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Early in her pregnancy, Jaci Statton was in her kitchen when she felt like she was going to pass out and saw that her jeans had become soaked with blood. Doctors told her the pregnancy was not viable and that it could threaten her life if an abortion was not performed soon, she said. But…
“Imagine a hallucinogenic state fair,” the reporter Rick Marin wrote about Burning Man in The New York Times in 2000. The article described an environment of countercultural revelry, where hippies and Silicon Valley types cut loose in surroundings reminiscent of both “Mad Max” and Cirque du Soleil. But this year’s festival, held in a remote…
Standing around three feet high, the modern koala is roughly 25 pounds of claws and teeth, tufty ears and fluffy white marsupial tummy. You could give one a hug — experts suggest that they prefer it if you don’t — but you wouldn’t want to carry it around all day. Now imagine that same koala,…
The coral reefs off the shores of the Florida Keys should be vibrant and colorful this time of year. But after some of the highest recorded water surface temperatures, scientists say they’re seeing a very different picture. Last month, a marine buoy in the nearby Upper Keys measured the surface water temperature at more than 100…
Just before sunrise on Monday, a satellite peered down on regions of Morocco that had been damaged by an earthquake Friday night. The data it gathered from 430 miles above Earth is offering scientists critical clues that will help unravel the mechanics behind the quake, including pinning down the specific fault that ruptured. Key data…
Since Ulysses S. Grant was in the White House, any company that mines gold or other metals from public land has been able to haul it away without paying a dime in royalties to the federal government. As demand is spiking for copper, nickel, cobalt and other metals and minerals that are essential for electric…
Now that July’s sizzling numbers are all in, the European climate monitoring organization has made it official: July 2023 was Earth’s hottest month on record, and by a wide margin. July’s global average temperature of 62.51 degrees Fahrenheit was six tenths of a degree higher than the previous record set in 2019, the Copernicus Climate…
Don’t let the rats fool you. Although the pizza-pilfering vagabonds — and a variety of other creatures — thrive in cities, for many wild animals urban environments are unappealing homes, covered in concrete and carved up by car traffic. As buildings go up and roads are laid down, some species seem to vanish from the…
The farthest star ever detected, located behind what NASA describes as “a wrinkle in space-time,” is more than twice as hot as the sun and about a million times more luminous. The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed new details about the star, dubbed Earendel, which was detected by the Hubble Space Telescope last year….
The United States has suffered 23 billion-dollar disasters so far in 2023, a record for this point in the year that highlights the country’s struggle to adapt to the effects of climate change. The list, compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes the fire in Maui that killed at least 115 people, the…
