Science

In late December, scientists in California began searching coronavirus samples for a fast-spreading new variant that had just been identified in Britain. They found it, though in relatively few samples. But in the process, the scientists made another unwelcome discovery: California had produced a variant of its own. That mutant, which belongs to a lineage […]

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration’s plan to relax restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, paving the way for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to enact new and stronger restrictions on power plants. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia called the […]

The world’s oldest known all-purpose orifice sits in a fossil display case in the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, so close to the glass that enshrines it that you can “put your face up to it, like this,” said Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, holding his hand […]

Much less is known about the lifestyle of assassin bugs of yore, of which only 50 or so species have been unearthed in fossil form. The newcomer to the bunch, named Aphelicophontes danjuddi, is one of the most intact to date. The fossil was first pried from a wreath of rock in Colorado’s Green River […]

Baltimore’s acting city solicitor, Dana P. Moore, said that the city filed its lawsuit in the state courts “because that is the appropriate forum for seeking accountability for localized harms.” She called the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to move the case to federal court “a delay tactic.” Baltimore’s suit, initially filed in July 2018, argues […]

The disk is small — just 12 inches in diameter — but it has loomed large in the minds of people across millenniums. Made of bronze, the artifact was inlaid in gold with an ancient vision of the cosmos by its crafters. Over generations, it was updated with new astronomical insights, until it was buried […]

Two of the knots, they concluded, were probably small galaxies with small internal motions being cannibalized by the big galaxy. Measurements of the third knot had such large error bars that it could not yet be ruled in or out as the black hole’s location. The fourth, very compact knot near the bottom edge of […]

Martinus J.G. Veltman, a Dutch theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for work that explained the structure of some of the fundamental forces in the universe, helping to lay the groundwork for the development of the Standard Model, the backbone of quantum physics, died on Jan. 4 in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. He was […]

“It’s a chicken-or-egg problem,” said Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe, an online payments company based in San Francisco. “The best way to bring down the cost is to start deploying these technologies at scale. But until there are actual customers, no one’s going to build them.” To help break the impasse, Stripe announced […]

What Ms. Burkett and Ms. Miller experienced wasn’t the norm. Many of the conditions that can raise a person’s risk for severe Covid — excess weight, heart disease, diabetes, smoking — are highly influenced by environment and behavior, not just genetics. A person’s history of fighting off other coronaviruses, like those that lead to common colds, might […]