Climate
EPA Proposes Easing Methane Rules for Oil and Gas Operators
The proposal would end the “super-emitter” program and loosen rules on low-producing wells and flaring; the EPA says industry would save $45 billion.
Science
Space, climate, the natural world and new research.
The Fossil Sold for $47 Million Sits at the Center of a Dinosaur Argument
Whether Nanotyrannus was its own species or a young Tyrannosaurus rex has shifted in recent studies, and a Montana skeleton named Jodi is part of the story.
Climate
Greenhouse Gas Levels Reached New Records in 2025, UN Weather Agency Says
Carbon dioxide averaged 426.8 parts per million, about 153 percent of pre-industrial levels. The rise slowed from the year before, but the agency expects another increase in 2026.
Paleontology
237-Million-Year-Old Fossils Point to an Amphibian That Lived Entirely at Sea
Two armored skeletons from southern China suggest Gerrothorax maritimus survived in salt water, something no living amphibian is known to do.
Astronomy
Record-Scale Lumina Simulation Recreates the Universe’s First Two Billion Years
Harvard and Smithsonian astronomers modeled a cube of space about 1.5 billion light-years wide to follow how light from the first galaxies transformed hydrogen and helium.
Animal Behavior
Monkeys That Survived an Outbreak Grew Warier of Contaminated Food, Study Finds
Researchers at a Texas sanctuary found that macaques exposed to a deadly virus were far less likely to take a treat from a surface that looked dirty, a clue to the evolutionary roots of disgust.
Climate
Study Estimates Summer Heat Killed About 50,000 People in Europe’s Cities
Researchers attribute roughly two-thirds of the deaths to human-caused warming, in what they describe as the deadliest summer on record for the 854 cities studied.
Oceans
Nearly All Shallow Coral Reefs Face High Risk of Collapse by 2075, Review Finds
The first global review of coral reefs under the IUCN’s ecosystem red list rates 96 percent of them critically endangered once projected ocean warming is counted.
Climate
UN Report Says Passing the 1.5C Warming Limit Is Now Unavoidable
The annual Emissions Gap Report finds current policies point to about 2.8C of warming this century. The task now, it says, is to keep the overshoot small and short.
Space
Japan Launches a Mission to Bring Home a Piece of the Martian Moon Phobos
The MMX spacecraft, carrying a small French-German rover, aims to return at least 10 grams of soil in 2031 and help settle how Mars got its two odd little moons.
Space
Europe’s Euclid Telescope, Built to Map Dark Matter, Finds Its First Comet
A doctoral student’s software spotted a faint, fuzzy streak in survey images. The comet, now named C/2026 S1 (Euclid), is a lucky catch for an observatory designed to look far beyond the solar system.
Space
Spacecraft Bound for Mars Aims to Settle Where Its Two Small Moons Came From
Set to lift off from southern Japan this week, MMX carries instruments from NASA and European partners and would be the first craft to bring material home from the Martian system.
Space
Artemis II Reports Show What Trained Eyes Can Add at the Moon
NASA’s first detailed look at the science from April’s crewed lunar flyby credits the astronauts’ own descriptions, while a separate review found Orion’s heat shield held up far better than on the uncrewed test flight.
Climate
Satellites Track an El Niño That Could Become the Strongest Since 1950
NASA images show warm water and raised sea levels stretching across the Pacific, while federal forecasters put the odds of a historic event this fall at better than four in five.
Timekeeping
World’s Timekeepers Vote to Retire the Leap Second Starting in 2027
Meeting in Versailles, the General Conference on Weights and Measures agreed to let atomic time drift up to an hour from Earth’s rotation, ending the one-second adjustments that have unsettled computer networks since 1972.
Paleontology
A Fossil Left in a Museum Drawer for a Century Is a New Meat-Eating Dinosaur
Scientists say the partial skull from England’s Isle of Wight belongs to Invictibellatrix amberina, the first megaraptoran known from Europe. The find supports the idea that the group spread across ancient continents.
Mars
Perseverance Becomes the Farthest-Traveled Vehicle on Another World
NASA’s Mars rover passed the 28.06-mile mark set by Opportunity, covering the distance in about five and a half years. Most of the driving was planned by the rover itself.
Biology
How Octopus DNA Folds May Help Explain Their Complex Brains, Study Suggests
Researchers in Vienna found that an ancient reshuffling of the cephalopod genome brought distant stretches of DNA into contact, creating new ways for genes to be switched on and off.
Astronomy
Astronomers Catch a Small Star Slowly Feeding on Its Brown Dwarf Companion
The pair, about 300 light-years away, circle each other every 87 minutes, and the steady flow of material between them could continue for an extraordinarily long time.
Physics
Vienna Physicists Build the First Nuclear Clock That Keeps Itself on Time
The thorium-based prototype ran for more than a day without leaning on a conventional atomic clock, a step toward timekeepers that could one day outperform the best ones in use today.
Remembrance
Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Guided Apollo to the Moon, Dies at 90
She led the MIT team that wrote the Apollo flight software, helped turn programming into an engineering discipline, and built in the safeguards that kept Apollo 11’s landing on track.
Spaceflight
Four Astronauts Return to Earth After Eight Months on the Space Station
The crew that rushed to orbit in February to replace colleagues sent home after a medical emergency splashed down in the Pacific off Los Angeles, three weeks later than planned.
Nobel Prizes
Chemistry Nobel Goes to Kagan and Soai for Work on Life’s One-Handed Molecules
The French and Japanese chemists showed how reactions can amplify a small tilt toward one mirror-image form of a molecule, a puzzle at the heart of both drug design and the origins of life.
Nobel Prizes
Halzen Wins Physics Nobel for Turning South Pole Ice Into a Neutrino Telescope
The University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist is the sole winner, honored for leading the IceCube observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from beyond the solar system.
Climate
A Possibly Record El Niño Is Building, and NOAA Is Studying It With Less
Federal forecasters say the warming in the tropical Pacific could become the strongest on record, but the agency’s research response will be far smaller than a decade ago.
Medical Technology
FDA Approves the First Heart Valve Designed to Grow With a Child
The expandable valve, with leaflets made of a synthetic polymer rather than animal tissue, could spare children with congenital heart disease repeated open-heart operations.
Climate
Swiss Glaciers Lose 5.5 Percent of Their Ice, the Second-Largest Melt on Record
A dry winter and the hottest Swiss summer on record pushed losses to nearly 20 percent of the country’s glacier ice since 2021, monitoring scientists reported.
Space
Four Astronauts Launch on a Fast Track to the International Space Station
NASA’s Crew-13 lifted off from Florida after a three-week delay to fix a fuel leak, on a trip to the orbiting laboratory expected to take about eight hours.
Climate
Oceans Held More Heat in 2025 Than Ever Recorded, European Report Finds
The 10th Copernicus Ocean State Report documents record ocean heat, steadily rising acidity and long marine heat waves in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
Space
NASA Picks a Far-Infrared Telescope to Open a New Class of Missions
PRIMA, chosen last week as the first of NASA’s mid-priced Probe Explorers, would study how galaxies, planets and cosmic dust formed, with a cost cap of about $1.2 billion and a target launch in 2033.
Spaceflight
SpaceX’s Starship Reaches Orbit for the First Time, Then Ends Its Flight Early
The giant rocket deployed 26 Starlink satellites despite engine trouble, a milestone for the vehicle NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the moon.
