Science & Environment

Steffan Messenger Environment correspondent, BBC Wales News PA Both blast furnaces were closed at the UK’s largest steelworks in Port Talbot in 2024 The UK’s climate change advisors have criticised the handling of a switch to greener steelmaking at the country’s largest plant in Port Talbot, which resulted in huge job losses. Government ministers should have been better at planning …

Rebecca Morelle BBC News science team Reporting fromHouston, Texas Kevin Church/BBC Rosemary Coogan is surrounded by a team of people pushing, pulling, squishing and squeezing her into a spacesuit. It takes about 45 minutes to get all her gear on before a helmet is carefully lowered over her head. The British astronaut is about to undergo her toughest challenge yet …

Victoria Gill Science correspondent, BBC News Watch: wild chimpanzees filmed using forest ‘first aid’ Chimpanzees in Uganda have been observed using medicinal plants – in multiple ways – to treat open wounds and other injuries. University of Oxford scientists, working with a local team in the Budongo Forest, filmed and recorded incidents of the animals using plants for first aid, …

More than 500 million years before Matt Groening and “The Simpsons” introduced us to Blinky, a mutated fish with an extra eye swimming through Springfield’s Old Fishin’ Hole, a three-eyed predator chased prey through seas of the Cambrian Period. Once it caught its quarry, a pair of spine-covered grasping claws and a circular mouth covered in teeth would finish the …

Deep in the labyrinth of the American Museum of Natural History, past the giant suspended blue whale and the first floor’s Alaska brown bears, is an unobtrusive locked door. On it, there is a small sign. “Bug Colony.” Behind the door, accessible only to a handful of museum employees, thousands of flesh-eating dermestid beetles toil around the clock handling a …

3M is set to pay New Jersey up to $450 million over the next quarter-century to settle claims it contaminated the state with harmful “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, affecting drinking water. The Minnesota-based chemicals giant manufactured the PFAS, which were used for decades at the Chambers Works facility in Deepwater, N.J., a nearly 1,500-acre complex on the banks of the …

President Trump has long railed against drug traffickers. He has said they should be given the death penalty “for their heinous acts.” On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order listing cartels as “terrorist organizations.” But many public health and addiction experts fear that his budget proposals and other actions effectively punish people who use …

The Trump administration is proposing a drastic reimagining of how public lands across the United States are used and managed, according to an Interior Department document leaked to the public in late April. The document, a draft of the department’s strategic plan for the next five years, downplays conservation in favor of an approach that seeks to maximize economic returns, …

At least 24 factories have been set up in the United States to produce electric cars that qualify for the credit, including a Ford plant making plug-in hybrids in Louisville, Ky., and a General Motors battery plant in Ohio, according to a study from Atlas Public Policy, a research firm. Near Savannah, Ga., Hyundai invested in a $7.5 billion factory …

Another long-term concern is pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive disease in which scarring thickens and hardens lung tissue, making it difficult for oxygen to move into the bloodstream. Dr. Elsayegh describes a lung with pulmonary fibrosis as “a stiff balloon from the party store” — your face flushes as you try to force air inside, but it simply refuses to inflate. …