It’s not easy to get from North Lincoln Avenue to the Lake of Death. North Lincoln Avenue is in Pittsburgh; the Lake of Death is on the moon—meaning there’s a tidy 385,000 km (over 239,000 mi.) between them. But before the end of the year, that gap should close—thanks to a modest company in a…

(SYLHET, Bangladesh)—Scientists say climate change is a factor behind the erratic and early rains that triggered unprecedented floods in Bangladesh and northeastern India, killing scores and making lives miserable for millions of others. Although the region is no stranger to flooding, it typically takes place later in the year when monsoon rains are well underway. This year’s...

In some ways, the last place you’d want to put the James Webb Space Telescope is, well, in space. If you owned a $10 billion car, you wouldn’t leave it out in a hail storm, and while there’s no hail in space, there are plenty of micrometeoroids—high speed debris no bigger than a dust grain but moving so fast they can pack a true destructive wallop. Every day, millions of...

Climate change affects everyone, but especially children. Their small bodies—and the fact that they grow so rapidly, starting from the time they’re in utero—make them more vulnerable to toxins, pollution, and other climate-change fallout. Over their lifetimes, kids also face greater exposure to the damage of climate change than adults. A new scientific review article published...

Human beings may be a savage species when we want to be, but we’re also an exceedingly moral one, with a highly evolved sense of right and wrong, good and bad, crime and consequences. Few things illustrate this better than our practice of third-party punishment: meting out penalties against malefactors who have done us no personal harm. The entire criminal and civil justice system is built...

China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery. The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye — the world’s largest radio telescope — differ from previous ones captured and the...

The man who captained the first mission to orbit the moon was not, truth be told, terribly impressed by what he experienced. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, which circled the moon 10 times on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1968, was candid when we chatted one day back in 2015. We met in his private airplane hangar in Billings, Montana, and I asked Borman, now 94, if, living out in big...

NASA has spent more than 60 years flying UFOs. Every spacecraft that ever visited the moon, landed on Mars, buzzed by Jupiter, orbited Saturn, or reconnoitered Pluto would be a decidedly unidentified flying object to any alien intelligence that might encounter it. There may be no such intelligence beyond Earth in our solar system. But in interstellar space? That’s another question....

Nobody would have known if I had touched Neil Armstrong’s moon-walking suit back in 2018. I wasn’t supposed to touch it—indeed, I was forbidden to touch it—but boy, I could have. I was in the restoration lab at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy extension outside of Washington, D.C., and the suit was being mounted on a new mannequin-like armature that...

The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has shot past a key milestone—more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times—and is at levels not seen since millions of years ago when Earth was a hothouse ocean-inundated planet, federal scientists announced Friday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said its long-time monitoring station at Mauna Loa,...

(NEW DELHI, India)—The devastating heat wave that has baked India and Pakistan in recent months was made more likely by climate change and is a glimpse of the region’s future, international scientists said in a study released Monday. The World Weather Attribution group analyzed historical weather data that suggested early, long heat waves that impact a massive geographical area are...

The House Intelligence Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation subcommittee would like to make one thing very clear: They did not spend 90 minutes this morning conducting public hearings into the existence of UFOs. Yes, they were discussing unidentified objects, and yes those objects were seen to be flying, but the term for them today is...

You’d think it would be hard to overlook an object with a mass four million times greater than the sun. But when that object is a supermassive black hole like Sagittarius A*, the giant object astronomers have long believed sits at the center of our galaxy, it is, by definition, impossible to see. Black holes, after all, are collapsed objects with a gravitational pull so great that not even...

The Apollo astronauts faced a lot of challenges in their time on the moon, but having enough to eat was not among them. The longest any of the crews spent on the surface was the three days logged by Apollo 17 in 1972, and even in the astronauts’ tiny lunar module, there was enough room for the shrink-wrapped, pre-packaged provisions they’d need for such a brief camping trip. The next...

The frequency and duration of droughts will continue to increase due to human-caused climate change, with water scarcity already affecting billions of people across the world, the United Nations warned in a report Wednesday. The U.N. desertification agency, which is currently hosting a conference of parties in Abidjan in Ivory Coast, estimates that roughly one third of the world’s...

The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted. With human-made climate change continuing, there’s a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to extend its reach—not just around the world, but into space. For that we have Dmitry Rogozin—an intemperate man in what demands to be a temperate business—to blame. Much of the world came to know Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, back in 2014, when he was deputy prime minister, and Russia had launched its first...

Children who begin identifying as transgender at a young age tend to retain that identity at least for several years, a study published Wednesday suggests. The research involved 317 youngsters who were 3 to 12 years old when they were recruited to the study. Five years later, at the study’s end, 94% were living as transgender and almost two-thirds were using either puberty-blocking...

