Science
15 Lessons Scientists Learned About Us When the World Stood Still
When the pandemic upended our lives, it gave researchers a rare chance to learn more about who we are and how we live. The simultaneous changes endured by the entire world created experiments that could never have happened otherwise. What happens when sports teams play in empty stadiums? When people see their doctors online? When the government sends people money? When women stop wearing high heels? When children stop going to school?
Research was challenging in such an extraordinary period: It’s impossible to know whether changes were caused by the specific thing scientists were studying, or by some other aspect of the pandemic — or whether we could expect the same result in normal times.
Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the pandemic was that science is a process. Just as our understandings about masks or vaccines changed as the pandemic went on, these lessons might also change with time. For now, here are 15 things we learned.
1. Flu season doesn’t have to be so bad.
Flu virtually disappeared during the pandemic. The precautions people took to prevent the spread of Covid also played a role in preventing other respiratory viruses, experts found. Slowing their spread doesn’t necessarily require extreme measures, like stay-at-home orders, the studies showed. Simple behaviors — masking, hand-washing and avoiding social gatherings or workplaces when sick — help keep people healthy. Even those precautions haven’t stuck, though: This year, flu is surging.
2. Home-field advantage got less mysterious.
When sports teams started playing in empty stadiums, researchers could more rigorously study why players seem to do better at home. A variety of studies found that, yes, the fans made a difference: Home teams played worse without them around. They were less likely to win at home and had poorer performances — and the effect was smaller for teams that had frequently played in front of smaller crowds before the pandemic. But there was also evidence that it wasn’t just about fans. When the N.B.A. restarted play, the top 22 teams isolated in Orlando, Fla., allowing researchers to study the effects of jet lag. Rebounding, shooting accuracy and wins were all higher among players who didn’t have to travel across time zones.
3. Teenagers need to sleep in, but schools won’t let them.
Most teenagers were sleep-deprived before the pandemic — they don’t naturally tend to feel tired until around 11 p.m. and need around 10 hours of sleep a night. But when schools closed, teenagers around the world started sleeping according to their natural rhythms. They went to bed later (by about two hours, one study found) and slept longer. They woke up naturally, without an alarm or a parent, which doctors say is the sign of sufficient sleep. Teenagers lost these gains when schools reopened at their usual early start times. When high schools start later, other research has shown, it’s associated with improved concentration, behavior, attendance, learning and mental health.
4. High heels aren’t just uncomfortable — they’re dangerous.
Starting in March 2020, the number of women showing up at emergency rooms with injuries they said were from wearing high heels, like fractures or sprains, declined sharply. In 2020, there were 6,300 hospital visits for high heel injuries, down from 16,000 during each of the four years prior, according to data analyzed by Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. Now he’s looking into whether injuries have increased since people have begun socializing and working in offices again, or whether the pandemic has hastened the trend toward flats and sneakers.
5. Patients don’t always need to see a doctor in person, if at all.
Telehealth, once uncommon, accounted for half of medical visits early in the pandemic, found a study of two billion medical claims in the United States. Mostly, patients and doctors were satisfied with seeing one another online. Telehealth lowered health care costs, and was especially useful for treating chronic illnesses and for psychotherapy. And in some cases, the pandemic revealed, people don’t need to see a doctor at all. The number of people showing up with mild appendicitis decreased, while the number with complicated appendicitis didn’t change, which researchers said suggested that some patients who would typically have had surgery recovered on their own.
6. Women are better patients than men.
During the pandemic, women were more likely than men to wear masks, get vaccinated and follow other public health guidance. This was true in many countries. When men and women lived together, the men were a little more likely to follow health rules, but still less likely than the women. One group of researchers studied professional tennis players at the U.S. Open in 2020. The women were more likely than the men to skip the event because of safety concerns. This aligns with gender differences in health overall, researchers said — women are more likely to seek preventive care, visit doctors and follow health recommendations. It’s probably one reason women tend to live longer.
