Valmik Thapar, a tenacious conservationist who wrote eloquently about tigers in India and worked to protect them against the impact of poachers, the loss of habitat and government policies that he abhorred, died on May 31 at his home in New Delhi. He was 72 or 73. His family said in a statement that the … Read more
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary, on Monday fired all 17 members of the advisory committee on immunization to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying that the move would restore the public’s trust in vaccines. About two-thirds of the panel had been appointed in the last year of the Biden administration, … Read more
The tiny nation of Suriname, on South America’s Atlantic coast, has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. A majority of those deaths involve a single substance: paraquat, a pesticide widely used for weed control that is lethal to humans in amounts as small as one swallow. Pesticides are among the leading means … Read more
The Food and Drug Administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to “radically increase efficiency” in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, one of several top priorities laid out in an article published Tuesday in JAMA. Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other “concerning ingredients” that appear in U.S. food but … Read more
As the Trump administration clamped down on the country’s medical research funding apparatus in recent months, scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health often privately wondered how much autonomy the agency’s director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, had. After all, the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s signature cost-cutting project, helped drive decisions to cancel … Read more
Niede Guidon, a Brazilian archaeologist whose work called into question a longstanding theory of how the Americas were first populated by humans, and who almost single-handedly transformed a hardscrabble region of northeast Brazil into the Serra da Capivara National Park, died on Wednesday at her home near the park, in São Raimundo Nonato. She was … Read more
The deep-sea environs of the Earth’s poles are home to mysterious ocean creatures: giant sea spiders, Antarctic sea pigs, phantom jellyfish. Finding and identifying these animals can be difficult, however; some are known only because researchers found their remains in fishing nets or in the bellies of seabirds. But on Christmas Day last year, the … Read more
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. Ga6789 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more