Science & Environment

Donald Trump has signed a controversial executive order aimed at stepping up deep-sea mining within US and in international waters. Thursday’s order is the latest issued by the US president to try to increase America’s access to minerals used by the aerospace, green technology and healthcare sectors. The deep sea contains billions of tonnes of potato-shaped rocks, called polymetallic nodules, …

China will let scientists from six countries, including the US, examine the rocks it collected from the Moon – a scientific collaboration that comes as the two countries remain locked in a bitter trade war. Two Nasa-funded US institutions have been granted access to the lunar samples collected by the Chang’e-5 mission in 2020, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) …

Justin Rowlatt Climate Editor BBC Listen to Justin read this article Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists are dusting down their placards, digging out their infamous fluorescent orange vests, and charging up their loud hailers — a routine they have gone through many a time before. It has taken just three years of throwing soup, spraying corn-starch paint and blocking roads …

President Trump has ordered the U.S. government to take a major step toward mining vast tracts of the ocean floor, a move that nearly every other nation in the world considers off limits to this kind of industrial activity. The executive order, signed Thursday, would circumvent a decades-old international treaty that every major coastal nation except the United States has …

Federal health officials plan to cut funding to the Women’s Health Initiative, effectively shuttering one of the largest and longest studies of women’s health ever carried out. Its findings changed medical practice and helped shape clinical guidelines, preventing tens of thousands of cases of cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. The study, which began in the 1990s when few women were …

Reaction to White House proposals to cut funding for Nasa and a future asteroid fly past Source link

Hawaii is a beautiful tropical paradise and also home to formidable creepy crawly predators. There are spiders that impale prey in midair and venomous centipedes that can stretch nearly 15 inches long. And then there are the carnivorous caterpillars, an evolutionary rarity. And now scientists have discovered one very hungry caterpillar that doesn’t just eat other insects — it decorates …

Phoenicians no doubt traveled to and from Carthage, he said, and over the six or seven centuries of its Punic life many probably relocated there and had families, but they could not have amounted to more than a tiny fraction of the population. “Certainly there’s no evidence of a regular supply of Phoenician women to become male colonists’ wives,” Dr. …

Male domination is the natural order of things, some people say. But bonobos, primates with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA, beg to differ. Bonobos are great apes that live in female-dominated societies, a relative rarity among mammals, especially in species where males are the larger sex. While females are smaller than their male counterparts, they reign …

Every Monday, Maurine Gentis, a retired teacher, waits for a delivery from Meals on Wheels South Texas. “The meals help stretch my budget,” Ms. Gentis, 77, said. Living alone and in a wheelchair, she appreciates having someone look in on her regularly. The same group, a nonprofit, delivers books from the library and dry food for her cat. But Ms. …