7. Not even being stuck at home makes men do more housework.
During lockdowns, there was a lot more domestic labor to do. More dishes piled up, with more needy children underfoot. But even when men worked from home, women still handled more of the work. Eight in 10 mothers said they managed remote schooling (fathers overestimated their contribution). That could be a reason mothers’ antidepressant use increased when schools were closed, but not fathers’. Mothers were also more likely than men to cut back at work — though they returned as soon as they could. Only couples who really wanted egalitarian relationships, researchers wrote, could overcome “the stickiness of gender inequality in household work.”
8. Alcohol restrictions can save lives.
Many places had curfews or bans on selling alcohol during lockdowns — and it appeared to have saved lives. In South Africa, hospital admissions to trauma units and deaths declined. In Southern India, traumatic brain injuries decreased. In other parts of the world, however, alcohol use increased significantly — and, along with it, domestic violence and other problems.
9. Office workers don’t need to be chained to their desks.
Even without in-person meetings, work travel and days spent in cubicles, business continued on. The lesson, said Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist: “Work from home works.” Researchers are still studying how remote work affects productivity, collaboration and creativity. But some version of it seems here to stay: Just over a quarter of paid work days are now worked from home, compared with about 7 percent prepandemic. Remote work has downsides — for innovation, mentorship and service jobs in downtowns. But it also has benefits that workers aren’t eager to give up, like no commutes, more focused work time and making it easier for parents to juggle child care. As a result, it also improves retention.
10. Computers are no replacement for classrooms.
Five years later, the data is clear: When it came to learning, remote school wasn’t enough. Across the country, in rich and poor districts, and among students of different races, test scores in reading and math fell. Many students still haven’t caught up. There was learning loss even in countries with much shorter school closures than the United States. Other factors hampered students’ learning, including poverty and stress, but the importance of attending school in person is clear: The sooner children returned to classrooms, even part-time, the better they did.
11. There’s a simple way to bring children out of poverty.
The monthly checks that the U.S. government sent most parents during the pandemic were enormously successful in bringing children out of poverty, a variety of research has found. Families used the money to pay for food, child care, health care and housing. The benefits weren’t just financial — the checks improved parents’ mental health and family well-being. In 2022, when the checks ended, child poverty doubled. The expanded child credit was part of a rapid $5 trillion expansion of the social safety net.
12. Premature births might be prevented by taking care of moms.
The first reports came from Denmark and Ireland in 2020: The number of babies born premature or at a very low birth weight plummeted early in the pandemic. Soon it became clear that this trend was global: One study estimated that worldwide, 50,000 premature births — a leading cause of infant mortality — had been prevented in just the first month of the pandemic. Researchers aren’t sure exactly why, but a leading theory is that staying home benefited pregnant women — they could rest more, and were exposed to fewer stressors, pollutants and viruses. Perhaps giving pregnant women a break would make them, and their babies, healthier.
13. Dolphins talk more when people aren’t around.
When humans were less active — what scientists call the anthropause — animals began breeding more and traveling farther. Dolphins whistled longer, birds changed their songs, sea turtles laid more eggs. But the anthropause also revealed the ways in which animals have adapted to people, and humans’ disappearance disturbed delicate balances. In some places, predators or invasive species arrived. Urban wildlife that had become accustomed to coexisting with humans, like crows or raccoons, retreated. It revealed the ways in which humans both threaten and protect the natural world, scientists said.
14. Trees and plants make people happier.
Unable to spend time in indoor public spaces, people flocked to natural areas when they could, and were better off for it. A study in Hong Kong compared people who lived near urban green spaces with those who didn’t, and found that parks provided physical activity and a refuge. A study in nine countries found that access to nature — even a balcony or garden at home — buffered the stress of lockdowns and improved people’s moods. And a study in Taiwan analyzed the “window/wall ratio” in people’s quarantine rooms and found that more windows, especially if people could see vegetation, made them happier.
