CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Years late and billions over budget, NASA’s new moon rocket makes its debut next week in a high-stakes test flight before astronauts get on top.
The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket will attempt to send an empty crew capsule into a far-flung lunar orbit, 50 years after NASA's famed Apollo moonshots.
NEW YORK (AP) — Twenty years ago, scientists discovered a 7-million-year-old skull that they concluded belonged to a creature who walked upright and was our earliest known ancestor. Not everyone was convinced.
An illegal dirt road ripping through protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon is now just a few miles shy of connecting two of the worst areas of deforestation in the region, according to satellite images and accounts from people familiar with the area.
BEIJING (AP) — Hainan island in the South China Sea says it will become China's first region to ban sales of gasoline- and diesel-powered cars to curb climate-changing carbon emissions.
Sales of fossil fuel-powered cars will be banned by 2030 and electric vehicles promoted with tax breaks and by expanding a charging network, the Hainan provincial government said in a “Carbon Peak Implementation Plan.”
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday instructed his government to consider developing safer, smaller nuclear reactors, signaling a renewed emphasis on nuclear energy years after many of the country's plants were shut down.
Parts of northern Texas, mired in a drought labeled as extreme and exceptional, are flooding under torrential rain. In a drought.
BEIJING (AP) — Tropical Storm Ma-on was gaining strength as it headed for Hong Kong and other parts of southeastern China on Wednesday after displacing thousands in the Philippines.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Archaeologists unearthed a lavish 1,200-year-old estate in Israel's desert south that offers a unique glimpse of life for wealthy residents of the Negev region, the country's antiquities authority said Tuesday.
BEIJING (AP) — With China's biggest freshwater lake reduced to just 25% of its usual size by a severe drought, work crews are digging trenches to keep water flowing to one of the country's key rice-growing regions.
The compound in psychedelic mushrooms helped heavy drinkers cut back or quit entirely in the most rigorous test of psilocybin for alcoholism.
More research is needed to see if the effect lasts and whether it works in a larger study.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pfizer's COVID-19 pill appears to provide little or no benefit for younger adults, while still reducing the risk of hospitalization and death for high-risk seniors, according to a large study published Wednesday.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Officials in the Trump White House tried to pressure U.S. health experts into reauthorizing a discredited COVID-19 treatment, according to a congressional investigation that provides new evidence of that administration’s efforts to override Food and Drug Administration decisions early in the pandemic.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — More than four grueling months and $300 million later, the federal government has declared the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history 100% contained, a notable milestone but just another step in what local residents and officials say will be a long journey toward recovery.
Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine was 73% effective in protecting children younger than 5 as omicron spread in the spring, the company announced Tuesday.
Vaccinations for babies, toddlers and preschoolers opened in the U.S.
Edward Buckles, Jr. was 13 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and completely upended his life. Buckles and his family moved from New Orleans to Lafayette, Louisiana for several months while their hometown began to recover from the catastrophic storm.
BENI, Congo (AP) — A new case of the Ebola virus has been confirmed in Congo’s eastern Beni city, Congo’s ministry of health announced Monday, saying it is linked to a previous outbreak.
Testing by a lab at the National Institute for Biomedical Research in Goma confirmed the case was the Ebola Zaire strain and was genetically linked to Congo’s 10th outbreak in Ituri and North Kivu provinces from 2018 to 2020 that killed more than 2,000 people, the ministry said.
Pfizer asked U.S. regulators Monday to authorize its combination COVID-19 vaccine that adds protection against the newest omicron relatives — a key step toward opening a fall booster campaign.
The Food and Drug Administration ordered vaccine makers to tweak their shots to target BA.4 and BA.5 that are better than ever at dodging immunity from earlier vaccination or infection.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The world’s newest and biggest space telescope is showing Jupiter as never before, auroras and all.
Scientists released the shots Monday of the solar system's biggest planet.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert who became a household name — and the subject of partisan attacks — during the COVID-19 pandemic, announced Monday he will leave the federal government in December after more than five decades.
