In July 1945, as J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other researchers of the Manhattan Project prepared to test their brand-new atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert, they knew relatively little about how that mega-weapon would behave. On July 16, when the plutonium-implosion device was set off atop a hundred-foot metal tower in a test […]

The work of a paleontologist is often like solving a puzzle with no picture on the box and most of the pieces missing. From scattered bones and teeth, scientists studying fossils extrapolate entire long-dead creatures, and even relationships between different species. But every so often, researchers get a lucky break in the form of nearly […]

Most people come to Ox Ranch — an 18,000-acre property outside Uvalde, Texas — for the thrill of hunting exotic animals in the Hill Country. But the ranch is also home to ancient secrets, as in lines of dinosaur tracks that cut across an empty creek bed and in a dark cave under a stony […]

For nearly a year, talks between the planet’s two biggest polluters, China and the United States, have been suspended as the impacts of global warming have only grown more intense in the form of deadly heat, drought, floods and wildfires. John Kerry, President Biden’s special envoy for climate change, is set to arrive in Beijing […]

“Like being on the edge of death if you go for a walk.” That’s how my colleague Jack Healy described living in Phoenix, where it has reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius) or higher for 13 consecutive days, with no end in sight. Jack moved to Phoenix in 2021, chasing stories about the fast-growing […]

Even if you’ve been paying attention to climate change, it can sometimes feel very far away, distant in both space and time. But on Sunday night, as I was writing my first edition of this newsletter, it came roaring into my kitchen. I was with my family at our 100-year-old cabin in the Hudson Valley, […]

When Dr. Benjamin Han, a geriatrician and addiction medicine specialist, meets new patients at the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, he talks with them about the usual health issues that older adults face: chronic conditions, functional ability, medications and how they’re working. He asks, too, about their use of tobacco, […]

A new shortage of a type of penicillin crucial to the fight against syphilis is alarming infectious disease experts, who warn that a protracted scarcity of the drug could worsen the U.S. epidemic of the sexually transmitted infection. The shortage, announced by the drugmaker Pfizer in a letter last month, involves Bicillin L-A, a long-acting […]

On a muggy June night in Greenwich Village, more than 800 neuroscientists, philosophers and curious members of the public packed into an auditorium. They came for the first results of an ambitious investigation into a profound question: What is consciousness? To kick things off, two friends — David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a […]

Pulsars act like cosmic clocks, emitting beams of radio waves that can be periodically measured on Earth. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that as gravitational waves sweep past pulsars, they should expand and shrink the distance between these objects and Earth, changing the time it takes for the radio signals to arrive at observers. […]