Glaciers are shrinking, coral reefs are in crisis and last year was the hottest on record. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, have passed a dangerous new threshold as people continue to burn fossil fuels. Is anyplace making progress on climate change? The short answer is: It’s complicated, but yes. In South […]
Nearly 1.5 million teenage girls in some of the world’s poorest countries will miss the chance to be protected from cervical cancer because the drugmaker Merck has said it will not be able to deliver millions of promised doses of the HPV vaccine this year. Merck has notified Gavi, the international organization that helps low- […]
When ancient humans pushed into the Arabian Peninsula, they found a world marked by magma. Swaths of it once erupted from volcanoes, leaving a landscape of craters and frozen lava flows. Many of these seemingly otherworldly volcanic fields are adorned with archaeological remains — from small dwellings to colossal animal-corralling structures called kites — that […]
It was spring in Queensland, Australia, a season when many wild animals find themselves in trouble, and the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital was a blur of fur and feathers. A groggy black swan emerged from the X-ray room, head swaying on its long neck. A flying fox wore a tiny anesthetic mask. An injured rainbow lorikeet […]
The National Academy of Sciences is asking a court to allow it to repurpose about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, who controlled the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family name from the endowment funds. The petition filed by the Academy in Superior Court in […]
Have dinosaurs evolved on other worlds? Could we spot a planet of glowing organisms? What nearby star systems are positioned to observe Earth passing in front of the sun? These are just a few of the questions that Lisa Kaltenegger has joyfully tackled. As the founding director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, […]
The email landed in the inbox of Dave Parker, an Arkansas government employee, in 2021: Hey, we’ve got this eclipse coming. “I wasn’t even aware of an eclipse coming in ’24,” Mr. Parker said. But after the first meeting, the headlines became clear: “This could be possibly the biggest economic moment for Arkansas ever,” said […]
A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis. The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the […]
The federal government is required to “expeditiously” house migrant children who cross into the United States unlawfully, rather than allow them to remain in unsafe open-air sites along the border, a Federal District Court judge ruled Wednesday night. The decision, handed down by Judge Dolly M. Gee of the United States District Court of Central […]
On some level, the human liver in the operating room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago was alive. Blood circulating through its tissues delivered oxygen and removed waste products, and the organ produced bile and proteins that are essential to the body. But the donor had died a day earlier, and the liver lay inside […]
