Remnants from a massive Chinese rocket booster crashed back to Earth on Saturday over the Indian Ocean, space officials from the US and China confirmed. It remains unclear what path the debris from the booster might take, US Space Command said on Twitter on Saturday, referring questions to the Chinese government. China’s spaceflight agency said wreckage of the 23-metric-ton (25.4 tons)...

The lunar club is an elite one. Since the dawn of the space age, only the U.S., Russia, China, Japan, India, Israel, and the European Space Agency have sent spacecraft to land on or orbit the moon. On August 2, as Nature reports, that rarefied group will add a new member, when South Korea’s Danuri (which means “enjoy the moon”) probe is launched from the Kennedy Space Center...

You can tell you’ve left the American segment of the International Space Station (ISS) and entered the Russian segment when the walls go from white to salmon-colored. It’s a singularly unlovely salmon, and if Russian designers had to do it over again perhaps they’d have picked up a different can of paint. Either way, the color had a meaning: the U.S. and Russia—old Cold...

Two climate-related health risks are converging with alarming frequency: record high temperatures, and air pollution from things like car exhaust and wildfire smoke. Separately, these conditions can make people acutely sick and exacerbate existing health problems. But what happens when they coincide? Recently, researchers at the University of Southern California set out to answer that question....

Matt Higgins and his team of researchers at the University of Oxford had a problem. For years, they had been studying the parasite that spreads malaria, a disease that still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. They had identified an important protein on the surface of the parasite as a focal point for a potential future vaccine. They knew its underlying chemical code. But the...

How long the COVID-19 pandemic will last is one of the biggest questions facing the world at present—and one of the major issues addressed at the TIME100 Health Summit that took place on July 15. At the summit, White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Ashish Jha said this pandemic will end, just as all previous pandemics have ended, but that’s not likely to happen in the next few months....

(LONDON, England) — James Lovelock, the British environmental scientist whose influential Gaia theory sees the Earth as a living organism gravely imperiled by human activity, has died on his 103rd birthday. Lovelock’s family said Wednesday that he died the previous evening at his home in southwest England “surrounded by his family.” The family said his health had...

Debris from a Chinese rocket is set to crash to Earth some time over the next few days, with the potential for wreckage to land across a wide swathe of the globe. Part of a Long March 5B rocket China launched on July 24 will make an uncontrolled reentry around July 31, according to the Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit based in El Segundo, California, that receives U.S. funding. The possible debris...

(MOSCOW, Russia) — Russia will pull out of the International Space Station after 2024 and focus on building its own orbiting outpost, the country’s new space chief said Tuesday amid high tensions between Moscow and the West over the fighting in Ukraine. Yuri Borisov, appointed this month to lead the state space agency, Roscosmos, said during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin...

First comes the art, them comes the science. Just over a week after NASA dazzled the world with the first clutch of images from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers working with one of the pictures believe they have found the oldest galaxy ever imaged—one dating back 13.5 billion years, or just 300 million years after the Big Bang, report Space.com and others. The age of a galaxy is...

You could go your entire life without thinking about a collet. Indeed, you could go your entire life without even knowing what a collet is, and if we stopped right here you’d be no worse off. For the record, though, a collet is a small ring of metal, about the size of a fist, and, as NASA announced at a July 20 press conference, at the moment, it’s the biggest thing standing in the...

The diary industry is a big polluter. A new type of milk offers a more climate-friendly option.

The monarch butterfly fluttered a step closer to extinction Thursday, as scientists put the iconic orange-and-black insect on the endangered list because of its fast dwindling numbers. “It’s just a devastating decline,” said Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University who was not involved in the new listing. “This is one of the most recognizable butterflies in the...

Houston, Texas, is experiencing its hottest summer on record, with sizzling stretches of triple digit days and rolling blackouts caused by extreme power demand. Lena Arango, a local meteorologist at FOX26, wanted her viewers to understand why. “The temperatures we’re experiencing today are five times more likely [because of] climate change,” she said on a TV forecast earlier...

It’s no easy feat to get much of the the population of the world to pay attention to the same thing on the same day at the same moment. There are 7.5 billion of us, scattered across seven continents, 195 countries, and 24 time zones. Catching the attention of even a small fraction of that teeming mass of humanity is no small feat. And truth be told, this past Tuesday, July 12, NASA indeed...

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA astronauts will go back to riding Russian rockets under an agreement announced Friday, and Russian cosmonauts will catch lifts to the International Space Station with SpaceX beginning this fall. The agreement ensures that the space station will always have at least one American and Russian on board to keep both sides of the orbiting outpost running smoothly,...

The big reveal of pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope are not just dazzling; they also pack a lot of science.

A Q&A with TIME

New York researchers transplanted pig hearts into two brain-dead people over the last month, the latest in a string of developments in the long quest to one day save human lives with animal organs. The experiments announced Tuesday come after a historic but failed attempt earlier this year to use a pig’s heart to save a dying Maryland man — sort of a rehearsal before scientists try...

This glimpse into the history of the universe will usher in a "new phase of scientific discovery"

Our view of the universe just expanded: The first image from NASA’s new space telescope unveiled Monday is brimming with galaxies and offers the deepest look of the cosmos ever captured. The first image from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is the farthest humanity has ever seen in both time and distance, closer to the dawn of time and the edge of the universe. That image will be...

It was only eight years ago that German space station astronaut Alexander Gerst threatened, as he put it, to kick his crewmate’s butt. The butt in question belonged to American astronaut Reid Wiseman and the kicking, happily, would be administered only by proxy. It was June 26, 2014 and the U.S. and Germany were about to face off in the World Cup. Gerst’s playful taunt (“I hope...