Science & Environment

In 2023, sewage plants in Maryland started to make a troubling discovery. Harmful “forever chemicals” were contaminating the state’s sewage, much of which is turned into fertilizer and spread on farmland. To protect its food and drinking water, Maryland has started restricting the use of fertilizer made from sewage sludge. At the same time, a major sludge-fertilizer maker, Synagro, has …

A new study says 99.999% of the world’s deep seafloor is still unseen by humans. Source link

The egg drop challenge is an annual rite of passage for many students learning about physics: Swaddle an egg in cotton balls and masking tape or other materials, and then drop it off the roof of your school. Anyone who has participated in this exercise knows how difficult it is to engineer a structure that will save the egg from …

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has repeatedly questioned the safety of mRNA vaccines against Covid-19. Scientists with funding from the National Institutes of Health were advised to scrub their grants of any reference to mRNA. Around the country, state legislatures are considering bills to ban or limit such vaccines, with one describing them as weapons of mass destruction. While …

President Trump said on Wednesday that he would nominate Casey Means, a Stanford-educated doctor turned critic of corporate influence on medicine and health, as surgeon general. Dr. Means, an ally of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has described becoming disillusioned by establishment medicine. She rose to prominence last year after she and her brother, Calley Means, a White …

Maddie Molloy Climate & Science reporter Getty Images The Soviet Union launched a number of missions to explore Venus – this probe was from an earlier flight Part of a Soviet-era spacecraft is expected to crash back to Earth this week after being stuck in orbit for more than half a century. Kosmos 482 was launched in 1972 as part …

A coalition of states led by Washington, Colorado and California sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, charging that it was unlawfully withholding billions of dollars allocated by Congress for electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law provided $5 billion to states to build stations around the country. So far, 71 stations have been built, with …

True friends, most people would agree, are there for each other. Sometimes that means offering emotional support. Sometimes it means helping each other move. And if you’re a superb starling — a flamboyant, chattering songbird native to the African savanna — it means stuffing bugs down the throats of your friends’ offspring, secure in the expectation that they’ll eventually do …

Humans have visually documented about 1,470 square miles, or a mere 0.001 percent, of the deep seafloor, according to a new study. That’s a little larger than the size of Rhode Island. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, arrives as nations debate whether to pursue industrial mining of the seabed for critical minerals. Some scientists argue that …

In the early 2000s, a coronavirus infecting bats jumped into raccoon dogs and other wild mammals in southwestern China. Some of those animals were sold in markets, where the coronavirus jumped again, into humans. The result was the SARS pandemic, which spread to 33 countries and claimed 774 lives. A few months into it, scientists discovered the coronavirus in mammals …