Excess sound from airplanes or freeways or equipment can affect health. Kevin Carter/Getty Images hide caption

Joel Breman trains scientists in malaria diagnosis in Côte d'Ivoire, 1986. Breman died this month at age 87. Courtesy of the Breman family. hide caption

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has studied Auschwitz survivors, Vietnam war veterans, survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and people who'd been subjected to repression by the Chinese government. He reflects on what he's learned in his new book, Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Wolfgang Richter hide caption

Calliope Holingue is researching the microbiome among kids with autism. She's part of a growing field of research seeking to understand the gut-brain axis. Kennedy Krieger Institute hide caption

Fishermen land their wooden boats on the beach in Tanzania, one of the countries involved in the genetic analysis of the Swahili people. Gideon Mendel/Corbis via Getty Images hide caption

Joyce Cohen Lashof was the first female dean of UC Berkeley's School of Public Health and a lifelong fighter for social justice. UC Berkeley School of Public Health hide caption

A baby who is suffering from pneumonia receives treatment at a hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh on January 13, 2022. A new study points to concerns about childhood deaths after a hospitalization for such diseases as pneumonia, diarrhea and malaria. Syed Mahamudur Rahman/NurPhoto via Getty Images hide caption

Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu is the head of the World Health Organization's newly created Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. "We have to get better at convincing leaders to use the data we provide and not their political instinct or whatever else their decisions are based on. And that's not easy," he says. Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters hide caption

A woman waits outside a clinic in Malawi to be injected with the world's first vaccine against malaria in a pilot program. Jerome Delay/AP hide caption

Two boys stand at the edge of the Buriganga River in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in July. A recent study finds that globally, boys and young men made up two-thirds of all deaths among young people in 2019. Kazi Salahuddin Razu/NurPhoto via Getty Images hide caption

Though the pandemic has left us all less able to socialize in person with our close friends and community, we're still finding ways to use screens and other methods to connect and maintain relationships, research suggests. Janice Chang for NPR hide caption