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
At the very moment that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was set to take the stage, the governor of Gila River Indian Community was still standing at the podium, articulating his uneasiness around recent Trump administration moves. “Let me repeat that: We have spent a good part of this year providing education on why … Read more
Brandon Williams, President Trump’s pick to become the keeper of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, testified on Tuesday that he would not recommend that Mr. Trump restart explosive testing of the deadly weapons. His statement, during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, was unexpected. Other advisers to the administration had proposed that the … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more