15. There’s no substitute for human contact.
Across the globe, when people didn’t see other people, their mental health — as measured by loneliness, depression and anxiety — got worse. Social media was not a substitute, and often made mental health deteriorate. The pandemic made clear that socializing is particularly important for two age groups, researchers said: young adults and older adults. The older group had better mental health, as well as cardiovascular and cognitive health, when they had structured socializing, like activities at community centers or weekly visits or phone calls.
WASHINGTON — NASA recaptured the world’s attention with Artemis II, which took astronauts to the moon and back for the first time in half a century. But the agency’s scientific projects could again be under threat as the Trump administration makes a renewed push to drastically cut their funding — including at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The cuts, proposed in the Trump administration’s 2027 budget request to Congress, would pose further challenges to the already weakened Caltech-managed lab and could be broadly damaging to American efforts to bring back new discoveries from space. They echo last year’s attempt by the administration to slash NASA funding, which Congress rejected.
Though the Artemis project is billed as laying a foundation for a crewed NASA mission to Mars, exploration of the Red Planet is among the endeavors that could be slashed. The rover currently exploring Mars’ ancient river delta and a mission to orbit Venus are among projects with JPL involvement targeted for spending cuts, according to an analysis of the NASA budget proposal by the nonprofit Planetary Society.
“This isn’t [because] they’re not producing good science anymore. There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, which led opposition to the administration’s similar effort to cut NASA funding last year.
Storm clouds hang over the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Feb. 7, 2024.
(David McNew / Getty Images)
This time, the administration is asking Congress to cut NASA funding by 23% — including a 46% cut to its science programs, which are responsible for developing spacecraft, sending them into outer space to observe and analyzing the data they send back.
The proposal would cancel 53 science missions and reduce funding for others, according to the Planetary Society analysis. The effort to pare down NASA Science comes amid the Trump administration’s broader effort to cut scientific research across federal agencies.
The plan swiftly drew bipartisan criticism from members of Congress, who rejected the administration’s similar 2026 proposal in January. Republican Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, who chairs the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, indicated last week that he would work to fund NASA similarly for 2027, saying it would be “a mistake” not to fund science missions.
Moran plans to hold a hearing with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman before the end of April to review the budget request, a spokesperson for his office said. The president’s budget request is an ask to Congress, which ultimately holds the power to allocate funding.
But until Congress creates its own budget, NASA will use the plan as its road map, which could slow grants and contracts. The proposal “still creates enormous chaos and uncertainty in the meantime for critical missions, the scientific workforce, and long-term research planning,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), whose district includes JPL.
A NASA spokesperson declined to comment Friday. In the budget request, Isaacman wrote that NASA was “pursuing a focused and right-sized portfolio” for its space science missions in order to align with Trump’s federal cost-cutting goals.
The budget “reinforces U.S. leadership in space science through groundbreaking missions, completed research, and next-generation observatories,” Isaacman wrote.
Jared Isaacman testifies during his confirmation hearing to be the NASA administrator in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on Dec. 3, 2025.
(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
At JPL — which has for decades led innovation in space science and technology from its La Cañada Flintridge campus — questions had already swirled about the lab’s role in the future of NASA work.
Multiple rounds of layoffs over the last two years, the defunding of its embattled Mars Sample Return mission and a shift by the Trump administration toward lunar exploration and away from the type of scientific work that JPL executes had pushed the lab into a challenging stretch.
It has had a steady stream of employee departures in recent months, and those left have been scrambling to court outside funding from private investors, sell JPL technology to companies and increase productivity in hopes of keeping the lab afloat, according to two former staffers, who requested anonymity to describe the mood inside the lab.
“If we’re not doing science, then what are we doing?” asked one former employee, who recently left JPL after more than a decade there.
A spokesperson for the lab declined to comment, referring The Times to the budget proposal.
