From extreme wildfires in the Western United States to melting ice sheets in Antarctica, the effects of rising temperatures on Earth have not gone unnoticed. On Wednesday, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced 2016 was the hottest year on record. Before that, the...
Good morning. It’s Thursday, Jan. 19, and here’s what’s happening across California: TOP STORIES Smog check Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency cast doubt on whether California should continue to have power to impose its own emission rules for cars and trucks, an authority...
A new forecasting tool will help scientists predict blue whale traffic, as the ocean behemoths make their annual migration. The tool allows researchers to post online maps showing likely “hot spots” for blue whales that will help ship captains avoid collisions with the animals. “We can both see...
Sifting through more than four decades of data on two killer whale populations in the northwest Pacific, an international team of scientists says they’ve discovered why killer whales go through menopause: their complicated relationships with their daughters. The findings, described in the journal...
More than 22 million Americans use some form of marijuana each month, and it’s now approved for medicinal or recreational use in 28 states plus the District of Columbia. Nationwide, legal sales of the drug reached an estimated $7.1 billion last year. Yet for all its ubiquity, a comprehensive new...
Listen closely to those baboon calls. They may tell you a thing or two about human speech. Scientists who studied baboons’ wahoos, yaks, barks and other vocalizations have found evidence of five vowel-like sounds — a sign that the physical capacity for speech may have evolved over much longer timescales...
The last three years’ worth of Hollywood blockbusters represent an escalation of gun violence depicted in film, and have exposed more families and younger teens to mayhem devoid of consequence, a team of researchers has found. Gun violence — albeit largely bloodless and free of such troubling...
It is an odd quirk of human nature that humans do not always respond to the misfortunes of other humans in the most humane way. A new study tosses some fresh experimental findings for that observation onto a mounting pile of research evidence. Among the affluent people in affluent neighborhoods,...
A whole generation of space scientists are mourning what may be the lost opportunity of a lifetime: Earlier this month, when NASA compiled its roster of planetary probes to be launched over the next six years, Venus was left off the list — again. According to Paul Voosen of Science Magazine, it...
Four months after a launch pad explosion, SpaceX returned to flight Saturday morning, delivering 10 satellites into orbit and landing its first-stage booster on a floating drone ship. Analysts had described the launch as “all-important” for the Hawthorne space company to reestablish customer confidence...
Before they were machines based on silicon, “computers” were actually women — though their colleagues would often refer to them as “girls.” The film “Hidden Figures,” which opened to wide release Friday and picked up two Golden Globe nominations, tells the story of three black computers who dealt...
When NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson asks to join a high-level briefing in the run-up to astronaut John Glenn’s historic 1962 flight in the film “Hidden Figures,” an engineer rushes to shut the idea down. “There’s no protocol for women attending,” he replies — an excuse that Johnson quickly...
The aging brain is a shrinking brain, and a shrinking brain is, generally speaking, a brain whose performance and reaction time are declining: That is a harsh reality of growing older. But new research shows that brain shrinkage is less pronounced in older folks whose diets hew closely to the traditional...
The hustle and stress of the holidays can throw even the most virtuous eaters off course. You could take some of the cooking and grocery shopping — and some of the season’s inevitable temptations — off your plate with a healthy meal delivery service. And you might be able to beat back the binge...
After decades of low-fat yogurts and 1% milk populating store shelves, whole milk and products such as creamy ghee (clarified butter) are finding their way back to favor. On the back of a 2014 Harvard School of Public Health study that found full-fat dairy to be more satisfying — and consequently...
For the first time, researchers are seeing signs that American teens may be turning away from electronic cigarettes. An annual survey involving thousands of middle and high school students from across the nation found that use of e-cigarettes — both experimentally and on a regular basis — declined...
Here’s a tack that climate-change activist and former Vice President Al Gore might have tried when he visited President-elect Donald J. Trump last week: Maybe the best way to “Make America Great Again” would be to adopt policies that would return the nation’s environment to an idyllic past. In...
You don’t need fancy genome-sequencing or brain-imaging equipment to know that some of the people we know and love are just a little, well, out there. We used to call these people “worriers,” “creative types,” “eccentrics” or “loners.” Like the rest of us, they seem to have come into the world...