Americans with H.I.V. are achieving the once unthinkable: a steady march into older age. But beginning around age 50, many people living with the virus face a host of health problems, from heart disease and diabetes to social isolation and cognitive decline. And so the medical research community, which some three decades ago developed lifesaving […]
On Thursday morning in Japan, a bus-size telescope with X-Ray vision soared into space. It wasn’t alone. Along for the ride was a robotic moon lander about the size of a small food truck. The two missions — XRISM and SLIM — would soon part ways, one headed off to spy on some of the […]
A few miles away, Robert Dicke, a physicist at Princeton, and his students had begun looking into the conditions under which the universe could have begun, if indeed it had a beginning. They concluded that any such Big Bang must have been hot enough to sustain thermonuclear reactions, at millions of degrees, in order to […]
A little over a week after successfully landing a rover on the moon, India on Saturday launched its first solar mission aimed at studying the outer layers of the sun. Aditya L1, as the mission is called, weighs about 3,300 pounds and will travel a distance of about 930,000 miles over four months. It is […]
Snakes can’t really unhinge their jaws, but for some, that doesn’t get in the way of swallowing absurdly large prey. For instance, Burmese pythons, like the invasive ones making their way north in Florida, have been known to consume 70-pound deer and 100-pound alligators. But new research indicates that, relative to their size, the snakes […]
Over the last three years, a highly lethal form of avian influenza has whipped around the world, felling birds in Europe, Africa and Asia before jumping across the ocean and setting off the worst bird flu outbreak in United States history. Last fall, the virus, known as H5N1, finally arrived in South America. It raced […]
In flight, the Eurasian kestrel is mostly silent, a small falcon that seems to defy physics as it faces the wind and hovers in midair, tail spread out like a fan. Flapping its wings vigorously, the bird of prey catches every eddy of the breeze while scanning the ground below for quarry. Perched in its […]
In the world of birding, Peter Kaestner stands alone. No one has seen and identified more birds than Mr. Kaestner, a retired U.S. diplomat who aspires to become the first birder to spot 10,000 of the planet’s roughly 11,000 avian species. With 9,697 on his eBird list so far, he is getting close. Yet for […]
A male saltwater crocodile approached a female saltie — as they’re known in Australia — in the same enclosure at Australia Zoo. He snapped at her aggressively. But then in a change of heart that wasn’t what you’d expect from one of Australia’s most fearsome predators, he appeared to think better of it. “He went […]
As a marine biologist, Lorian Schweikert knew hogfish could change color to match their surroundings. But as an angler, she noticed something that wasn’t in the textbooks: Hogfish can camouflage even after they’re dead. When Dr. Schweikert saw a hogfish with a conspicuous spearfishing hole through its body change color to match the texture of […]
