Air Quality This Week Gives U.S. a Glimpse of the World’s Air Pollution
The dangerous haze hovering over parts of the Northeast and Midwest on Wednesday morning was highly unusual for the United States. For many people around...
Birds With a Taste for Flesh Threaten Whale Calves
Thousands of colossal southern right whales travel to the calm waters of Península Valdés off the coast of Argentina each year to breed and give...
Scientists Discover First Virgin Birth in a Crocodile
In January 2018, a female crocodile in a Costa Rican zoo laid a clutch of eggs. That was peculiar: She’d been living alone for 16...
A Summer Without Arctic Sea Ice Could Come a Decade Sooner Than Expected
The first summer on record that melts practically all of the Arctic’s floating sea ice could occur as early as the 2030s, according to a...
Birth Control for Cats? Gene Therapy May Offer a Method
For all the cats who share our homes as companion animals, there is a vast shadow world of strays — a sprawling and fast-breeding crowd....
Merck Sues Over Medicare Drug-Price Negotiation Law
The pharmaceutical company Merck sued the government on Tuesday over a federal law that empowers Medicare for the first time to negotiate prices directly with...
The Grand Canyon and Colorado River Are in Crisis
As the planet warms, low snow is starving the river at its headwaters in the Rockies, and higher temperatures are pilfering more of it...
Seven Underappreciated Birding Spots in New York
Birding in New York City is easier than you might think. “The best place to bird in New York is exactly where you are right...
An Ancient Egyptian Mural Offers an Exquisitely Detailed View of Several Bird Species
A century ago, archaeologists excavated a 3,300-year-old Egyptian palace in Amarna, which was fleetingly the capital of Egypt during the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten....
Birds Sing, but Are They Making Music? What Scientists Say.
When a bird sings, you may think you’re hearing music. But are the melodies it’s making really music? Or is what we’re hearing merely a string of...
Ancient Human Relatives Buried Their Dead in Caves, New Theory Claims
In 2015, scientists reported an astonishing discovery from deep inside a South African cave: more than 1,500 fossils of an ancient hominin species that had...
This Famous ‘Spy’ Whale Likes People. That Could Be a Problem.
Hvaldimir, a domesticated beluga whale that has been spotted in Scandinavian waters for years, was seen last week off the coast of Sweden, prompting concern...
Rectal Cancer Patients May Not Need Radiation, Study Finds
Rectal cancer researchers have pulled off a daunting feat, demonstrating in a large clinical trial that patients do just as well without radiation therapy as...
For These Bird Flu Researchers, Work Is a Day at the Very ‘Icky’ Beach
It was a glorious day for field work on the shores of the Delaware Bay. The late afternoon sun cast a warm glow over the...