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...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A panel of U.S. health advisers on Tuesday narrowly backed a closely watched COVID-19 pill from Merck, setting the stage for a likely authorization of the first drug that Americans could take at home to treat the coronavirus. A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel voted 13-10 that the drug’s benefits outweigh its risks, including potential birth defects if used...

(LOS ANGELES) — NASA launched a spacecraft Tuesday night on a mission to smash into an asteroid and test whether it would be possible to knock a speeding space rock off course if one were to threaten Earth. The DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a $330 million project with echoes of the...

As you tuck into your Thanksgiving dinner, the kick-off event (at least for Americans) of the holiday season, spare a thought for the planet’s carbon waistline. Food production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for more than a third of emissions worldwide — and a new study has given fresh insight into how small changes in the diet can have a big impact on...

One of my favorite bar signs is the one that promises “Free beer tomorrow.” That’s how I’ve always thought of nuclear fusion—a (theoretically) cheap, pollution-free and inexhaustible energy source, the promise of which has pretty much been a decade away ever since the technology was first tested 70 years ago. When “nuclear energy” is discussed,...

The Russian missile test that shattered a dead satellite this week highlights a growing threat of space debris just as companies such as SpaceX and Boeing Co. make plans to launch as many as 65,000 commercial spacecraft into orbit in coming years. The anti-satellite weapon smashed a Russian orbiter into at least 1,500 pieces, forming a belt of debris hurtling around the Earth at speeds up to...

Getting calories out of grass is not easy. That’s why cows and other ruminants, like goats and sheep, have multiple compartments in their stomachs to help them digest their food. One of those stomachs is populated by microbes that help break down plant matter into a more digestible form. The process, called enteric fermentation, also produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is 80...

(PACIFIC GROVE, Calif.) — There is a ray of hope for the vanishing orange-and-black Western monarch butterflies. The number wintering along California’s central coast is bouncing back after the population, whose presence is often a good indicator of ecosystem health, reached an all-time low last year. Experts pin their decline on climate change, habitat destruction and lack of food...

The overarching narrative emerging from COP26 is complicated. The deal that emerged—the Glasgow Climate Pact—wasn’t universally celebrated, nor was it universally condemned. It won’t save the world, but it does move the needle. “We made real and vital progress,” Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, told me just after countries agreed to the deal...