Humans rely on a bevy of strange natural chemicals to liven up our food and drink, to endure pain, and to change our perspective. We use caffeine from coffee, tea, and yerba mate to stimulate our bodies and minds, capsaicin from red pepper flakes or isothiocyanates in horseradish or wasabi to enliven our food with spice, and codeine or morphine to endure the pain of injuries and surgeries....

Caviar has never gone out of style, but these days, it’s particularly in demand. In the last year or so, the upmarket delicacy has begun to make regular appearances in over-the-top stunt foods, such as garnishing fried fish sandwiches, and highbrow-lowbrow trendy pairings like caviar-topped Pringles. Market research suggests that U.S. sales are expected to surpass $400 million this...

The globe is speeding to 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius (4.5 to 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming since pre-industrial times, set to blow well past the agreed-upon international climate threshold, a United Nations report calculated. To have an even money shot at keeping warming to the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) limit adopted by the 2015 Paris climate agreement,...

SpaceX launched its mega rocket Starship but lost both the booster and the spacecraft in a pair of explosions minutes into Saturday’s test flight. The rocketship reached space following liftoff from South Texas before communication suddenly was lost. SpaceX officials said it appears the ship’s self-destruct system blew it up over the Gulf of Mexico. [time-brightcove...

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says. The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released Tuesday with details that bring...

The world is off track in its efforts to curb global warming in 41 of 42 important measurements and is even heading in the wrong direction in six crucial ways, a new international report calculates. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The only bright spot is that global sales of electric passenger vehicles are now on track to match what’s needed — along with many...

BILLINGS, Mont. — Astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded Apollo 8’s historic Christmas 1968 flight that circled the moon 10 times and paved the way for the lunar landing the next year, has died. He was 95. Borman died Tuesday in Billings, Montana, according to NASA. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Borman also led troubled Eastern Airlines in the 1970s and...

The last 12 months were the hottest earth has ever recorded, according to a new report by Climate Central, a nonprofit science research group. The peer-reviewed report says burning gasoline, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels that release planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide, and other human activities, caused the unnatural warming from November 2022 to October 2023....

This October was the hottest on record globally, 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the pre-industrial average for the month — and the fifth straight month with such a mark in what will now almost certainly be the warmest year ever recorded. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] October was a whopping 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer...

Cheetahs are usually daytime hunters, but the speedy big cats will shift their activity toward dawn and dusk hours during warmer weather, a new study finds. Unfortunately for endangered cheetahs, that sets them up for more potential conflicts with mostly nocturnal competing predators such as lions and leopards, say the authors of research published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of...

LOS ANGELES — Ken Mattingly, an astronaut who is best remembered for his efforts on the ground that helped bring the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft safely back to Earth, has died, NASA announced. He was 87. “We lost one of our country’s heroes on Oct. 31,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Thomas...

My closest brush with motherhood was an intense 24 hours fostering an orphaned baby owl monkey in the Peruvian Amazon in 2009. According to Charles Darwin, my maternal drive should have transformed me into an intuitively wise and selfless nurse. But the truth was I felt quite traumatized—fretful, exhausted, and for the sake of my defiled and defecated hair alone (the baby was happiest...

James Hansen first warned Congress of the threat from climate change in 1988. Today, in a controversial new peer-reviewed paper published in Oxford Open Climate Change, he brings a new warning: Scientists are underestimating how fast the planet is warming. And the crisis will have to be met, in part, with geoengineering. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] According to the...

In a little more than five years – sometime in early 2029 – the world will likely be unable to stay below the internationally agreed temperature limit for global warming if it continues to burn fossil fuels at its current rate, a new study says. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The study moves three years closer the date when the world will eventually hit a...

No matter how much the world cuts back on carbon emissions, a key and sizable chunk of Antarctica is essentially doomed to an “unavoidable” melt, a new study found. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Though the full melt will take hundreds of years, slowly adding nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) to sea levels, it will be enough to reshape where and how people live in the...

In the midst of a heat wave in Nova Scotia, Canada, this July, humans sought out air conditioning and shelter in the shade. Fish in the Wrights River, meanwhile, converged on what patches of deeper, cooler water they could find, like holes in the streambed out of the sun’s glare. One of those areas of relief, though, hadn’t occurred naturally. It had been created by humans...

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s been a month since a Maryland man became the second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig—and hospital video released Friday shows he’s working hard to recover. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Lawrence Faucette was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant when doctors at the...

