Isobel PerlFour years ago, Isobel Perl was living with friends in London and thriving. She was working for a big accountancy firm and had a busy social life.

Tiny genetic alterations could help the bird flu virus enter cells in the upper respiratory tract, the C.D.C. said. But there is no sign that mutations are widespread in nature.After someone in southwest Louisiana was hospitalized with a severe case of bird flu, the first such illness reported in the United States, health workers swabbed the person’s nose and throat, looking for genetic clues about the virus.On Thursday, federal health officials reported some unsettling results. Some of the genetic samples contained mutations that in theory might help the bird flu virus, H5N1, infect people more easily.One of those mutations was reported last month in a viral sample taken from a teenager with a severe case of bird flu in British Columbia, Canada. The teenager was placed on a ventilator during a long hospitalization.Worrying as those severe cases are, the new report about the Louisiana patient contained some reassuring findings, scientists said.For one thing, the mutations seemed to develop as the virus adapted to its human host. The genetic changes were not present in H5N1 samples from a backyard poultry flock that infected the patient, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.That suggested that viruses in nature had not yet acquired the concerning mutations. Still, every additional human case gives H5N1 more opportunities to adapt to people, potentially making it more capable of spreading from one person to the next.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.

The astronauts on the I.S.S. — including two who were scheduled to return months ago — held a zero-gravity cookie-decorating contest and built a reindeer from storage bags.In June, two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, set out for what was expected to be an eight-day trip to the International Space Station.On Wednesday — around six months and several spacecraft malfunctions later — they donned Santa Claus hats and wished their families the best from hundreds of miles above sea level as their tenure, which is likely to keep them in Earth’s orbit for at least two more months, stretched on.Ms. Williams, 59, and Mr. Wilmore, 61, docked at the space station during a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner, which was intended to be a commercial option for ferrying people to and from the station.But after a spate of malfunctions called the safety of the return flight into question, NASA leaders decided to bring the Starliner to Earth uncrewed, leaving the two astronauts behind until another aircraft can take them back.So Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore had a chance to participate in the long, strange tradition of celebrating the holidays in space, which began in 1968 when the Apollo 8 astronauts read verses from the Book of Genesis while broadcasting a video of the lunar surface to roughly one billion viewers.A view of the rising Earth greeted Apollo 8 astronauts as they approached from behind the moon on Christmas Eve 1968.NASAWe 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.

Sofia BrizioSofia Brizo spends four hours a day on what she calls “disability admin”.

Experts share how shifting from self-focused goals to thinking about others can have a positive impact on the year ahead.My New Year’s resolutions have always had one thing in common: They’ve been all about me. Some years I’ve vowed to pick up my high school French again; some years I’ve sworn off impulse shopping; and some years (OK, every year) I’ve promised myself I’d go to bed earlier. The goal, though, has always been the same: to become a better, happier version of myself.But while there’s nothing wrong with self-improvement, experts say that focusing on our relationships with the people around us may go a long way to making us happier.“Our society has treated happiness as a highly individualistic pursuit — the idea being that it’s something that you make for yourself, that you get for yourself, and you do it all alone,” said Stephanie Harrison, founder of The New Happy, an online platform that uses art and science to change how we think about happiness, and author of “New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That’s Got It Wrong.”We tend to set our sights on self-focused goals, Ms. Harrison said, “almost plucking them out of thin air, thinking, ‘OK, this will be the thing that makes me happy.’” Instead, she suggested, pivot to “think about happiness as something we create together and for each other.”There is ample research — including one of the longest-running studies on human happiness — to show that our interpersonal relationships are crucial to our well-being, protecting against depression, bolstering our physical health and making our lives more meaningful. As you think about your goals for 2025, here are some ways to center your relationships with your friends, family and co-workers.Ask how (and whom) you can helpEmma Seppälä, a psychologist and research scientist with academic postings at Yale and Stanford, can summarize decades of happiness research in one sentence: “The happiest people, who also happen to live the longest and healthiest lives, are the people who live a life characterized by compassion, balanced with self-compassion.”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.

It may be a longstanding practice, but critics say routine weight measurements are driving some patients away from care.Until she was in her mid-30s, Xanthia Walker rarely went to the doctor, even when she needed care. She didn’t want to step on the scale.When she did go in — to treat sciatic nerve pain or get antibiotics — somehow the conversation always turned to her weight.“Even when I went in about migraines, the response was, ‘Well, if you lost weight that would probably go away,’” she recalled.That changed when Ms. Walker, 40, who lives in Phoenix, found a new physician. Dr. Natasha Bhuyan rejects what she calls the “weight-centric” model of medicine.Instead, she favors a “weight-inclusive” approach recognizing that people come in different shapes and sizes, and that the number on the scale does not necessarily predict health status.“When a person comes in, the first thing we do is not check their weight,” said Dr. Bhuyan, who is the vice president of in-office care and national medical director at One Medical, a primary care practice owned by Amazon.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.

Twenty big cats – including a Bengal tiger and four cougars – have died of bird flu over the past several weeks at an animal sanctuary in the state of Washington.

More than half of the cats at the sanctuary in Shelton, Wash., died of the virus over the past several weeks.Twenty big cats, including a half-Bengal tiger and four cougars, died between late November and mid-December at a sanctuary in Washington State after becoming infected with bird flu, according to the facility’s director.“We’ve never had anything like it; they usually die basically of old age,” said Mark Mathews, the founder and director of the Wild Felid Advocacy Center in Shelton, Wash. “Not something like this, it’s a pretty wicked virus.”Three other cats had recovered from the virus, and one remained in critical condition on Tuesday, he said.The sanctuary said in a statement on Friday that the facility was under quarantine and would be closed until further notice while the habitats were sanitized.The virus began to present itself in November within the cougar population, with several cats developing pneumonialike symptoms. Within days, other species began to show signs of illness.On Nov. 23, the first cat, a cougar, died, and several others began to become increasingly ill in the following days. An African serval was the last cat to die, on Dec. 13. Some of the cats shared a common wall between their habitats, but did not directly interact.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.

PA MediaA recruitment drive for Scotland’s first ever Patient Safety Commissioner has failed for a second time.

Two NHS hospital trusts in London are using AI technology to see if they can spot type 2 diabetes in patients up to a decade in advance of the condition occuring.