It’s not hard to keep track of NASA’s big-ticket items—the high visibility spacecraft that generally carry equally high price tags and make very big headlines. There’s the $150 billion International Space Station; the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope; the $2.4 billion Perseverance Mars rover; and then, of course, the trouble-plagued, $4.1 billion-per-flight Space...

It’s a very good thing Carlo Rovelli did not get eaten by a bear in 1976—though even he admits it would have been his own fault. Camping alone in western Canada, he decided to save the money it would have cost him to pitch his tent in a designated area, and picked instead a wilder part of the wilderness. No sooner had he set up camp and prepared to settle in than the grizzly...

At a steel plant in Lulea, Sweden, workers make the world’s most essential construction material the old fashioned way: piling iron ore and coke, a kind of coal-derived fuel, in a huge blast furnace, heating the mixture to enormous temperatures, and then “tapping” the cauldron of molten metal, which sends a stream of white-hot pig iron—and showers of sparks—spilling...

A baby zebrafish is just half the size of a pea. A recent look inside its transparent brain, however, offers clues to the far bigger mystery of how we remember—and how we forget. In an experiment that yielded insights into memory and the brain, a team of researchers at the University of Southern California taught…

A disaster-weary globe will be hit harder in the coming years by even more catastrophes colliding in an interconnected world, a United Nations report issued Monday says. If current trends continue the world will go from around 400 disasters per year in 2015 to an onslaught of about 560 catastrophes a year by 2030, the scientific report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction...

Scientists say last summer was the hottest summer on record in Europe, with temperatures a full 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average for the previous three decades. A report released Friday by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service found that while spring 2021 was cooler than average, the summer months were marked by “severe and...

It’s hard not to love Europa. It is far and away the most promising of Jupiter’s 79 moons, covered in a rind of water ice perhaps 30 km (18 mi.) thick. Beneath the ice lies a salty, globe-girdling ocean that astronomers estimate could be up to 150 km (93 mi.) deep. As its larger sister moons—Io, Ganymede and Callisto—pass by in their orbits, their gravity causes Europa to...

The Biden administration is launching a $6 billion effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing, citing the need to continue nuclear energy as a carbon-free source of power that helps to combat climate change. A certification and bidding process opened Tuesday for a civil nuclear credit program that is intended to bail out financially distressed owners or operators of nuclear power...

To the uninitiated, psilocybin—the substance that gives ‘magic mushrooms’ their psychedelic qualities—could be dismissed as a recreational drug. Like many other psychedelics, it is banned by the U.S. government as a Schedule 1 substance, meaning it supposedly has high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use in treatment. However, to many medical science...

BEIJING — Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after six months aboard their country’s newest orbital station in the longest crewed mission to date for China’s ambitious space program. The Shenzhou 13 space capsule landed in the Gobi desert in the northern region of Inner Mongolia, shown live on state TV. During the mission, astronaut Wang Yaping carried out...

It is a fact of orbital mechanics that the moon is steadily receding from the Earth. Every year the distance between the two worlds grows by 3.78 cm (1.48 in.), or about the speed at which our fingernails grow. That’s not much compared to the overall 384,472 km (238,900 mi.) average distance between the Earth and the moon, and there’s no reason to worry that the moon will be bidding...

Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Dwayne Haskins was killed in an auto accident Saturday in Florida. Haskins’ agent, Cedric Saunders, told ESPN about the quarterback’s death, and the Steelers released a statement extending their condolences. “I am devastated and at a loss for words with the unfortunate passing of Dwayne Haskins,” Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said. “He...

The dining will be fine aboard the International Space Station (ISS) throughout the next week. Flying 408 km (254 mi.) above the Earth and clipping along at a brisk 28,000 km/h (17,500 mph), the crew will be tucking into arroz Estelle Valencia, a Spanish rice dish; secreto de cerdo with pisto—Ibérico Pork with tomatoes, onions, eggplant, and peppers; and chicken and mushroom...

Decades ago, the state of California tried to strike a major blow against climate change, and failed. The state passed an ambitious rule in 1990 mandating car companies slowly begin replacing their offerings with electric vehicles (EVs). But in 2002, the state backed off the policy. Part of the reason was political—car companies, aided by the Bush Administration, were fighting the state...

Swiss startup Climeworks AG has raised 600 million francs ($650 million) to scale up its technology that sucks carbon dioxide directly from the air. The world has to reach peak greenhouse-gas emissions before 2025 to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to a major United Nations report published Monday. But most scenarios that keep warming within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels...

