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...

Evolution got especially creative when it came to sex

On its face, 1966 was a very good year to be a consumer. A gallon of milk would set you back just 42 cents. A pack of cigarettes went for 30 cents. And a gallon of gas—which today is topping $5 in some places as the war in Ukraine and the cutoff of Russian oil push prices higher—went for just 31 cents. And what, just for the record, did it cost to finance the greatest space program...

The conflict in Ukraine has far reaching consequences for climate change and the Arctic

Three-quarters of the Amazon rainforest may be speeding toward a “tipping point” that, if passed, could leave the world’s critical tropical biome a relatively dry savanna within a few decades, according to new research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change. Researchers for years have used complicated models to project if or when the region might cross such a...

'Any other option would have caused more pain,' says John Garretson, whose son's body was dissolved via aquamation, a rarely used alternative to flame cremation or burial

Ukraine is not the only theater of conflict in the current war between Russia and the former Soviet republic. The 30 nations of NATO are coordinating sanctions, sending supplies, and moving troops and weaponry into position to defend the alliance from a wider war. All 193 member countries of the United Nations are involved too, as the U.N. scheduled an emergency meeting of the General...

After decades of failure to stop emissions rising, a landmark new report released Monday from the United Nations’ climate-science body warns that the impacts of climate change are here and now humans need to accelerate efforts to adapt. “It is unequivocal that climate change has already disrupted human and natural systems,” states the report’s summary for policymakers....

Sarah Al Amiri was in COVID-19 quarantine after arriving in Japan in July 2020 when she learned news beyond anything she had ever dreamed of: while scrolling through Twitter to pass the time, she learned that the government of the United Arab Emirates was reshuffling some of its higher ranking offices and officers and that Amiri, now 35, was being appointed chairwoman of the United Arab Emirates...

(Paris, France)—The International Energy Agency said Wednesday that emissions of planet-warming methane from oil, gas, and coal production are significantly higher than governments claim. The Paris-based agency said its analysis shows emissions are 70% higher than the official figure provided by governments worldwide. If all leaks were plugged, the methane captured would be enough to...

WASHINGTON—America’s national bird is more beleaguered than previously believed, with nearly half of bald eagles tested across the U.S. showing signs of chronic lead exposure, according to a study published Thursday. While the bald eagle population has rebounded from the brink of extinction since the U.S. banned the pesticide DDT in 1972, harmful levels of toxic lead were found in...

The seas lapping against America’s coastlines are rising ever faster and will be 10 to 12 inches higher by the year 2050, with major Eastern cities hit regularly with costly floods even on sunny days, a government report says. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and six other federal agencies issued a 111-page report Tuesday that warns of “significant...

The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds. A dramatic drying in 2021—about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region—pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the...

The charitable sector should hope that billionaire Jared Isaacman keeps seeking new adventures. Isaacman, who turned a payments-processing firm he started as a teenager into a multibillion-dollar company, periodically indulges his passion for aviation with head-turning flights. Each time, a prominent charity has joined the ride — and the stakes keep getting bigger. In 2009, Isaacman set a...

Planned home births account for a tiny but growing share of U.S. births

Let’s start with the good news: There is no danger to anyone on the ground from the flock of 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites that are currently plunging from orbit and heading for Earth, knocked from the sky by a geomagnetic storm originating from the sun. Atmospheric drag will easily incinerate the small, 260 kg (575 lb.) satellites before they reach the surface. As for the bad news? Well,...