Research shows heat amplifies the dangers of pesticides. For the nation’s 2.4 million farmworkers, climate change is poised to exacerbate the harms of pesticides, a growing body of research shows. Heat stresses the body, making it more vulnerable to pesticides and other toxicants, and protective clothing worn in the…
Practices shifted from individuals buried in coffins to reusing sites for later mummy interments. Egypt’s Theban necropolis holds over 400 tombs, a rich resource for archaeologists eager to learn more about that region’s ancient history. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology outlines how Egyptian…
Here’s what it was like watching a total solar eclipse 90 minutes north of Madrid. DURATÓN, Spain—I’ll say it: I’m hooked. Standing in the shadow of the Moon is one of the rarest opportunities to directly sense the mechanics of our Solar System, when the dance between three celestial…
“It highlights the brutality of medieval warfare,” said paleopathologist Jo Buckberry. During a medieval siege, a trebuchet scored a chance hit on an unlucky defender. A small boulder slammed into his upper back at close to 300 kilometers an hour, smashing bones and crushing him beneath its weight. The…
Regulations reduced prenatal exposure to harmful emissions, but wildfire smoke is erasing gains. In 1965, a presidential advisory panel issued a report warning that pervasive chemical and carbon pollution was harming environmental health and changing the climate. Five years later, President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. Since…
Utility-scale solar leads by a mile, followed by batteries. Fossil fuels, not so much. It’s been a wild first half of the year in the US power sector, with announcements of gigantic natural gas power plants and some long-awaited renewable energy projects coming online. At times of rapid change,…
Let’s shield the astronauts instead of the spacecraft. Solar storms, like the one in August 1972 that hit during the gap between the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, throw bursts of protons intense enough to raise an astronaut’s cancer risk or even cause radiation sickness. Earth’s atmosphere and…
“It’s the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature.” Physicists with the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III) experiment have uncovered convincing new evidence of the existence of so-called glueballs, an elusive composite particle made entirely of gluons predicted by quantum theory. The…
In a recent study, evolution gets even messier than usual. The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop. The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved in wildly different directions, branching out into a diverse…
Hot hours of summer could triple in the coming decades. Global warming is leading to more extremely hot weather. There is perhaps no more obvious consequence of climate change. But changing how we analyze this problem can still help scientists think about it in a different way that may…