Liz Marshall’s latest release, Meat the Future, will be available for streaming April 5 on Apple TV, Amazon, and Google Play. The feature length-documentary charts the birth of a new technological innovation that grows meat from stem cells instead of animals, reducing the need for industrial agriculture and ending slaughter. She tells the story through Uma Valeti, a cardiologist-turned...

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to prevent the worst of climate change would be relatively cheap and technologically feasible, but governments and financial bodies are failing to do so as they continue to prop up the fossil fuel industry. That’s the conclusion of a landmark report published Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report...

(GENEVA, Switzerland) — The U.N. health agency says nearly everybody in the world breathes air that doesn’t meet its standards for air quality, calling for more action to reduce fossil-fuel use, which generates pollutants that cause respiratory and blood-flow problems and lead to millions of preventable deaths each year. The World Health Organization, about six months after...

There are people in their 30s who have never lived in a world without the Hubble Space Telescope peering into the cosmos. The venerable observatory was launched in April 1990, back when George H.W. Bush was in the White House, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the number one box office hit, and gas went for a buck a gallon. It’s only fitting then that this week, the very old telescope made...

It was all smiles and thumbs-up on March 30, at 5:28 PM local time, when NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov thumped down in the steppes of Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft—and with good reason. For one thing, Vande Hei had just completed a marathon 355 consecutive…

The first human genome was mapped in 2001 as part of the Human Genome Project, but researchers knew it was neither complete nor completely accurate. Now, scientists have produced the most completely sequenced human genome to date, filling in gaps and correcting mistakes in the previous version. The sequence is the most complete reference genome for any mammal so far. The findings from six new...

(Grand Portage, Minn.) — To administer this COVID test, Todd Kautz had to lay on his belly in the snow and worm his upper body into the narrow den of a hibernating black bear. Training a light on its snout, Kautz carefully slipped a long cotton swab into the bear’s nostrils five times. For postdoctoral researcher Kautz and a team of other wildlife experts, tracking the coronavirus...

Sarah Al Amiri knows the importance of cultivating diversity in science. Indeed, she assembled a team that included 80% women to help the United Arab Emirates, a nation of fewer than 10 million people, join the ultra-exclusive Mars exploration club. Al Amari, 35, paid tribute to the power of representation Monday night as she accepted her TIME 100 Impact Award at the Museum of the Future in...

An ice shelf the size of New York City has collapsed in East Antarctica, an area long thought to be stable and not hit much by climate change, concerned scientists said Friday. The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse. It happened at the beginning of a freakish warm spell last week when temperatures soared...

Time was, there were only nine known planets in the entire universe—the gaggle of worlds that orbit our sun. That local number was reduced to eight in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union busted Pluto down to a dwarf planet. But even before Pluto was pink-slipped, the planetary census far deeper in space began to grow, with the discovery, in 1992, of a planet orbiting a rapidly...

It’s hard not to love the Kepler Space Telescope. Launched in 2009, the venerable spacecraft discovered nearly 5,000 suspected or confirmed exoplanets—or worlds orbiting other stars—during its 11-year lifetime. Built and launched at a relative bargain price of $600 million, it generated 4,306 scientific papers written by 9,606 authors. So all good, right? Well, not entirely. In...

In the depths of the Californian winter, an ember of hope has flickered for the monarch butterfly, the charismatic and beloved visitor that has seemingly been on a graceful descent into oblivion. The annual mass migration of the orange and black butterflies to the coast of California, as well as a separate odyssey the creatures…

There is absolutely nothing special about the star known to astronomers as 2MASS J17554042+6551277. It’s a nice bright star, yes—about 16 times brighter than the sun. And it’s located relatively close to Earth, as these things go—about 2,000 light years away. But it’s just one of up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and until recently, nobody gave it a lot of...

During a lull between air raid warnings earlier this month, Iryna Nikolaieva sat in a stairwell of a Kyiv bomb shelter where she had been living for three days and called engineers at two chemical plants near the front lines in the country’s east. Nikolaiva worked as an expert on hazardous waste, and she worried that fighting near the facilities could damage earthen dams holding back...

Before Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine last month, Olena Pareniuk and Kateryna Shavanova worked at Chernobyl studying microorganisms in the exclusion zone and those living in the radioactive lava inside the site’s collapsed No. 4 reactor. Both are currently in Ukraine (Shavanova is in Kyiv while Pareniuk is near Chernivtsi). Writing together, they corresponded with TIME...

Pfizer Inc. said it would no longer start new clinical trials in Russia and that it would donate all profits from its subsidiary in the country to Ukraine relief causes. At the same time, the drugmaker said in a statement that it will continue to supply medicines to Russia, out of fear that vulnerable patients such as children and elderly people who rely on its therapies could be harmed by any...