The James Webb Space Telescope traveled nearly 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) to reach a destination that, in some ways, is nowhere at all. On Jan. 24, just shy of one month after its Christmas Day launch, the $10 billion observatory arrived at a spot in space known as L2—where the gravity of the sun and the Earth effectively cancel each other out, allowing the spacecraft to circle an...

Climate change has its winners and losers. As global temperatures rise, some species will find themselves squeezed out of suitable living arrangements while others—for a while at least—will see new opportunities opening up. The same goes for what we eat and drink. A new study published in the scientific journal PLOS One zeros in on how climate change will impact some of the food and...

New research suggests giving extra cash to low-income mothers can change their infants’ brain development. Brain measurements at age 1 showed faster activity in key brain regions in infants whose low-income families received $300-plus monthly for a year, compared with those who got $20 each month, U.S. researchers reported Monday. The same type of brain activity has been linked in older...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The world’s biggest, most powerful space telescope reached its final destination 1 million miles from Earth on Monday, a month after it lifted off on a quest to behold the dawn of the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope fired its rocket thrusters for nearly five minutes to go into orbit around the sun at its designated spot, and NASA confirmed the...

Mars is both a wonderful and a terrible place to go looking for life. On the one hand, the planet is a wasteland, where wintertime temperatures plunge to -153º C (-225º F), and the atmosphere—such as it is—is just 1% the density of Earth’s and composed principally of carbon dioxide. On the other hand, the Red Planet wasn’t always such a wreck. For the first...

Researchers on Thursday reported the latest in a surprising string of experiments in the quest to save human lives with organs from genetically modified pigs. This time around, surgeons in Alabama transplanted a pig’s kidneys into a brain-dead man—a step-by-step rehearsal for an operation they hope to try in living patients possibly later this year. “The organ shortage is in...

In September 1965, James Stockdale was a naval wing commander on his third tour of combat duty over North Vietnam. Flying just above the treetops at nearly 600 miles-per-hour, his A-4 Skyhawk jet ran into a barrage of flak. The plane caught fire and Stockdale ejected. Upon landing he was captured by North Vietnamese troops who beat him so badly that he walked with a limp for the rest of his...

Renowned Israeli gastronome Michal Ansky knows her food. She’s a professional taster and a Master Chef judge. So when she was invited to the world’s first public blind taste test pitting lab-grown, or cultivated, chicken up against a conventionally raised product, she jumped at the chance. It was a historic opportunity, but she was also confident that she would be able to tell the...

Medicare said Tuesday it will limit coverage of a $28,000-a-year Alzheimer’s drug whose benefits have been widely questioned, a major development in the nation’s tug-of-war over the fair value of new medicines that offer tantalizing possibilities but come with prohibitive prices. The initial determination from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services means that patients taking...

In a medical first, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and a Maryland hospital said Monday that he’s doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery. While it’s too soon to know if the operation really will work, it marks a step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Doctors...

When it comes to superstitions, NASA and baseball see the world in different ways. It’s one of baseball’s unwritten rules that when a pitcher is throwing a no-hitter through, say, seven innings, you never, ever mention it out loud. To speak of it is to jinx it, and likelier than not, you’ll get clobbered in the eighth. NASA, clearly, takes a different approach. In the 13 days...

You bring your feverish baby to the hospital in the middle of the night. The nurse asks you to go home to get a flashlight. When the flashlight batteries give out, she resorts to a flickering candle to guide the insertion of an IV needle, delivering malaria medicine, into your baby’s hand. Maybe you don’t have a baby. Maybe you travel 14 miles a day by public bus to buy fresh fish to...

It took Bill Nelson 35 years to go from low-Earth orbit to 300 E. St. in Washington, D.C. Low-Earth orbit is where Nelson, then a U.S. representative from Florida, spent six days as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Columbia, from Jan. 12 to Jan. 18, 1986. He returned to Earth and eventually made his way to the U.S. Senate, serving from 2001 to 2019, and spending much of his tenure...

Don’t you hate it,” says Jon the Robot, gesturing with tiny articulated arms at an expectant crowd, “when you’re trying to solve inverse kinematics equations to pick up a cup and then you get ‘Error 453, no solution found’?” The crowd laughs. “Don’t you hate that?” An experiment billed as a comedy act, Jon is the brainchild of Naomi...

A cup of tea in 2006 changed genetic engineering forever. Jill Banfield, a University of California at Berkeley ecosystem scientist and 1999 MacArthur Foundation fellow, had become curious in 2006 about mysterious repeating DNA sequences that were common in microbes that live in some of the planet’s most extreme environments, such as deep-sea heat vents, acid mines and geysers. She just...

(BEIJING) — China is calling on the United States to protect a Chinese space station and its three-member crew after Beijing complained that satellites launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX nearly struck the station. A foreign ministry spokesman accused Washington on Tuesday of ignoring its treaty obligations to protect the safety of the Tiangong station’s three-member crew following...

From the James Webb Space Telescope to the Perseverance rover, the agency had win after win in 2021

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope rocketed away Saturday on a high-stakes quest to behold light from the first stars and galaxies and scour the universe for hints of life. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope soared from French Guiana on South America’s northeastern coast, riding a European Ariane rocket into the Christmas morning sky. The $10 billion...

Adam McKay's new Netflix comedy may be a farce, but much of the science around how to prevent a comet from colliding with Earth is based in reality

The Hubble's successor is years late and billions over budget, but it might just be worth it

Few things signal something’s gone haywire on the planet quite like frozen land on fire. Now scientists have determined that Arctic fires, even milder ones, can reshape a landscape for decades, in ways that may make it even harder to keep global heating from eclipsing international goals. It’s mostly rising temperatures that are thawing out frozen Arctic ground but northern blazes...

Football star and TV celebrity Michael Strahan hurtled toward space with Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Saturday, sharing the ride with the daughter of America’s first astronaut. The co-host of ABC’s “Good Morning America” and former New York Giant had a football with him as Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket blasted off from West Texas on the planned 10-minute...

When rain—not snow—fell on the highest point of Greenland’s ice sheet this August for the first time in recorded history, it was considered a worrying anomaly related to the regions’ changing climate. Now, a new study led by Canada’s University of Manitoba and co-authored by scientists at the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that it’s...

BERLIN — Scientists from the United States and Europe announced plans Tuesday to create the biggest map of underground fungal networks, arguing they are an important but overlooked piece in the puzzle of how to tackle climate change. By working with local communities around the world the researchers said they will collect 10,000 DNA samples to determine how the vast networks that fungi...