For decades, NASA has been the kid politely asking for a raise in its allowance. Time was NASA’s pocket money was huge. Go back 54 years, to 1966, and the space agency was getting $5.9 billion a year—which would be a tidy $47 billion in 2020 dollars. That represented 4.1% of America’s annual household budget. But in 1966 there was also a bully on the block, whose mailbox at the...

(WAUCHULA, Fla.) — A orangutan named Sandra, who was granted legal personhood by a judge in Argentina and later found a new home in Florida, celebrated her 34th birthday on Valentine’s Day with a special new primate friend. Patti Ragan, director of the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, says Sandra “has adjusted beautifully to her life at the sanctuary” and has...

The long list of big companies backing a carbon tax as a solution to climate change grew this week with financial giant J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. endorsing a legislative plan billed as a centrist approach to reducing emissions. The announcement comes as the Climate Leadership Council (CLC), the organization behind the proposal, which was first released in 2017, redoubles efforts to promote the...

It’s easy to lose count of all of the pesticides that are sprayed on crops in the U.S., and well-nigh impossible to know all of the names (dichloropropene and pyraclostrobin and spinetoram and on and on). But it’s not hard to guess who gets hit hardest by all of these chemicals: kids, whose brain, nervous and hormonal systems are still developing at the time of exposure. What’s...

Chinstrap penguins are exquisitely adapted to their environment. They live and breed in some of the world’s harshest conditions, nesting in the windblown, rocky coves of the Antarctic Peninsula, a strip of land comprising the northernmost part of the frigid continent. In water they are precision hunters, darting after krill, the tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that…

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Europe and NASA’s Solar Orbiter rocketed into space Sunday night on an unprecedented mission to capture the first pictures of the sun’s elusive poles. The $1.5 billion spacecraft will join NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, launched 1 1/2 years ago, in coming perilously close to the sun in order to unveil its secrets. While Solar Orbiter won’t...

The temperature at one research base in Antarctica reached a record-breaking 18.3 degrees Celsius (65 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, almost a full degree above the previous high set five years ago. Argentine scientists on the Esperanza base who confirmed the reading said that wasn’t the only record broken this week. The nation’s Marambio site registered the highest temperature for the...

A previously unknown strain of coronavirus has dominated headlines in recent weeks, and alarmed public health officials with its rapid spread and virulent nature. But it’s really no surprise to the scientists who study infectious disease: it’s just one of several pathogens that have the potential to reach calamitous status. I have no evidence that climate change triggered this...

(MOSCOW) — NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who has spent nearly 11 months in orbit on the longest spaceflight by a woman, landed safely in Kazakhstan on Thursday along with two of her International Space Station crewmates. The Soyuz capsule carrying Koch, along with station Commander Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos’ Alexander...

Trump's false claim that Alabama was at risk and the altered map was swiftly deemed #sharpiegate

(NEW YORK) — A telescope in Hawaii has produced its first images of the sun, revealing its turbulent gas surface in what scientists called unprecedented detail. They show the surface covered with bright cell-like areas, each about the size of Texas, that result from the transporting of heat from the sun’s interior. The telescope can reveal features as small as 18 miles (30 km) across,...

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — Spacewalking astronauts plugged a leak in a cosmic ray detector outside the International Space Station on Saturday, completing a series of complex repairs to give the instrument new life. The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer could resume its hunt for elusive antimatter and dark matter by midweek. Team members around the world expressed relief as NASA’s...

(WASHINGTON) — The Pentagon’s new U.S. Space Force is not Star Trek‘s Starfleet Command, but their logos bear a striking similarity. President Donald Trump unveiled the Space Force logo Friday, writing on Twitter that he had consulted with military leaders and designers before presenting the blue-and-white symbol, which features an arrowhead shape centered on a planetary...

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space. While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes. And how do they taste? No one knows. Still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their...

Scientists have discovered four new species of walking sharks proving the ocean somehow can always seem a little more mysterious. According to a study published in the Marine and Freshwater Research journal on Tuesday, the Hemiscylliidae genus of sharks “walk” using their pectoral and pelvic fins to move across the ocean floor and live in coastal waters around northern Australia and...

(MILAN) — The eruption of Mount Vesuvius turned an incinerated victim’s brain material into glass, the first time scientists have verified the phenomenon from a volcanic blast, officials at the Herculaneum archaeology site said Thursday. Archaeologists rarely recover human brain tissue, and when they do it is normally smooth and soapy in consistency, according to an article detailing...

Here’s the bad news: we’ve all got just 100 seconds to live. Here’s the good news: they’re metaphorical seconds, but the fact is we’ve got just 100 of them and when they tick down, it really could be the end of human life. That grim assessment comes from this morning’s update of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists‘ Doomsday Clock, announced at a press...

The priest once known as Nesyamun has been a man of few words for the past 3,000 years—which is how things go when you’ve been dead since about 1000 BCE. But according to a study just published in Scientific Reports, he recently spoke in a lab in the United Kingdom, and the single syllable the mummified Nesyamun uttered could open the door to an entire chorus of voices from the...

There was nothing quite like the slang used in the early days of the space program. Saying something was “OK” would not do when you could say “A-OK” instead. Saying, “Let’s get moving,” when you’ve been sealed in your spacecraft for hours waiting to launch while Mission Control sorts out technical glitches, was weak tea compared to the “Light...

(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — SpaceX completed the last big test of its crew capsule before launching astronauts in as little as two months, mimicking an emergency escape shortly after liftoff Sunday. No one was aboard for the wild ride in the skies above Cape Canaveral, just two mannequins. A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off as normal, but just over a minute into its supersonic flight, the Dragon...

YouTube has been “actively promoting” videos containing misinformation about climate change, a report released Thursday by campaign group Avaaz claims, despite recent policy changes by the platform intended to drive users away from harmful content and conspiracy theories. Avaaz examined 5,537 videos retrieved by the search terms “climate change,” global warming” and...

An estimated 2,135 additional people could die every year in the United States as a result of climate change-related injuries like assaults, drownings and falls, if temperatures rise 2°C over current long-term averages, according to findings published in Nature Medicine earlier this week. While researchers have studied the intersection of health and climate change before, the focus has been...

Some scientist worry that a new way of studying human remains could be misused

If you ask astronomers how many planets in the universe harbor life, they will likely say there are only two possible answers: one or infinity. We can rule out zero, thanks to the decidedly alive Earth, which means that so far one is the answer. But if we discover another, the answer jumps straight past two to infinity. The reason: You can posit a universe in which the confluence of factors that...