The dazzling Perseid meteor shower – one of the biggest meteor showers of the year – is back from July through late August. The shower is forecast to peak from August 12 to 13, when the moon will be 10% full, according to the American Meteor Society. The society notes that normal rates seen from … Read more
Throughout the summer birding project, we have been encouraging new birders to try different ways to observe birds. Sketching is one way to deepen your observation skills. We asked a master illustrator, David Sibley, to share tips on how to draw, and we invited readers to share their attempts. Below is a selection of what … Read more
This week’s challenge for new birders: Try joining a group for an outing, or go birding with at least one new person. Let us know how it goes by commenting here. And if you’re already part of a birding community, tell us about it. Did you meet friends — or even your spouse — through … Read more
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Archaeologists working at a planned Shetland spaceport have discovered what appears to be a bronze age ritual cremation cemetery. The remains were uncovered while foundation work was carried … Read more
In 1966, scientists at Camp Century, a now abandoned U.S. military base in the Arctic, drilled deep into the Greenland ice sheet, extracting a cylinder of ice nearly a mile long along with 12 feet of the frozen sediment that sat beneath it. “That was a pretty miraculous engineering feat that has been really hard … Read more
Armed with machetes and chain-saws, hacking through fallen trees and wading through dense scrub, the archaeologists cleared a path down rocky trails.At last, they reached their destination in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula: a hidden city where pyramids and palaces rose above crowds over 1,000 years ago, with a ball court and terraces now buried and overgrown.Mexico’s … Read more
In July 1945, as J. Robert Oppenheimer and the other researchers of the Manhattan Project prepared to test their brand-new atomic bomb in a New Mexico desert, they knew relatively little about how that mega-weapon would behave.On July 16, when the plutonium-implosion device was set off atop a hundred-foot metal tower in a test code-named … Read more
A tornado caused extensive damage to a Pfizer drug manufacturing site in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Wednesday, threatening critical supplies for hospitals across the country.The company estimated that one-fourth of the injectable medications it supplies to U.S. hospitals were made at the Rocky Mount property, including drugs used during surgeries and other procedures to help … Read more
A new analysis has found that the White House’s signature environmental justice program may not shrink racial disparities in who breathes the most polluted air, in part because of efforts to ensure that it could withstand legal challenges. The program, called Justice40, aims to address inequalities by directing 40 percent of the benefits from certain … Read more
The Berlin bear was given a run for its money as the official symbol of Germany’s capital on Thursday. The authorities said that a “free-roaming lioness” in the area had led to a sprawling search with more than 100 police officers, veterinarians and hunters as well as drones and helicopters involved in trying to catch … Read more