Tag Archives: science

Updated vaccines against Covid-19 are coming, just as hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus are steadily ticking up again. Today, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized new mRNA booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer, and a panel of outside experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and …

Standing on the marina, Rob Skelly peers into the darkness of the river where bright speckles of algae drift in the water. A neon green invader. “It’s starting to build,” he says. “Tomorrow, you’ll find that there’s clumps like that all over the river—and then the day after that there’ll …

It’s scariant season—again. A new offshoot of Omicron, BA.2.86—nicknamed Pirola—has popped up in Israel, the US, South Africa, and the UK after it was first recorded in Denmark in late July. Pirola initially set off alarm bells because it was spotted in four countries at the same time—and because, having …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles—those moving much faster than the rest—traveled here from powerful sources farther away. For decades, astrophysicists …

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The hottest summer on record for many Texas cities has brought millions of dollars in damage to municipal plumbing and the loss of huge volumes of water during a severe drought.  Authorities across the …

Most people interpret radiation as a bad thing—but it isn’t always. In fact, radiation is a very normal phenomenon. For now, let’s just say that radiation is when an object produces energy. When a material is radioactive, it emits energy either as particles or electromagnetic waves. The particles are usually …

Just a week after Hurricane Idalia “rapidly intensified” and slammed the Florida coast with monster storm surges, Tropical Storm Lee has grown into a massive hurricane in the Atlantic. By feeding on exceptionally warm waters, it has undergone rapid intensification, a transformation that scientists define as an increase in sustained …

In a first, researchers in China have used pigs to grow early-stage kidneys made up of mostly human cells. The advance is a step closer to producing organs in animals that could one day be transplanted to people. More than 100,000 people in the United States are on the national …

As the dust settled following SpaceX’s brief, explosive test launch of Starship in April, both the company and the Federal Aviation Administration dug into investigating the aftermath. The gigantic rocket’s flight lasted just four minutes before it blew up near SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site on the Texas coast. Images …

If you were planning on a shore vacation this year, you might have kept track of great white sharks. The apex predator made famous by Jaws (and, OK, by The Meg and Sharknado) has been spotted on East Coast beaches from South Carolina up past Cape Cod, leaving potential beachcombers …