The NASA programs marked for cancellation or cutbacks support thousands of jobs at JPL and other centers, said Chu, who has led a push for increased funding for NASA Science. After last year’s layoffs, JPL “cannot afford to lose more of this expertise,” she said in a statement.
Among the JPL projects that appear to be slated for cancellation are two involving Venus, Dreier said. One, Veritas, is early in development and would give work to the lab for the next several years, he said.
The project would be the first U.S. mission to Venus in more than 30 years, Dreier said, and aims to make a high-resolution mapping of the planet’s surface and observe its atmosphere.
The Perseverance rover, which is on Mars collecting rock and soil samples, could face spending reductions. The budget request proposes pulling some funding from Perseverance to fund other planetary science missions and reducing “the pace of operations” for the rover.
Though how the Mars samples might get back to Earth is uncertain, the rover is still being used to explore the planet and search for evidence of whether it could have ever been habitable to life.
Researchers hope the tubes of Martian rock, soil and sediment can eventually be brought back to Earth for study. The team has about a half a dozen more sample tubes to fill and the rover is in good shape, said Jim Bell, a planetary scientist and Arizona State University professor who leads the camera team on Perseverance, which works daily with JPL.
He said NASA’s spending proposal put forth “no plan” for the future of the agency’s work.
“Are people just supposed to walk away from their consoles,” Bell asked, “and let these orbiters around other planets or rovers on other worlds — just let them die?”
The NASA document did not clearly show which programs were targeted for cuts and did not list which projects were targeted for cancellation. The Planetary Society and the American Astronomical Society each analyzed the proposal and found that dozens of projects appeared to be canceled without being named in the document.
Across NASA, other projects slated for cancellation according to the Planetary Society’s analysis include New Horizons, a spacecraft exploring the outer edge of the solar system; the Atmosphere Observing System, a planned project to collect weather, air quality and climate data; and Juno, a spacecraft studying Jupiter.
The administration’s plan also doesn’t prioritize new scientific projects, Bell said, which further jeopardizes long-term job stability and space discovery at centers like JPL.
“We’re going through this long stretch now with very few opportunities to build these spacecrafts,” Bell said. “All of the NASA centers are suffering from the lack of opportunities.”
Last year, the Trump administration proposed to slash NASA’s 2026 funding by nearly half. Instead, Congress approved funding in January that provided $24.4 billion for the agency — a cut of about 29% rather than the proposed 46%. The 2027 budget request asks for $18.8 billion.
Congress kept funding for science missions nearly steady, allocating $7.25 billion for science missions, about a 1% decrease from 2025. The administration had proposed cutting the science investment down to $3.91 billion. This time, the budget requests $3.89 billion.
Under the Trump administration, NASA has put an emphasis on moon exploration, including this month’s successful Artemis II mission. Isaacman, who defended the proposed cuts on CNN last week, touted the agency’s lunar plans, including a project to build a base on the moon.
The agency has indicated commitment to some existing science missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the to-be-launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Dragonfly spacecraft set to launch for Saturn’s moon in 2028, and other projects.
“NASA doesn’t have a topline problem, we just need to focus on executing and delivering world-changing outcomes,” Isaacman said on CNN.
Scientists have urged the government not to choose between funding science and exploration but to keep up investment in both.
“It’s ultimately kind of confusing, especially on the heels of the Artemis II mission,” said Roohi Dalal, deputy director for public policy at the American Astronomical Society. “The scientific community … is providing critical services to ensure that the astronauts are able to carry out their mission safely, and yet at the same time, they’re facing this significant cut.”
After years of heated debates among fire officials, scientists and local advocates, California’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection released new proposed landscaping rules for fire-prone areas Friday that outline what residents can and can’t do within the first 5 feet of their homes.
Many of these proposed rules — designed to reduce the risk of a home burning down amid a wildfire — have wide support (or at least acceptance); however, the most contentious by far has been whether the state would allow healthy plants in the zone.
