Science
Nuclear Fusion Edges Toward the Mainstream

ABINGDON, England — Harnessing fusion energy into something commercially viable — and maybe, ultimately, a clean source of power that replaces fossil fuels for centuries to come — has long been considered by some as the ultimate moonshot. But investor interest in fusion energy continues to slowly rise, and the number of start-ups in the […]

Updated: Oct 19, 2021
Democrats Weigh Carbon Tax After Manchin Rejects Key Climate Provision

WASHINGTON — Some House and Senate Democrats, smarting from a move by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, to kill a major element of President Biden’s climate plan, are switching to Plan B: a tax on carbon dioxide pollution. A carbon tax, in which polluting industries would pay a fee for every ton […]

Updated: Oct 18, 2021
As Manchin Blocks Climate Plan, His State Can’t Hold Back Floods

FARMINGTON, W.Va. — In Senator Joe Manchin’s hometown, a flood-prone hamlet of about 200 homes that hugs a curve on a shallow creek, the rain is getting worse. Those storms swell the river, called Buffalo Creek, inundating homes along its banks. They burst the streams that spill down the hills on either side of this […]

Updated: Oct 18, 2021
What Scientists Know About the Risk of Breakthrough Covid Deaths

The death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday from complications of Covid-19 has provided fuel for vaccine skeptics and opponents, who immediately seized on the news that Mr. Powell had been vaccinated to stoke doubts about the effectiveness of the vaccines. But Mr. Powell’s immune system had quite likely been weakened by […]

Updated: Oct 18, 2021
A Taste for Pangolin Meat and the Fall of an African Wildlife Cartel

“For Malawi, this shows that there’s no sacred cow,” Mr. Kaonga said. “Money cannot save you, and there’s a limit to what corruption can actually get you.” The Chinese embassy in Malawi did not respond to questions about the case. Eighteen other members of Mr. Lin’s network — including four close relatives — have also […]

Updated: Oct 18, 2021
Will New Covid Treatments Be as Elusive for Poor Countries as Vaccines?

“It’s not a coincidence that Merck has experience from H.I.V. — internally, with their leadership and culture, they know that if they don’t address the access challenges, they will be slammed,” said Dr. Moon, co-director of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Generic manufacturing is not […]

Updated: Oct 18, 2021
How a Nuclear Bomb Could Save Earth From a Stealthy Asteroid

One day, astronomers may spot an asteroid months away from a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth. Our only chance of survival at such a late stage would be to try to use a nuclear explosive to obliterate it. But would it work? Unlike some melodramatic Hollywood blockbusters of the 1990s, real-life scientists are largely unconcerned by […]

Updated: Oct 18, 2021
Anni Bergman, Therapist Who Listened to Children, Dies at 102

Anna Emilie Rink was born on Jan. 10, 1919, in Vienna. Her father, Ernst, owned a factory. Her mother, Marta (Haas) Rink, a homemaker, died of breast cancer when Anni was 10; two sisters died of influenza. Her father died when she 17. The family was well off, and Anni was cared for by a […]

Updated: Oct 18, 2021
Russian Film Crew Wraps Space Station Shoot and Returns to Earth

The filming continued as the crew exited the station, boarded their capsule, then landed on a chilly Sunday morning in flat Kazakh grasslands. Astronaut recovery teams, a sizable film crew, and even Dmitri Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, made for an unusually large crowd at the landing site. “No one should be looking into the […]

Updated: Oct 17, 2021
To Learn Bees’ Secrets, Count Them One by One

All through late summer and early fall, Max McCarthy, a graduate student at Rutgers University, walked around wetlands in northern New Jersey with a mesh net catching bees, which he marked with tiny colored pens. Three dots, each a different color, on the bees’ minuscule thoraxes before releasing them again. He wrote this information in […]

Updated: Oct 16, 2021