A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. In less than two weeks, leaders from 196 countries and around 25,000 delegates, activists and protestors will descend on the Scottish city of Glasgow for the United Nation’s 26th global climate summit, or COP26. It is no small...

Historians have long observed the links between the natural environment and the fate of civilization. Natural emergencies like droughts, floods and crop failure regularly plunge people into chaos. Long term changes in the earth’s climatic conditions lead flourishing societies like the Roman Empire to wither and fade. But perhaps there is no greater example of the explosive intersection of...

Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but among the hurdles: A sugar in pig cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. The kidney for this...

New York City will mandate Covid-19 vaccination for all city workers, eliminating a testing option. Starting Wednesday, all employees who get their first shot at a city-run site will receive an extra $500 in their paycheck. The benefit will end on Oct. 29, the deadline for employees to submit proof of at least one dose, Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. Employees not vaccinated by then...

The U.K. unveiled its net-zero strategy on Tuesday as it tries to showcase its green credentials ahead of key climate talks later this month. It will move taxes from electricity to gas, fund carbon-capture, and offer grants for cleaner home heating. It estimates the cost of the transition could be 1-2% of GDP by 2050, and moving away from fossil fuels will also hit tax revenue. The government...

A scientist from Guangdong, China plans to appeal to the Tibetan government to conserve recently discovered fossils of handprints and footprints on a rock on the world’s highest plateau—because they may be the oldest prehistoric art ever recorded and the earliest evidence of human life in the region. Dr. David Zhang, who found the impressions with his research team in Quesang on the...

Star Trek's Captain Kirk, now 90, returns from space with a message for everyone, including Jeff Bezos

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A NASA spacecraft named Lucy rocketed into the sky with diamonds Saturday morning on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids. Seven of the mysterious space rocks are among swarms of asteroids sharing Jupiter’s orbit, thought to be the pristine leftovers of planetary formation. An Atlas V rocket blasted off before dawn, sending Lucy on a roundabout journey...

As workers continue to comb beaches for tar balls in California’s Orange County after an underwater pipeline ruptured on Oct. 2, another massive fossil fuel cleanup operation is just getting underway on a 55-year-old rig anchored 120 miles up the coast. It’s a taxpayer-funded, $60 million debacle that reveals just how difficult and costly it may be to shut down aging oil rigs in the...

More than 75 years separate Queen Elizabeth II from climate activist Greta Thunberg, but both share similar reservations with world leaders who talk a good game on climate change but aren’t prepared to back it up with action. In remarks caught on a livestream Thursday, the British monarch was heard talking about COP26, the UN climate conference that begins in Glasgow later this month....

On Oct. 13, actor William Shatner, 90, best known for his role as Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk, went to space for real aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. He was aloft for only 10 minutes—but they were 10 minutes that forever transformed him. The day after his return, Shatner—now the oldest person to have ever traveled to space—sat down with TIME to talk about...

Even if you follow these things closely, it can be hard to understand where the world’s fight against climate change stands. On the one hand, news abounds of the clean energy revolution, as wind farms and solar panels pop up in communities across the globe and automakers promise to go electric. On the other hand, scientists continue to warn that fossil fuels have placed the planet and...

You could be forgiven for never having heard of The Butler’s Night Off, an obscure 1951 Canadian film that was a little bit of noir, a little bit of comedy and a whole lot of forgettable. Indeed it would have been forgotten entirely, were it not for a small part played by a 20-year-old actor whose character name was simply listed as “a crook” and whose real name, as posted in...

The rule for most Mars missions, or at least those looking for signs of life? Follow the water. Choose a place that was once wet—and Mars’s now-dry riverbeds, sea basins and ocean floors offer plenty of those—and do your spelunking there. With limited missions and a multitude of promising sites, however, the trick is to choose just the right landing zone. Now, a new paper in...

On Oct. 6, the World Health Organization recommended use of the first vaccine to fight malaria. The decision is momentous and highly anticipated for many reasons: among them is that this is the first vaccine to help reduce the risk of deadly severe malaria in young children in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease remains a leading killer. The vaccine offers hope that there can be a circle of...

The legendary primatologist has spent decades persuading us to change the way we treat animals and the planet, and she does it one story at a time.

Two scientists, working independently of each other, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work into molecular construction and its impact on a range of uses from solar cells to battery storage. Benjamin List, from the Max-Planck-Institut in Germany, and David MacMillan, a professor at Princeton University, won the award for developing “an ingenious tool” for building molecules,...

Almost a third of adult single men live with a parent. Single men are much more likely to be unemployed, financially fragile and to lack a college degree than those with a partner. They’re also likely to have lower median earnings; single men earned less in 2019 than in 1990, even adjusting for inflation. Single women, meanwhile, earn the same as they did 30 years ago, but those with...

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. Anyone who has followed U.S. climate policy is familiar with the cycle of bold attempts to enact climate rules that eventually sputter, followed by years of inaction. President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax before backing away under...

ESG funds—investment funds that are supposed to include companies that score the highest marks in environmental, social and governance factors—have become increasingly popular as more people look to put their money where their environmental concerns are. When BlackRock debuted a new ESG-aligned fund in April, investors couldn’t get enough. They poured $1.25 billion into...

For all of our 21st-century trappings, our human paths align across the millennia.

A group of more than 20 current and former employees are accusing Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket ship company of being a toxic work environment and not adhering to proper safety protocols. The workers claim in an essay that there’s sexism at the Kent, Washington, company. The employees, led by former head of Blue Origin employee communications Alexandra Abrams, state that...

“They are, in some sense, mutually exclusive.”

In the early years of World War II, when Jane Goodall was around 6 years old, she was often woken from her sleep by the blare of air-raid sirens. The sound warned that Nazi planes were flying over Bournemouth, the English seaside town where Goodall’s family had moved at the outbreak of the war. Her…