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Pentagon officials announced on Thursday that they had detected a Chinese “surveillance balloon” flying over Montana. On Friday the Pentagon’s press secretary said that the balloon is now over the central U.S. and moving eastward at an altitude of about 60,000 feet. Observers on the ground have been able to snap photographs and videos of […]

President Joe Biden’s Intelligence Advisory Board now includes a top climate scientist. Biden recently announced the appointment of Kim Cobb, an earth sciences professor at Brown University and a lead author of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released in 2021, to the White House council that’s tasked with evaluating the effectiveness […]

More than four dozen Jamaican fruit bats destined for a lab in Bozeman, Montana, are set to become part of an experiment with an ambitious goal: predicting the next global pandemic. Bats worldwide are primary vectors for virus transmission from animals to humans. Those viruses often are harmless to bats but can be deadly to […]

Keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius is “currently not plausible,” warns a new report from the University of Hamburg. The types of swift, transformative social change needed to reach that target just aren’t happening fast enough. A less ambitious target of 2 C still could be in the cards, the report adds. But it would […]

Scientists are split on a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposal to update COVID-19 vaccines once a year, similar to the agency’s approach to updating influenza vaccines. At a meeting of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel on 26 January, some researchers argued that the plan would help to simplify the country’s complex COVID-19 immunization […]

Eleven more U.S. airports plan to adopt a new way of landing planes that reduces both emissions and noise — all by having incoming planes turn off their engines and glide down to the tarmac like a paraglider. The Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday that planes heading to Orlando, Fla.; Kansas City, Mo.; Omaha, Neb.; […]

Cancer is common in dogs. About one in four will develop cancer at some point during its lifetime—and that proportion rises to an estimate of nearly 50 percent after a dog passes its 10th birthday. A new analysis of thousands of dogs finds that traits such as size, breed and whether an animal has been […]

From the hills of West Virginia to the flats of rural Australia, some of the world’s largest telescopes are listening for signals from distant alien civilizations. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI, is an effort to find artificial-looking electromagnetic-radiation signals that might have come from a technologically advanced civilization in a far-away solar […]

Mammals only have one life to live, but the length of that life varies greatly. While some shrews shuffle off this mortal coil in less than 14 months, bowhead whales can swim in Arctic waters for more than two centuries. And longevity is not all about size. For example, 250-pound brown bears (with a maximum […]