The Most Powerful Rocket in History Had a Good Morning
Marina Koren
SpaceX has once again launched the most powerful rocket in history into the sky, and this time, the mission seems to have passed most of its key milestones. Starship took off without a hitch this morning, separated from its booster, and cruised through space for a while before SpaceX lost contact with it. Instead of splashing down in the ocean as planned, Starship seems to have been destroyed during reentry in Earth's atmosphere.The flight was the third try in an ambitious testing campaign that b...
The Return of Measles
Daniel Engber
Measles seems poised to make a comeback in America. Two adults and two children staying at a migrant shelter in Chicago have gotten sick with the disease. A sick kid in Sacramento, California, may have exposed hundreds of people to the virus at the hospital. Three other people were diagnosed in Michigan, along with seven from the same elementary school in Florida. As of Thursday, 17 states have reported cases to the CDC since the start of the year. (For comparison, that total was 19, plus the Dis...
Fruit Chaos Is Coming
Zoe Schlanger
Summer, to me, is all about stone fruit: dark-purple plums, peaches you can smell from three feet away. But last summer, I struggled to find peaches at the farmers' markets in New York City. A freak deep freeze in February had taken them out across New York State and other parts of the Northeast, buds shriveling on the branch as temperatures plummeted below zero and a brutally cold, dry wind swept through the region.The loss was severe. One farmer estimated that the Hudson Valley lost 90 percent ...
Do Animals Have Fun?
Sallie Tisdale
Orcas sank another yacht near the Iberian Peninsula in November. Members of a pod had been ramming and shaking boats in the area for more than three years, and had now sunk four. Many observers believed the orcas were attacking their boats, perhaps taking revenge on fishermen. But both boaters and scientists wondered if the orcas were playing, and the marine biologists who study this group think it may be a fad. "The consensus is that they're doing this to show off," the director of science at an...
The Oceans We Knew Are Already Gone
Marina Koren
Even after nearly three months of winter, the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are disturbingly warm. Last summer's unprecedented temperatures--remember the "hot tub" waters off the coast of Florida?--have simmered down to a sea-surface average around 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the North Atlantic, but even that is unprecedented for this time of year. The alarming trend stretches around the world: 41 percent of the global ocean experienced heat waves in January. The temperatures are also part of a de...
Goodbye to Biden's First Climate Envoy
Zoe Schlanger
The smallest hint of frustration had crept into John Kerry's voice. We were talking about international climate diplomacy, which for the past two years has been Kerry's job as the U.S. special presidential envoy on climate, a role President Joe Biden created to signal his commitment to the issue. Kerry's last day is Wednesday, and when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, I asked him why the United States--historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gases--had pledged a paltry $17.5 million to a new ...