It’s a familiar, dreaded scenario in many parts of Africa and Asia: An elephant shows up, wanders into farmers’ fields, and tramples and eats crops. Sometimes farmers fight back, and elephants are killed. That series of events seemed likely to play out recently when a forest elephant bull emerged from the dense jungle surrounding Gbarnjala […]
When it came to the treatment of diseases, the ancient Romans had no shortage of magical remedies, several of which involved iron nails. To cure epilepsy, the first-century historian Pliny the Elder advised driving a nail into the ground at the spot where the afflicted person’s head lay at the start of the seizure. The […]
Terran 1, a rocket designed and built by the company Relativity Space, suffered a failure shortly after lifting off from a launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., late on Wednesday night. A demonstration mission, the rocket was not carrying people or a customer payload, and no one was hurt. The vehicle was powered by nine 3-D […]
In December 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a rare warning: Mental health challenges were leading to “devastating effects” among young people. His statement came as the suicide rate for young Americans ages 10 to 19 jumped by 40 percent from 2001 to 2019, while emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 88 percent. Lately, […]
A mesmerizing display of lights streaking in the night sky over Northern California on Friday was caused by the re-entry of flaming space debris into Earth’s atmosphere, experts said. Specifically, flaming chunks of communications equipment, which were jettisoned from the International Space Station in February 2020, streaked across the sky at 17,000 miles per hour, […]
Construction workers have been at work demolishing an abandoned tuberculosis hospital in Queens over the past several months, dismantling the long-empty wards and carting off the bricks. But first, they had to figure out what to do with a school of goldfish which for unknown reasons had come to call the flooded basement home. Three […]
Few creatures have pushed anatomy to its limits like sauropods. These supersized dinosaurs moved on pillar-like limbs that supported massive girth, wielded whip-like tails to ward off predators and used long necks to vacuum up foliage. While this entire group of dinosaurs is commonly referred to as “long necks,” Mamenchisaurus, which roved around what is […]
In July, Jennifer O’Brien got the phone call that adult children dread. Her 84-year-old father, who insisted on living alone in rural New Mexico, had broken his hip. The neighbor who found him on the floor after a fall had called an ambulance. Ms. O’Brien is a health care administrator and consultant in Little Rock, […]
For eons this has been a quiet, unremarkable place. Thousands of square miles of flat land covered in shrubs and red dirt. The sun is withering and the wind blows hard. It is exactly those features that qualify this remote parcel of the Australian Outback for an imminent transformation. A consortium of energy companies led […]
Scientists announced this week a tantalizing advance toward the dream of a material that could effortlessly convey electricity in everyday conditions. Such a breakthrough could transform almost any technology that uses electric energy, opening new possibilities for your phone, magnetically levitating trains and future fusion power plants. Usually, the flow of electricity encounters resistance as […]
