In a world getting used to extreme weather, 2023 is starting out more bonkers than ever and meteorologists are saying it’s natural weather weirdness with a bit of help from human-caused climate change. Much of what’s causing problems worldwide is coming out of a roiling Pacific Ocean, transported by a wavy jet stream, experts said. At least one highway in drought-mired California...

(LONDON, U.K.) — Britain had its warmest year on record in 2022, official figures showed Thursday, the latest evidence that climate change is transforming Europe’s weather. The Met Office weather agency said the provisional annual average temperature in the U.K. was 10.03 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit), the highest since comparable records began in 1884. The previous record was 9.88...

2022 was full of challenges, but it was also a year of milestones toward a better future, scientific breakthroughs, human progress.

Nobody knows for certain what the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi did or didn’t say at the lunch with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that took place in 1950. But as the perhaps apocryphal story has it, Fermi was holding forth on the sheer number of stars in the sky and the sheer number of intelligent civilizations the planets orbiting them might...

The tweet that came from Mars Monday morning actually didn’t originate from anywhere near there. It came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the mission of the Mars InSight lander is managed. Still, the message was a poignant one. “My power’s really low,” read the tweet, which was accompanied by a picture taken by the spacecraft,...

The universe is thought to harbor uncounted worlds that are home to water. The one we know best, of course, is our own, and as of 3:46 a.m. PT this morning, we set about working to know it better still. That was the moment, as NASA reports, that the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite blasted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to begin a three year campaign to study the height...

Things got dicey yesterday aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Late in the day, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk when exterior cameras showed a stream of white flakes pouring from the Soyuz spacecraft attached to the station. Simultaneously, telemetry indicated a drop in pressure in the Soyuz’s coolant tank, indicating that it...

Mid-September, 2022, was not a good time to be living along the Bering Coast in Western Alaska. That was the week Typhoon Merbok, a Category One storm, struck the region, packing sustained winds of 130 km/h (80 mph), causing 15 m (50 ft.) waves and inundating communities along 1,600 km (1,000 mi.) of coastline. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy declared a state of disaster on Sept. 17, saying at the...

The most striking, influential, and surprising photojournalism published by TIME in 2022, selected by TIME's photo editors.

In some ways, scientists at the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) have been a bit down and out. The $3.5 billion facility was designed to replicate the atom-smashing reactions that occur inside the sun, a difficult process that requires enormous amounts of heat and pressure, and could theoretically solve humanity’s energy and climate woes. But technical...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has ticked a lot of boxes in the near year it’s been aloft. Fly safely to its appointed spot in space 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) from Earth? Check. Successfully deploy its mirror, scientific instruments, and tennis court-sized sun shield? Check. Begin returning eye-popping images like none ever seen before? Check. Now, the Webb has delivered on its...

NASA picked a very good morning to return from the moon. It was 50 years ago today that the crew of Apollo 17 landed in the Taurus Littrow Valley on the lunar surface, where they planted the last of six flags Apollo crews would leave behind to mark their moments in history. Today, the space agency planted a new, if symbolic flag, when the Artemis 1 mission’s Orion crew capsule splashed...

One of the great differences between Mars and Earth involves what’s going on beneath the surface. Our planet remains a tectonically and volcanically active world—witness the current eruptions in Hawaii—while Mars has been a cold, geologically dead place for the past three billion years. That was the thinking at least. But a new paper in Nature Astronomy challenges that accepted...

The crew of Apollo 8 had a lot of things on their minds when they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 27, 1968, after becoming the first humans to orbit the moon—and one of the biggest was the matter of the sharks. The spacecraft hit the water at 4:51 a.m. Hawaiian-Aleutian time, more than an hour before the Pacific sunrise. A recovery crew of Navy frogmen was standing by on the...

A swear word is like a linguistic punch in the nose. Virtually every language and culture has them—and virtually every language and culture formally disapproves of them. But that doesn’t stop them from being used widely, loudly, and lustily. What gives a swear word its power is partly its meaning—typically referring coarsely to bodily parts and functions—and partly its...

(MOMBASA, Kenya) — Scientists around the world are warning governments who will be gathering in Montreal this week for the United Nations biodiversity summit to not repeat past mistakes and are urging officials to “avoid trade-offs” between people and conservation needs in a report Monday. The study published in the One Earth Journal found that even though there has been an...

Cannabis might still be banned federally, but most U.S. adults (88%) say it should be legal, according to a Nov. 22 Pew Research Center poll—and in nearly half of states, it is. Like any psychoactive substance, however, cannabis comes with some health risks, especially for children and adolescents. Over the last two decades, cannabis cases have flooded hotlines U.S. Poison Control...

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket officially became the most powerful rocket ever flown when it lifted off in the early morning hours of Nov. 16, putting out a prodigious 4 million kg (8.8 million lbs) of thrust. That comfortably beat the old record holder—the Apollo era’s Saturn 5, with its 3.4 million kg (7.5 million lbs) of thrust. But the SLS won’t hold...

Nicole Mann was busy growing dwarf tomatoes aboard the International Space Station (ISS) this morning just before I reached her by phone, in a call patched from New York through Mission Control in Houston, Texas, and up to the station, orbiting 400 km (250 mi.) above the Earth. Dwarf tomatoes are no minor thing for a station program preparing human beings for long-term stays on the moon and...

On May 26, 2022, Joe Garcia died suddenly of a heart attack just two days after his wife, Irma, was killed in the Uvalde, Texas school shooting. The papers reported a Garcia’s family member saying, “I truly believe Joe died of a broken heart.” As a cardiac scientist working in this field, I am regularly asked to comment on tragic cases like these. Sometimes they are celebrities...

About 140 million babies were born globally last year—the equivalent of adding an entire new Russia to the world’s population. Not counted among those typically blessed events are the number of families whose pregnancies end tragically. According to the United Nations Interagency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, about 2 million pregnancies around the world end in stillbirth each...

Richard Wang is trying to bring lighter, more powerful batteries to the world. The best way to do that, he says, is by electrifying airplanes. Wang is the founder and CEO of battery startup Cuberg, which is trying to use new, advanced chemical combinations to develop better batteries than the lithium-ion cells that serve as workhorses for laptops, cell phones, and electric vehicles. There are a...

Searching for an explanation for compulsive shopping, I recently ran across the story of a woman who couldn’t stop buying rabbits. Her husband told doctors that each day, she would visit the market and return home with yet another furry creature in a compulsive habit that appeared almost like an addiction. Then she would feel guilty about all the rabbits she had purchased. The reason this...