Category: Science/Nature

It’s not your average solar farm. The glassy panels stand in a meadow. Wildflowers sway in the breeze, bursts of purple, pink, yellow, orange and white among native grasses. A monarch butterfly flits from one blossom to the next. Dragonflies zip, bees hum and goldfinches trill. As solar projects unfurl across the United States, sites […]

For the next few weeks, Paris will be home to many of the world’s impressive athletes, including some of the fastest human beings on the planet. Among the competitors gathering for the Olympic Games are runners who can knock out a marathon in just over two hours, a mile in under four minutes and 100 […]

Richard M. Goldstein, a trailblazer in planetary exploration who used ground-based radars to map planets with techniques that scientists now use to measure geographical changes on Earth, including melting glaciers, died on June 22 at his home in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif. He was 97. His daughter, Rabbi Lisa L. Goldstein, confirmed the death. In […]

To hear animal rights activists tell it, those at SeaQuest are not. The for-profit company is not accredited by any zoo organization. It has at times run afoul of the U.S.D.A., which governs only some of the fauna on display. Last summer, the four-year-old SeaQuest in Trumbull, Conn., closed after several U.S.D.A. citations, including one […]

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday sharply criticized pharmacy benefit managers, saying in a scathing 71-page report that “these powerful middlemen may be profiting by inflating drug costs and squeezing Main Street pharmacies.” The regulator’s study signals a significant ramping up of its scrutiny of benefit managers under the agency’s chair, Lina Khan. It represents […]

The European Space Agency has waited about a decade for the first launch of Ariane 6, a powerful new rocket. But the brand-new vehicle is at last ready to fly — and if all goes well, European nations will once again have independent access to the final frontier, a crucial step for the space exploration […]

A wake-up call The ferocious Castle Fire in 2020 was the first of the extreme fires to strike the heart of the sequoia forests at the crest of the Sierra. It was one of some 650 wildfires started across Southern and Central California by an unusual “lightning siege” — some 15,000 strikes over a few […]

The process for diagnosing a child with autism heavily relies on a parent’s description of their child’s behavior and a professional’s observations. It leaves plenty of room for human error. Parents’ concerns may skew how they answer questionnaires. Providers may hold biases, leading them to underdiagnose certain groups. Children may show widely varying symptoms, depending […]

It sounds like something out of a Hollywood film script, but it really happened: Shark-evolution researchers say that increased ocean temperatures more than 100 million years ago may have caused sharks to grow bigger, swim faster and become the powerful predators we know today. In a paper published last month in the journal Current Biology, […]

On at least 19 occasions since 2019, SpaceX’s operations have caused fires, leaks and explosions near its launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. These incidents reflect a broader debate over how to balance technological and economic progress against protections of delicate ecosystems and local communities. The New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton explains. Source […]