Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign […]

At the height of the Los Angeles County wildfires, atmospheric concentrations of lead, a neurotoxin, reached 100 times average levels even miles from the flames, according to early detailed measurements obtained by The New York Times. Levels of chlorine, which is also toxic at low concentrations, reached 40 times the average. The spiking levels underscore […]

Deaths from bombs and other traumatic injuries during the first nine months of the war in Gaza may have been underestimated by more than 40 percent, according to a new analysis published in The Lancet. The peer-reviewed statistical analysis, led by epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, used modeling in an […]

A culture flourished along the central Peruvian coast from about A.D. 900 to 1500. Called the Chancay, they left behind a wealth of cultural remains, including intricate tattoos that are preserved to this day on the skin of mummified individuals. New details of these tattoos that were previously hidden to the naked eye, including finely […]

J. Fraser Stoddart, a Scottish-born scientist who went from playing with construction sets as a boy to building molecular machines a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, for which he shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Dec. 30 in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82. Alison […]

“This replicates and reinforces what we already know about sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said, “but the findings highlight their severe costs on health and productivity, especially in Africa and Latin America.” The study detailed intriguing patterns in the consumption of sugary drinks. For example, researchers found that men had modestly higher rates of soda consumption than […]