BERLIN (AP) — Several substances seem to have contributed to the massive fish die-off in the Oder River that forms much of Germany's border with Poland, a German official said Monday.
Numerous theories have been floated about the cause of the environmental disaster, but so far none have been conclusive, a spokesman for Germany's Environment Ministry said.
Serious pregnancy complications are rare in the United States but they still affect thousands of women each year.
They may endanger the health of the mother, fetus or both. Many are more common in Black patients and contribute to their disproportionately high maternal mortality rate.
GENEVA (AP) — Switzerland's 1,400 glaciers have lost more than half their total volume since the early 1930s, a new study has found, and researchers say the ice retreat is accelerating at a time of growing concerns about climate change.
BEIJING (AP) — Brush fires have forced the evacuation of more than 1,500 people in southwest China and power rationing for factories has reportedly been extended as weeks of record heat and drought batter the region.
LONDON (AP) — For years, global health officials have used billions of drops of an oral vaccine in a remarkably effective campaign aimed at wiping out polio in its last remaining strongholds — typically, poor, politically unstable corners of the world.
CHONGQING, China (AP) — China says it will try to protect its grain harvest from record-setting drought by using chemicals to generate rain, while factories in the southwest waited Sunday to see whether they would be shut down for another week due to shortages of water to generate hydropower.
HONOLULU (AP) — For more than 50 years, telescopes and the needs of astronomers have dominated the summit of Mauna Kea, a mountain sacred to Native Hawaiians that's also one of the finest places in the world to study the night sky.
KLAMATH RIVER, Calif. (AP) — Authorities have identified four people killed last month when California's largest and deadliest wildfire of the year swept through a remote hamlet.
DNA and dental analysis were used to identify the Klamath River residents, the Siskyou County Sheriff's Office tweeted Friday.
LONGQUAN, China (AP) — Hundreds of persimmon trees that should be loaded with yellow fruit lie wilted in Gan Bingdong’s greenhouse in southwestern China, adding to mounting farm losses in a scorching summer that is the country’s driest in six decades.
MOMBASA, Kenya (AP) — Africa's migratory birds are threatened by changing weather patterns in the center and east of the continent that have depleted natural water systems and caused a devastating drought.
MELIPEUCO, Chile (AP) — Mist suddenly arose from the Truful Truful River as it flowed below the snow-covered Llaima volcano, and Victor Curin smiled at the sun-dappled water spray.
A leader in one of the Indigenous communities by the river’s shores in the Chilean Andes, Curin took it as a sign that the waterfall’s ngen — its owner and protector spirit — approved of his visit and prayer that mid-July morning.
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A five-year review by U.S. officials has determined that Endangered Species Act protections for ocean-going salmon and steelhead that reproduce in the Snake River and its Idaho tributaries must stay in effect.
A Pennsylvania man has been charged with abuse of a corpse, receiving stolen property and other charges after police say he allegedly tried to buy stolen human remains from an Arkansas woman for possible resale on Facebook.
MADRID (AP) — A wildfire burning out of control in Spain's eastern province of Valencia has become one of the country's biggest fires this year, and 35 aircraft were deployed to fight it as the blaze entered its fifth day, authorities said Friday.
CASCADE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — It’s an increasingly familiar sight in U.S. cities and suburbs: A van pulls up to the curb. Workers wearing gloves, masks and other protective gear strap on backpack-type mechanisms with plastic hoses, similar to leaf blowers.
OSOGBO, Nigeria (AP) — Yeyerisa Abimbola has dedicated most of her 58 years on Earth to the Osun, a waterway in deeply religious Nigeria named for the river goddess of fertility. As the deity’s chief priestess, she leads other women known as servants of Osun in daily worship and sacrificial offerings along the riverbank.
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The U.S. oil industry hit a legal roadblock in January when a judge struck down a $192 million oil and natural gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico over future global warming emissions from burning the fuels.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has developed a new strategy to better engage with hundreds of Native American tribes as they face climate change-related disasters, the agency announced Thursday.