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network. Some 13,000 chemicals are associated with plastic production, of which only 7,000 or so have been investigated for their health and environmental impacts. Nearly half of those studied have elements deemed hazardous to human health, but the research—spanning 50 years, multiple languages,...

With warmer oceans serving as fuel, Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to rapidly intensify from wimpy minor hurricanes to powerful and catastrophic, a study said Thursday. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Last month Hurricane Lee went from barely a hurricane at 80 mph (129 kph) to the most powerful Category 5 hurricane with 155 mph (249 kph)...

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] (CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA’s Psyche spacecraft rocketed away Friday on a six-year journey to a rare metal-covered asteroid. Most asteroids tend to be rocky or icy, and this is the first exploration of a metal world. Scientists believe it may be the battered remains of an early planet’s core, and could shed light on the...

From the Pacific Northwest through the Southwest, people in the U.S. will be able to view a celestial spectacle on Saturday night, when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, obscuring the sun’s light, bringing forth this year’s solar eclipse.  [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The 2023 eclipse is an annular solar eclipse, which occurs when the moon is...

Four dozen Antarctic ice shelves have shrunk by at least 30% since 1997 and 28 of those have lost more than half of their ice in that time, reports a new study that surveyed these crucial “gatekeepers’’ between the frozen continent’s massive glaciers and open ocean. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Of the continent’s 162 ice shelves, 68 show...

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] (CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA on Wednesday showed off its first asteroid samples delivered last month by a spacecraft — the most ever returned to Earth. Scientists and space agency leaders took part in the reveal at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The ancient black dust and chunks are from the carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu,...

(PORTLAND, Maine) — Whales, dolphins and seals living in U.S. waters face major threats from warming ocean temperatures, rising sea levels and decreasing sea ice volumes associated with climate change, according to a first-of-its-kind assessment. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration examined more than 100...

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] After a summer of record-smashing heat, warming somehow got even worse in September as Earth set a new mark for how far above normal temperatures were, the European climate agency reported Thursday. Last month’s average temperature was 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1991-2020 average for September. That’s...

Five years ago someone found a baby owl, near-death, on their lawn. The wildlife rehabber who stabilized her consulted with me because of my experience with owls and hawks. Eventually my wife and I undertook the task of conditioning “Alfie” for a soft release; waiting out a developmental delay (most of her flight feathers came abnormally late that first summer), then flight...

The world’s frogs, salamanders, newts and other amphibians remain in serious trouble. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] A new global assessment has found that 41% of amphibian species that scientists have studied are threatened with extinction, meaning they are either vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. That’s up from 39% reported in the last...

The laureates of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry have been officially announced, hours after their names were leaked in what appeared to be an inadvertently sent email. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The winners, for achievements in the field of nanotechnology, are Moungi G. Bawendi from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Louis E. Brus from Columbia...

(STOCKHOLM) — The Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three scientists who look at electrons in atoms during the tiniest of split seconds. Pierre Agostini of The Ohio State University in the U.S.; Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany; and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University in Sweden won the...

A nine-mile trip from the airport in Dhaka, the bustling capital of Bangladesh, to Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed Park, near downtown, can take as long as 55 minutes, according to Google Maps. A trip of the same distance in Flint, Michigan, from the airport to the Sloan Museum of Discovery, takes about nine minutes. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] While we might expect a...

Few people take the time to give thanks to American astrologer Richard Noelle. Astrology as a whole may not have contributed much to the advancement of science, but that doesn’t mean that an astrologer’s ideas can’t have a very big impact. In 1979, Noelle had a good idea indeed, when he coined the now-ubiquitous term “supermoon.” [time-brightcove...

The rivalry between Asia’s two biggest countries has extended into outer space. After India’s landing of its Chandrayaan-3 rover on the moon last month—becoming the first country to put a spacecraft near the lunar south pole and breaking China’s record for the southernmost lunar landing—a top Chinese scientist has said claims about the accomplishment are...

(DUBAI, United Arab Emirates) — Iran claimed on Wednesday that it successfully launched an imaging satellite into space, a move that could further ratchet up tensions with Western nations that fear its space technology could be used to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s Communication Minister Isa Zarepour said the Noor-3 satellite had been put in an orbit 450 kilometers (280...

Infrared sensors on the ground detected the heat signature of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s sample-return capsule when it slammed into the atmosphere at more than 45,000 km/h (27,650 mph), at 8:42 a.m. MDT today. The 46 kg (101 lbs.) capsule was dropped off by its much larger OSIRIS-REx mother ship as that spacecraft went whizzing briefly by Earth. The capsule hit the air off the coast...