Tag Archives: science

New York and the surrounding areas are under a flash flood warning, and the city and state have issued emergency declarations. Parts of Brooklyn received more than 5 inches of rain this morning; Central Park and Midtown Manhattan had around 4 inches, according to the National Weather Service. Trains were …

Although Spider-Man started as a comic book character, he has made his way to live-action video several times. I remember seeing him appear on The Electric Company in the 1970s for a short skit; it was cool but a little odd. In the modern era of live-action Spider-Man movies, we …

Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It's like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols …

Think back to any dinosaur illustration you saw as a kid. The background was almost certainly one of two things: an asteroid streaking across the sky or a volcano blowing its top. (If the illustrator was feeling extra dramatic, maybe both.)  A 6-mile-wide asteroid, which hit the coast of the …

In the center of Siena, Italy, a cathedral has stood for nearly 800 years. A black-and-white layer cake of heavy stone, fine-cut statuary, and rich mosaics, the imposing structure—now visited by more than a million tourists each year—would seem to be a permanent fixture of the city’s past, present, and …

Earlier this month, state police in Connecticut held a “DNA drive” in an effort to help identify human remains found in the state. Family members of missing people were invited to submit DNA samples to a government repository used to solve these types of cases, a commercial genetic database, or …

Kamal Sonavane knew she’d pass out if she chewed smokeless tobacco one more time. It was a scorching April afternoon in the middle of another of India’s brutal heat waves, and with no job to go to, the farmworker had already chewed tobacco five times that day. “Even an addicted …

One of the weirder side effects of climate change is what it’s doing to rainfall. While most people think about global warming in terms of extreme heat—the deadliest kind of natural disaster in the United States—there is also an increasing risk of extreme precipitation. On average, it will rain more …

On Sunday, a capsule carrying a one-of-a-kind sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu careened through the atmosphere and landed in the Utah desert. But the OSIRIS-REx mission isn’t quite over: That precious cargo needs to be kept safe, then carefully opened one step at a time, before any science can …

A 58-year-old man has become the second person ever to receive a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig. The patient, Lawrence Faucette, was facing near death from heart failure and wasn’t eligible for a traditional transplant with a human organ. So surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center …