The number of hospitalized young children infected with the coronavirus rose precipitously last week to the highest levels since the beginning of the pandemic, according to data released on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase was observed in children who were 4 and younger, who are not eligible for vaccination, […]

The head of a comet often glows green; the tail mostly does not. That includes Comet Leonard, which made its closest pass to the sun on Monday and is heading away again. A team of scientists have now come up with a detailed explanation for this multi-chromatic behavior. The molecule responsible for the emerald hue […]

Your skin is home to a thousand kinds of bacteria, and the ways they contribute to healthy skin are still largely mysterious. This mystery may be getting even more complex: In a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, researchers studying the many varieties of Cutibacterium acnes bacteria on 16 human volunteers […]

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, Chile — Plans to expand lithium mining in Chile, the world’s second largest producer, hit political roadblocks this week, raising new questions about supplies of a metal that is in high demand as the world transitions away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources. Lithium is used in batteries, including […]

The tiny, spiny and adorable hedgehog is helping to upend conventional wisdom about the origins of drug-resistant bacterial infections that kill thousands of people each year. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, a group of international scientists found that the bacteria that cause a tough-to-treat infection existed in nature long before modern antibiotics began […]

The researchers also found a connection between the pollution and patterns of atmospheric “ridging,” the development of stagnant zones of high-pressure air. These zones, sometimes called heat domes, lead to increasing heat and drying that can cause wildfires to ignite and spread more readily, and can also cause dangerous heat waves. The frequency of these […]

In hospitals around the country, doctors are taking notice: This wave of Covid seems different from the last one. Once again, as they face the highly contagious Omicron variant, medical personnel are exhausted and are contracting the virus themselves. And the numbers of patients entering hospitals with the variant are surging to staggering levels, filling […]

But Dr. Johnston’s research, in eastern Oregon, has shown that even thinning alone can be beneficial, at least for a time until there is substantial regeneration of trees and shrubs that increases the risk of a larger fire. That research is part of a large body of work throughout the West that shows that forest […]

There had been no confirmed sightings of a live night parrot for nearly 140 years. So when the naturalist John Young produced evidence of the near-mythic bird in a remote corner of Australia’s outback in 2013, it was one of the greatest stories of species rediscovery in recent times. It was “the bird-watching equivalent of […]

Dr. Saam Morshed, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, said, “I think it’s fair that we hold the mirror up to ourselves and scrutinize effectiveness for some of these operations. It’s important to understand where we have gaps in knowledge of the […]