Category: Science/Nature

As Elon Musk’s Starship — the largest rocket ever manufactured — successfully blasted toward the sky last month, the launch was hailed as a giant leap for SpaceX and the United States’ civilian space program. Two hours later, once conditions were deemed safe, a team from SpaceX, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a […]

When Costco tried to cut down on its plastics use earlier this year, putting its popular rotisserie chicken in a thin bag instead of a bulkier clam shell, some chicken lovers were displeased. The bags were leaky, they said, and risked making a greasy mess. Their edges were prone to splitting open. “Chicken juice spilled […]

The Antikythera mechanism, an ingenious calculator made 2,200 years ago, has inspired awe and enchantment ever since it was recovered from a shipwreck near a Greek island in 1901. Generations of researchers have unraveled many mysteries about the device, which is often described as the world’s first analog computer, though much remains unknown. A study […]

The risk of hurricane-induced power outages could become 50 percent higher in some areas of the United States including Puerto Rico because of climate change in the coming decades, according to a new analysis. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute mapped how future hurricanes could affect power supplies, allowing […]

Allies of Donald J. Trump are proposing that the United States restart the testing of nuclear weapons in underground detonations should the former president be re-elected in November. A number of nuclear experts reject such a resumption as unnecessary and say it would threaten to end a testing moratorium that the world’s major atomic powers […]

Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, erstwhile coal-burning imperial behemoth, wants to be a “clean energy superpower.” At least that’s the promise of the man poised to be the next prime minister, Keir Starmer. His Labour Party was projected to win the parliamentary elections on Thursday, ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule. Labour […]

It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere. But while you indulge in long, balmy days at the beach or elsewhere in nature, you may be surprised to learn that our planet is creeping toward its greatest distance from the sun, a point known as aphelion. Here’s what to know about this celestial event that happens every […]

“Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,” Billy Joel crooned in “Piano Man,” his iconic 1973 barroom ballad. That may have been true enough when Mr. Joel wore a younger man’s clothes, but a new study conducted by computational musicologists at Queen Mary University of London has found that vocal melodies in popular […]

Hurricane Beryl, which devastated islands in Grenada on Tuesday and is now heading toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, has broken records as the earliest hurricane ever to reach Category 4 and Category 5 intensity in the Atlantic Basin. Wind speeds of at least 160 miles per hour were recorded on Monday. “There are so […]

The Baishiya Karst Cave is not an easy place to call home. It is nestled on a steep rocky slope on the Tibetan Plateau, 10,700 feet up, where the oxygen is thin and the climate cold and dry. But a series of expeditions to the cave in recent years have demonstrated that it was home […]