Spring is almost here — officially, at least.
The vernal equinox arrives on Tuesday, marking the start of the spring season for the Northern Hemisphere.
But what does that actually mean? Here’s what to know about how we split up the year using the Earth’s orbit.What is the equinox?
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As the Earth travels around...
If you’re like millions of people worldwide, Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, is very much on your mind this week. That’s because of a royal kerfuffle that erupted recently, when Middleton—who had not been seen in public since January when she underwent abdominal surgery—released a cheery Mother’s Day photo of herself and her children. The next day, the...
SpaceX’s mega rocket blasted off on another test flight Thursday and made it farther than two previous attempts, but the spacecraft was lost as it descended back to Earth.
The company said it lost contact with the spacecraft as it neared its goal, a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, about an hour after liftoff from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border.
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Space One Co., a Japanese startup backed by Canon Inc., failed to send its first rocket to space, a major setback in efforts to join a booming market for commercial launches.
The lightweight Kairos rocket exploded in flames just seconds after taking off around 11 a.m. Wednesday morning local time from Space Port Kii, about 420 kilometers (260 miles) southwest of Tokyo. Live footage...
WASHINGTON — For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records — with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus.
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The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fueled global hot streak includes...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo astronauts fell silent Thursday, a week after breaking a leg at touchdown and tipping over near the lunar south pole.
Read More: TIME’s Original 1969 Coverage of Apollo 11
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Intuitive Machines’ lander, Odysseus, lasted longer than the...
The Equatic Process, a novel carbon removal technology and one of the best inventions of 2023, is getting a major scale-up, with the world’s largest ocean carbon dioxide removal (OCDR) facility set to be built in Singapore and operational by 2025—sparking optimism for what has been hailed as a potential game changer for global climate efforts after scientists agreed in 2022 that...
The big map in the little shop in Casper, Wyo., was drawing a lot of attention when I visited on Aug. 20, 2017. A solar eclipse was coming the next day, with totality occurring at 11:43 a.m. Mountain Time. Our TIME reporting and video crew had arrived to cover the event and we selected Casper out of all of the cities and towns across the eclipse’s path, from Salem, Ore., through...
It would seem awfully hard to lose track of 0.24219 of a day. That not-inconsiderable amount adds up to five hours, 48 minutes and 20 seconds and if it were added to the clock in any 24-hour period, you’d surely notice it. But if the same span of time were spread out over the course of an entire year, it would be a whole lot easier to let it slip by.
That, in fact, is exactly what...
Early this week, Facebook provided me with a sweet piece of serendipity when it served up a picture of the late Gene Cernan. I had taken and posted the picture in 2014, when Cernan, the last man on the moon, was being feted at the premiere of the documentary about his life, titled, straightforwardly, The Last Man On the Moon. I had gotten to know Gene well over the course of many years of...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lander touched down on the moon Thursday but managed just a weak signal back, as flight controllers scrambled to gain better contact with the first U.S. spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in more than 50 years.
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Despite the spotty communication, Intuitive Machines, the company that built and managed...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day.
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The record-breaking quasar shines 500 trillion times brighter than our sun. The black hole powering this distant quasar is more than...
Extreme wind and rain may lead to bigger and worse desert locust outbreaks, with human-caused climate change likely to intensify the weather patterns and cause higher outbreak risks, a new study has found.
The desert locust — a short-horned species found in some dry areas of northern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia — is a migratory insect that travels in...
It’s not easy to swim 175 km (109 mi.) when you’re starving to death. It’s not easy either to try to survive when you’re shedding body weight at a rate of 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) a day. And it might be hardest—or at least most tragic—of all if you’re a nursing mom and your calorie intake has dropped so low that you can no longer produce the milk you need to...
Not a lot of spacecraft have gone aloft with poetry etched on their sides. Actually, no spacecraft has ever gone aloft with poetry etched on its side—but no spacecraft has ever been quite like NASA’s Europa Clipper.
The ship, which is in its final stages of assembly, will launch in October, making a long, six-year journey out to Jupiter. Once there, it will execute a series...
(WASHINGTON) — Nearly half of the world’s migratory species are in decline, according to a new United Nations report released Monday.
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Many songbirds, sea turtles, whales, sharks and other migratory animals move to different environments with changing seasons and are imperiled by habitat loss, illegal hunting and fishing, pollution...
A handful of super powerful tropical storms in the last decade and the prospect of more to come has a couple of experts proposing a new category of whopper hurricanes: Category 6.
Studies have shown that the strongest tropical storms are getting more intense because of climate change. So the traditional five-category Saffir-Simpson scale, developed more than 50 years ago, may not show...
If you’re trying to spot a phytoplankton, it pays to get exceedingly close. Among the smallest life forms inhabiting both fresh and marine water, phytoplankton can measure as little as one micrometer—or one millionth of a meter. But little things can have a big impact. Blooms of phytoplankton, which are actually a form of microalgae, can spread hundreds of square miles,...
A rare total solar eclipse will occur across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada on April 8, 2024. A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, blocking the sun’s rays during the day time, causing a temporary period of darkness.
If you would like to see the total solar eclipse, you will need to visit one of the places along the total eclipse path, which...
WASHINGTON — Women are far more likely than men to get autoimmune diseases, when an out-of-whack immune system attacks their own bodies — and new research may finally explain why.
It’s all about how the body handles females’ extra X chromosome, Stanford University researchers reported Thursday — a finding that could lead to better ways to detect a long list...
Elon Musk announced on Monday that the first human has received a brain implant through his Neuralink startup—marking a new step forward for the company and its goal to connect the human brain to computers.
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“The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well,” Musk announced in a post...
The two loneliest rhinos in the world are the female known as Najin and her daughter, known as Fatu. They live in the Ol Pejeta conservancy, a 360 sq km (140 sq mi.) sanctuary in central Kenya. A lot of different animals representing a lot of different species call Ol Pejeta home, but Najin and Fatu are special: they are the world’s last remaining northern white rhinos, a species that...
The first full moon of 2024, known as the “wolf moon,” will appear Wednesday night, and will remain visible until Friday
It’s expected to reach its peak on Thursday at 12:54 PM ET— though viewers will have to wait until the evening to see it, and it will look like a full moon until midnight on Friday.
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On Sep. 27, astronaut Frank Rubio, 48, broke the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by an American with his 371-day mission. When he returned to earth, his first meal back was a salad.
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“What most of us crave when we get back is fresh food, fresh fruits, vegetables. I kept saying that I wanted a salad,” he...
More than a trillion cicadas will be coming to the U.S. in an event that has not happened since Thomas Jefferson was U.S. president in 1803.
Two adjacent broods of the red-eyed flying cicadas will emerge from the ground in April, and residents in the Midwest and Southeast should brace themselves for a season of high-pitched buzzing.
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