Many fire officials and safety advocates have essentially argued anything that can burn, will burn and have supported removing virtually anything capable of combustion from this zone within 5 feet of houses, dubbed “Zone Zero.” They point to the string of devastating urban wildfires in recent years as reason to move quickly.
Yet, researchers who study the array of benefits shade and extra foliage can bring to neighborhoods — and local advocates who are worried about the money and labor needed to comply with the regulations — have argued that this approach goes beyond what current science shows is effective. They have, instead, generally been in favor of allowing green, healthy plants within the zone.
The new draft regulations attempt to bridge the gap. They outline more stringent requirements to remove all plants in a new “Safety Zone” within a foot of the house and within a bigger buffer around potential vulnerabilities in a home’s wildfire armor, including windows that can shatter in extreme heat and wooden decks that can easily burst into flames. Everywhere else, the rules would allow residents to maintain some plants, although still with significant restrictions.
The rules generally do not require the removal of healthy trees — instead, they require giving these trees routine haircuts.
Once the state adopts a final version of the rules, homeowners would have three years to get their landscaping in order and up to five years for the bigger asks, including removing all vegetation from the Safety Zone and updating combustible fencing and sheds within 5 feet of the home. New constructions would have to comply immediately.
The rules only apply to areas with notable fire hazard, including urban areas that Cal Fire has determined have “very high” fire hazard and rural wildlands.
Officials with the Board will meet in Calabasas on Thursday from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. to discuss the new proposal and hear from residents.
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Some L.A. residents are championing a proposed fire-safety rule, referred to as “Zone Zero,” requiring the clearance of flammable material within the first five feet of homes. Others are skeptical of its value.
Where is the Safety Zone?
The proposed Safety Zone with stricter requirements to remove all vegetation would extend 1 foot from the exterior walls of a house.
In a few areas with heightened vulnerabilities to wildfires, it extends further.
The Safety Zone covers any land under the overhang of roofs. If the overhang extends 3 feet, so does the Safety Zone in that area. It also extends 2 feet out from any windows, doors and vents, as well as 5 feet out from attached decks.
What plants would be allowed in the Safety Zone?
Generally, nothing that can burn can sit in the Safety Zone. This includes mulch, green grass, bushes and flowers.
What plants would be allowed in the rest of Zone Zero?
Homeowners can keep grasses (and other ground-covers, like moss) in this area, as long as it’s trimmed down to no taller than 3 inches.
The rules also allow small plants — from begonias to succulents — up to 18 inches tall as long as they are spaced out in groups. Residents can also keep spaced-out potted plants under this height, as long as they’re easily movable.
What about fences, trees and gates?
Any sheds or other outbuildings would need noncombustible exterior walls and roofs in Zone Zero — Safety Zone or not.
Residents would have to replace the first five feet of any combustible fencing or gates attached to their house with something made out of a noncombustible material, such as metal.
Trees generally would be allowed in Zone Zero. Homeowners would need to keep any branches one foot away from the walls, five feet above the roof and 10 feet from chimneys.
Residents would also have to remove any branches from the lower third of the tree (or up to 6 feet, whichever is shorter) to prevent fires on the ground from climbing into the canopy.
Some trees with trunks directly up against a house in this 1-foot buffer or under the roof’s overhang might need to go — since keeping branches away from the home could prove difficult (or impossible).
However, the board stressed it wants to avoid the removal of trees whenever feasible and encouraged homeowners to work with their local fire department’s inspectors to find case-by-case solutions.
What’s new and what’s not
Some of the rules discussed in Zone Zero are not new — they’ve been on the books for years, classified as requirements for Zone One, extending 30 feet from the home with generally less strict rules, and Zone Two, extending 100 feet from the house with the least strict rules.
For example, homeowners are already required to remove any dead or dying grasses, plants and trees. They also have to remove leaves, twigs and needles from gutters, and they already cannot keep exposed firewood in piles next to their house.
Residents are also already required to keep grasses shorter than 4 inches; Zone Zero lowers this by an inch.
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