Firefighters on Sunday battled some of California's largest-ever fires that have forced tens of thousands from their homes and burned one million acres, with further lightning strikes and gusty winds forecast.

The moon at first quarter will pass Antares, the heart of the scorpion, a red giant with an explosive futureThis week, the moon will coast past the blood-red northern summer star of Antares in the constellation of Scorpius, the scorpion. The chart shows the view looking south-south-west from London on 25 August at 21:00 BST. The moon and Antares will be low in the sky, but the white brilliance of...

The Guardian’s Latin America correspondent reflects on the humanitarian disaster that has gripped the region in recent monthsWhen I set off from Mexico City for Rio with my family in early March, for what was supposed to be a short holiday, Latin America had not recorded a single death from the coronavirus.Security staff at Mexico’s Benito Juárez airport wore face masks. A blue and red banner...

An asteroid has a 0.41% chance of entering the Earth's atmosphere on November 2, according to...

California firefighters had good weather on their side Saturday as they battled wildfires that have torched nearly 1 million acres and forced the evacuation of more than 119,000 people from their homes. But their fortune may run out Sunday, when storms with strong winds, lightning and little rain may return to the region.Among the two dozen major fires pulling firefighters in all directions are...

The melting glaciers and ice sheets could cause sea levels to rise dramatically, possibly reaching a meter (3 feet) by the end of the...

The podcast is called Story-telling/Story-listening: Decolonizing Research. The first episode hears from respected Tłı̨chǫ knowledge holder and Elder John B....

She cut a lonely figure — a sole swimmer slicing through the chilly blue-green water, her eyes on the wind turbines rising above the distant...

The study of fungi has long been overshadowed by more glamorous scientific quests. But biologist Merlin Sheldrake is on a mission to change thatAs a boy, Merlin Sheldrake really loved the autumn. In the garden of his parents’ house – he grew up a few moments from Hampstead Heath, which is where he and I are walking right now, on an overcast summer morning – the leaves would fall from a big...

Serious times call for serious measures – such as drawing smiley faces on fruit – and what’s more, the science proves itBy the fifth week of lockdown, I had mastered the art of silliness. My flatmates and I had drawn smiley faces on fruit, stuck googly eyes on vegetables and dressed up as our favourite pop stars. On social media I noticed similar responses to the “unprecedented” times we...

The last time we saw NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission was on July 30, 2020, as it disappeared into the black of deep space on a trajectory for Mars. But with NASA's Eyes on the Solar System, you can follow in real time as humanity's most sophisticated rover—and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter traveling with it—treks millions of miles over the next six months to Jezero Crater.

A brand new giant panda cub is sparking pandemic-fueled panda-mania, and officials at the National Zoo said traffic on their livestream spiked 1,200% over the past week.

Two tropical storms advanced across the Caribbean on Saturday as potentially historic threats to the U.S. Gulf Coast, one dumping rain on Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Hispaniola while the other swept into the gulf through the gap between Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba.

Schools across the United States are facing shortages and long delays, of up to several months, in getting this year's most crucial back-to-school supplies: the laptops and other equipment needed for online learning, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Dr Dominic Pimenta resigned from his cardiology post after Boris Johnson’s chief advisor made his controversial car journey. Was it the right decision?On 24 May, a couple of days after it was revealed that Dominic Cummings had travelled to Durham during the lockdown, a British cardiologist, Dr Dominic Pimenta, published a tweet in which he threatened to resign if Cummings did not. For Pimenta,...

Don’t be misled. It is political judgments, not obscure equations, which are doing so much to damage our children’s futuresWhat children know and too many politicians seem not to: a few years ago, the psychologists Alex Shaw and Kristina Olson ran an experiment in which they told young children about two boys, Dan and Mark, who had cleaned up their room and were to be rewarded with rubbers...

Canadian companies are playing catch-up to their European counterparts on most environmental and social issues, since most large oil companies in Europe have already made major carbon-reduction decisions and have linked environmental performance to compensation for several...

Despite long workdays and promising early results, researchers at VIDO-InterVac in Saskatoon say a lack of manufacturing capacity is slowing down their efforts at a made-in-Canada vaccine. That matters, given concerns over "vaccine nationalism," which could prevent access to a product that's not made at...

If a national crisis like COVID-19 can't push the government to kickstart action aimed at meeting its promises on national broadband, it's unclear what can, writes Erin...

Flight of the Monarch Day was held in Toronto Saturday, as well as various other locations across Canada, in an effort to raise awareness around declining monarch butterfly populations and ways to help the fluttering...

While some scientists believe the virus has become less deadly, others look at the factors that suggest otherwiseAre Covid-19 death rates decreasing?Most statistics indicate that although cases of Covid-19 are rising in many parts of Europe and the United States, the number of deaths and cases of severe complications remain relatively low. For example, patients on ventilators have dropped from...

Thirty years ago we were warned. Now is our last chance to listenThirty years ago this week, the population of Earth was given official notification that it faced a threat of unprecedented magnitude. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, spewed into the atmosphere from factories and vehicles burning fossil fuels, were pinpointed, definitively, as triggers of future climate...

‘Stunned’ scientists say there is little doubt global heating is to blame for the lossA total of 28 trillion tonnes of ice have disappeared from the surface of the Earth since 1994. That is stunning conclusion of UK scientists who have analysed satellite surveys of the planet’s poles, mountains and glaciers to measure how much ice coverage lost because of global heating triggered by rising...

In June, India began using cheaper, faster but less accurate tests to scale up testing for the coronavirus — a strategy that the United States is now considering. Cases surged faster than labs could scale up testing once India’s harsh lockdown was relaxed. Samples tested using both tests increased from 5.6 million in mid-June to 26 million two months later, and nearly a third of all tests...