Science

For California, where punishing droughts over the past two decades have shriveled crops and caused wells to run dry, it has been another year of extremes. Only this time, they’re of the...

The Thar Desert today is a scorching region in western India’s Rajasthan state. But in the Mesozoic Era, it was a tropical shoreline along the Tethys Ocean, inhabited by dinosaurs and marine...

The Back Story: An infection that surprises beachgoers.It’s not clear whether the appearance of these cases farther north than usual may be a result of better diagnosis or to warming waters associated...

The astronomers will tell you it is just an optical illusion, a pair of galaxies caught in the act of mating as seen from the wrong angle. Happens all the time.In the...

Each planet of the solar system has its own look. Earth has aquamarine oceans. Jupiter has panchromatic tempests. Saturn has glimmering rings. And Neptune has ghostly clouds — at least, it used...

Floating languorously through forests and jungles of the Americas, longwing butterflies have many secrets. The 30-odd species in this group include many mimics. The wing markings on some distantly related species of...

Johannes Fritz, a maverick Austrian biologist, needed to come up with a plan, again, if he was going to prevent his rare and beloved birds from going extinct.To survive the European winter,...

Wildfires are getting worse. Parts of the United States, scientists say, are experiencing wildfires three times as often — and four times as big — as they were 20 years ago. This...

For reasons unknown, the spin of Mars is speeding up.NASA’s InSight lander fell silent in December after dust accumulated on its solar panels. But scientists continue to sift through the four years’...

As I hurried to an appointment one recent afternoon in New York City, the harsh sun seemed to set my skin and hair on fire. Sweat pooled under my sunglasses, and my...