence.
Why it matters: Astronauts are NASA's public face and usually avoid politically charged topics in public, but as the agency's astronauts have more direct means of communication to the public, those lines are beginning to blur.
