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CLIMATEWIRE | A controversial idea for cooling the earth’s climate through artificial means would likely require a much longer global commitment than policymakers and the public understand, according to a recent study that raises new questions about the potential for using solar geoengineering. If world leaders decide to use solar geoengineering to meet international climate goals, they could […]

HOUSTON — NASA has named its first astronaut crew bound for the moon in more than 50 years. The space agency on Monday (April 3) announced the four astronauts who will launch on its Artemis 2 mission to fly around the moon. The crew is expected to become the first moon voyagers since the Apollo program. The Artemis 2 crew […]

“Stop faking!” Imagine hearing those words moments after your doctor diagnosed you with, say, a stroke or a brain tumor. That sounds absurd but for many people diagnosed with a condition called functional neurological disorder (FND), this is exactly what happens. Although the disorder is not well known to many people, FND is actually one […]

On February 14, 2046, a small but still decent-sized asteroid will almost certainly not hit Earth. That’s generally the way to bet about any space rock, but if you only read the headlines last week when a new near-Earth asteroid was discovered, you might get a different impression. The basic gist of many of them […]

Some of the largest and most ferocious dinosaurs of all time had an anatomical secret to their success. Like many modern birds, Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus and other giants had complex networks of air sacs that grew out of their throats and lungs and into their bones. The resulting porousness made them lighter, saving energy while maintaining […]

CZECH REPUBLIC Centuries-old tree rings in today’s Czech Republic and southeastern Bavaria suggest drought may have driven Attila the Hun’s invasion of the Roman Empire. The rings helped researchers to reconstruct the fifth-century climate, identifying dry spells that may have forced the Huns to move on. GREENLAND Scientists have identified two-million-year-old DNA, the oldest ever […]

1973 Catalytic Conversion “Among the most troublesome air pollutants produced by automobiles are the chemically active nitrogen oxides. Workers at Bell Laboratories have found catalysts that react nitrogen oxides with a reducing gas (hydrogen or carbon monoxide), converting them to nitrogen and such harmless by-products as water and carbon dioxide. They can be coated on […]

Johanna Teske: Ok, this is a spectrum. Teske: Vera Rubin means a lot to a lot of astronomers. This was one of the instruments that she used to help discover the presence of dark matter, which we now know is the dominant form of matter in our universe. Teske: She really was part of trying […]

A federal judge on Thursday overturned a portion of the Affordable Care Act that makes preventive services, such as some cancer screenings, free to enrollees, a decision that could affect health insurance policyholders nationwide. The decision from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas could open the door for insurers or employers […]

Alycia Weinberger: When I first went there in the early 1990s, there was a bathroom in a heated, comfortable, computer-driven observing room and it did not have any plate on the door to say whether it was for men or women. But I already knew this story about Vera and the bathrooms and so I […]