Science News

To give rivers more room to sprawl, cities are keeping adjacent lands for limited uses such as parks that can flood when rivers rise.

An unplanned grand experiment is changing Earth. As people across the globe stay home to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, the air has cleaned up, albeit temporarily.

Testing is critical to controlling the coronavirus and eventually easing restrictions that have halted daily life for most Americans. But there’s been confusion about what kinds of tests are available and what they actually measure.

Why aren’t health officials warning people about eating food contaminated with the new coronavirus? The answer has to do with the varying paths organisms take to make people sick.

Samoa’s population of “little dodos” is dwindling down to nothing, but the appetites of wealthy people keep putting these rare birds at risk.

A tiny fossil skull nicknamed “Wonderchicken” is giving scientists a rare glimpse at early ancestors of today’s birds. It may be the oldest known fossil from this group.

Some strategies are proving more effective than others in containing the COVID-19 pandemic: pro-active efforts to track down and isolate the infected, access to basic, affordable public health care, and clear, reassuring messaging from leaders.

Scientists say they have used the gene editing tool CRISPR inside someone’s body for the first time, a new frontier for efforts to operate on DNA, the chemical code of life, to treat diseases.

Even as it disappears, the “bomb spike” is revealing the ways humans have reshaped the planet.

China cracked down on the sale of exotic species after an outbreak of a new virus in 2002 was linked to markets selling live animals. Now another coronavirus is spreading through China, prompting calls to permanently ban the sale of wildlife.

The decade that just ended was by far the hottest ever measured on Earth, capped off by the second-warmest year on record, two U.S. agencies reported Wednesday. And scientists said they see no end to the way man-made climate change keeps shattering records.

Researchers on Wednesday reported the largest-ever one-year decline in the U.S. cancer death rate, a drop they credited to advances in lung-tumor treatments.