Science & Environment

On the last day of March, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital began an operation that they hoped might lead to a permanent change in how kidneys are transplanted in people. That morning’s patient was not a person. It was a pig, lying anesthetized on a table. The pig was missing one kidney and needed an implant. While kidneys typically must …

Maddie Molloy BBC Climate & Science reporter Getty Images The singer will be aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket Pop star Katy Perry and five other women are set to blast into space aboard Jeff Bezos’ space tourism rocket. The singer will be joined by Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez and CBS presenter Gayle King. The New Shepard rocket is due …

The broadcast journalist Gayle King and the singer Katy Perry were set to make a brief trip into space on Monday on a flight operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin. It would be the first time an all-female crew has been to space since 1963. Their flight, on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, was scheduled to take off …

A South Carolina man pleaded guilty on Thursday to importing sperm whale teeth and bones from four countries and selling them in the United States, federal prosecutors said. The man, Lauren H. DeLoach, 69, of St. Helena Island, S.C., pleaded guilty to Lacey Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act charges for importing and selling sperm whale parts, according to the …

An Australian psychologist named Luise Kazda has studied this very question. In a 2021 review paper, she and her colleagues found 14 studies in which receiving an A.D.H.D. diagnosis created a sense of “empowerment” by “supporting a sense of legitimacy accompanied by understanding and sympathy as well as decreased guilt, blame and anger.” But in 22 other studies, Kazda wrote, …

In his posts, Dr. Clifford tried to be clear about the difficulties of octopus ownership: the costs, the lack of sleep and the serious water damage to his home, which required major renovations. “I did not want to perpetuate or romanticize keeping a baby octopus,” he told me. Despite those efforts, he was overwhelmed with requests to adopt a hatchling. …

What do you wear for your first trip to space? If you are like most people, probably whatever spacesuit or astronaut outfit the company (or government agency) you are flying with provides. However, if you are Lauren Sánchez — journalist, pilot, children’s book author, philanthropist and fiancée of Jess Bezos — the second-richest man on the planet, you have another …

Jonathan McDowell is a go-to expert for all things spaceflight. Thousands of subscribers read his monthly Space Report, and far more people have seen him on cable news and other media platforms explaining unexpected events in orbit. But that has always been his side gig: For 37 years, Dr. McDowell has been a specialist in X-ray astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian …

Trump administration officials are recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times and several people with knowledge of the situation. The proposal from the Office of Management and Budget would abolish the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office at NOAA, one of the world’s …

President Trump this week directed 10 federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — to implement a novel procedure to scrap a wide array of longstanding energy and environmental regulations. He told agencies that oversee everything from gas pipelines to power plants to insert “sunset” provisions that would cause regulations to …