Science & Environment

The battle of billionaires in space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has entered a new arena: satellite internet. Amazon, the company that Mr. Bezos started as an online bookseller three decades ago, is now a merchandising behemoth, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic gadgets like Echo smart speakers and one of the most powerful …

Xavier Le Pichon, a French geophysicist whose pioneering model of the earth’s tectonic plates helped revolutionize how scientists understand movements of the earth’s crust, died on March 22 at his home in Sisteron, in the south of France. He was 87. His death was announced in a statement by the Collège de France, France’s highest educational institution, where Dr. Le …

The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Francis Crick, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, concluded that the anatomy and activity in just a …

The far side of the moon — the part that always faces away from Earth — is mysteriously distinct from the near side. It is pockmarked with more craters and has a thicker crust and less maria, or plains where lava once formed. Now, scientists say that difference could be more than skin deep. Using a lunar sample obtained last …

Hard hats are back. So is “beautiful, clean” coal. President Trump signed four executive orders on Tuesday to try to bolster the country’s declining coal industry, including the lifting of restrictions on mining and burning of the dirtiest fossil fuel. In addition to waiving air pollution limits and other regulations on coal imposed by the Biden administration, Mr. Trump directed …

In Washington State, April is when millions of young Chinook salmon are released from hatcheries, where they started as tiny, pink globes, to swim downstream and rebuild the salmon population. They are part of an ecosystem that affects tribal, commercial, and recreational fishing and are a main source of food for endangered killer whales. But this year, almost a dozen …

NASA will prioritize sending American astronauts to Mars, President Trump’s nominee to lead the space agency will tell a Senate committee on Wednesday. The nominee is Jared Isaacman, the chief executive of the payment processing company Shift4 Payments, who is a close associate of Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX. As someone who has led two private astronaut flights to …

For 20 years, Rj LaMendola found peace while paddling in the water on his surfboard. But last month off the coast of Southern California, the ocean turned hostile after a sea lion lunged at him, bit him and dragged him off his board. “It looked possessed,” Mr LaMendola wrote in a Facebook post, saying the animal involved in the encounter …

Thomas Mackintosh BBC News Royal Society of Biology Alessandro Coatti worked for the Royal Society of Biology in London Tributes have been paid to a London-based scientist who formerly worked for the Royal Society of Biology (RSB) after he was found murdered in northern Colombia. Alessandro Coatti’s remains were discovered on the outskirts of Santa Marta, a port city on …

Brandon Williams, President Trump’s pick to become the keeper of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, testified on Tuesday that he would not recommend that Mr. Trump restart explosive testing of the deadly weapons. His statement, during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, was unexpected. Other advisers to the administration had proposed that the president resume the test detonations …