Environment

The White House guest list for President Biden’s State of the Union address will underscore some of his administration’s biggest accomplishments, from student debt forgiveness to the expansion of NATO.But even as he heralds his accomplishments, the guest list will highlight intractable challenges still facing his presidency, including pervasive gun violence and the vast problem of climate change.Among the 20 guests who will join the first lady, Jill Biden, to watch the address is Jazmin Cazares, the sister of a 9-year-old victim of the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.After Uvalde, Mr. Biden signed the first gun safety legislation in decades — a measure he plugged during his State of the Union address last year,...

In March of 1961, Dr. Anthony Epstein, a pathologist at Middlesex Hospital in London, almost skipped a visiting physician’s afternoon lecture about children with exceptionally large facial tumors in Uganda.The physician, Dr. Denis Burkitt, a native of Ireland who called himself a bush surgeon, showed slides of bulbous tumors that emerged along the jawline and occurred in tropical African regions where rainfall was high. During his lecture, Dr. Burkitt mapped a veritable pediatric cancer belt that extended across equatorial Africa.Despite Dr. Epstein’s initial reluctance to attend the talk — he sat in the rear to make a quick escape — his excitement grew the longer Dr. Burkitt spoke. By the time the lecture was over, he knew that he would drop all of his ongoing projects to find the caus...

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Two good friends, Rebecca Grekin and Yannai Kashtan, met up one crisp December morning at Stanford University, where they both study and teach. The campus was deserted for the holidays, an emptiness at odds with the school’s image as a place where giants roam, engaged in groundbreaking research on heart transplants, jet aerodynamics, high-performance computing. Work that has changed the world.Ms. Grekin and Mr. Kashtan are young climate researchers. I had asked them there to explain how they hoped to change the world themselves.They have very different ideas about how to do that. A big question: What role should money from oil and gas — the very industry that’s the main contributor to global warming— have in funding work like theirs?“I’m just not convinced we need fossil fuel companies’...

Many Americans prefer to believe the Covid pandemic is a thing of the past. But for the nation’s nursing homes, the effects have yet to fully fade, with staffing shortages and employee burnout still at crisis levels and many facilities struggling to stay afloat, according to a new report published Thursday by federal investigators.The report, by the inspector general’s office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that the flawed infection-control procedures that contributed to the 170,000 deaths at nursing homes during the pandemic were still inadequate at many facilities. And while the uptake of Covid vaccines was initially robust when they first became available, investigators found that vaccination booster rates among staff workers and residents have been badly l...

Soon it will be time to say, “Good night, moon lander.”Last week, Odysseus, a privately built robotic lunar lander, became the first American spacecraft to set down on the moon in more than 50 years, and the first nongovernmental effort ever to accomplish that feat.But like the Homeric Greek hero it was named after, the lander has not had an easy journey with a neat, happy ending. The spacecraft encountered a series of near-calamitous challenges, almost lost its way, then landed crookedly.During a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built Odysseus, said the spacecraft continued to operate, but that it would be put into a planned shutdown within a few hours.The few hours stretched into almost another day. On Thursday morning, Intuiti...

One day after its historic landing, the first private spacecraft on the moon is in good condition but has toppled over, the company that built it reported on Friday.The spacecraft, named Odysseus, set down in the moon’s south pole region on Thursday evening, the first U.S. vehicle to land softly on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines said during a NASA news conference on Friday. “We do have communications with the lander.”He added, “That’s phenomenal to begin with.”But the landing did not go perfectly. Because the spacecraft fell over, its antennas are not pointed directly at Earth, limiting the amount of information that can go back and forth.Odysseus has not sent back an...