Plague and war, but good stuff too

Two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse will keep us busy in 2022 as they did in 2021. One is plague — in our case the Sars-CoV-2 virus that keeps mutating. As predicted in March, people are in for a seemingly permanent struggle between us (science) and nature (evolution). People keep coming up with new and better vaccines, but nature keeps changing the virus just enough to evade any immunity we can build up. The world will
certainly keep watching how
this race evolves, and how it changes us socially, economically, psychologically and politically.
Russia under President Vladimir Putin and China under President Xi Jinping are, in different ways, testing the norms — imperfect though those may have been — that have kept the world relatively stable since the Cold War. Xi has his eye on Taiwan, among other things. And Putin is right now trying to blackmail Nato and “the West” into staying out of eastern Europe so he can turn it into his sphere of influence. He’s massed his troops and may invade Ukraine. If so, how will the West — including Germany, where people live and which has a new and untested government — respond?
The other two horsemen won’t be far, of course. In our context, famine and death could stand for climate change and mass extinction. Still, as was in 2021, people be careful throughout 2022 to look not only at the bad and nasty this world offers but also at the good and creative. Yes, we humans cause a lot of problems. But we sure are good at solving them too.
With coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal.

mRNA vaccines could
vanquish Covid today,
cancer tomorrow
The best news about the mRNA shots from BioNTech and Moderna is that the same technique could also defeat many other diseases.
A new type of experiment could get us closer to grasping human consciousness. Or it could simply raise it.

Science shows why
simplifying is hard and complicating is easy
Our brains appear hardwired to add stuff rather than take things away. That explains a lot about the messes we keep making.
The Post-Heroic Legacy of Angela Merkel: History’s verdict, people believe, will be that Merkel deserves huge and lasting credit for managing situations that could have become disasters, but that her departure became necessary for a new era to be born.
—Bloomberg