Science & Environment

Medieval scribes filled volumes called bestiaries with illustrations and descriptions of fantastic creatures. The manuscripts containing representations of these animals also depended on a menagerie of beasts: The covers of these and other volumes were fashioned from the skins of calves, goats, sheep, deer, pigs and, in some macabre instances, humans. Most of these hides were shorn before they were …

The severe storm system that has inundated the central and southeastern United States with heavy rain and high winds for days fits into a broader pattern in recent decades of increasing rainfall across the eastern half of the United States. Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for 1991 through 2020 show that the Eastern part of the country …

President Trump plans to sign an executive order Tuesday aimed at expanding the mining and use of coal in the United States, in an effort to revive the struggling industry. The order will direct federal agencies to remove barriers to coal leasing and mining, loosen environmental reviews of coal projects and explore whether coal-fired electricity could help power new A.I. …

He took a down-to-earth approach to sexually transmitted infections, a subject no one wanted to discuss, arriving at novel methods of treatment and prevention. Source link

Alison Francis Senior Science Journalist Atlantic Productions/Magellan The digital scan shows the bow sitting upright on the sea floor A detailed analysis of a full-sized digital scan of the Titanic has revealed new insight into the doomed liner’s final hours. The exact 3D replica shows the violence of how the ship ripped in two as it sank after hitting an …

There is a magnificent, snow-white wolf on the cover of Time Magazine today – accompanied by a headline announcing the return of the dire wolf. This now extinct species is possibly most famous for its fictional role in Game of Thrones, but it did exist – more than 10,000 years ago – when it roamed across the Americas. The company …

Jonah Fisher BBC environment correspondent Getty Images More than half of the growth of solar in 2024 was in China. More than 40 percent of the world’s electricity was generated without burning fossil fuels in 2024, according to a new report from think-tank Ember. But carbon dioxide emissions, which warm the planet, have risen to an all time high, the …

The Trump administration has dismissed the few remaining health officials who oversaw care for some of the world’s most vulnerable people: more than 500,000 children and more than 600,000 pregnant women with H.I.V. in low-income countries. Expert teams that managed programs meant to prevent newborns from acquiring H.I.V. from their mothers and to provide treatment for infected children were eliminated …

Jeremiah Ostriker, an astrophysicist who helped set off a revolution in humankind’s view of the universe, revealing it to be a vaster, darker realm than the one we can see, ruled by invisible forms of matter and energy we still don’t understand, died on Sunday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 87. His daughter …

For more than a decade, scientists have chased the idea of reviving extinct species, a process sometimes called de-extinction. Now, a company called Colossal Biosciences appears to have done it, or something close, with the dire wolf, a giant, extinct species made famous by the television series “Game of Thrones.” In 2021, a separate team of scientists managed to retrieve …