Science

The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and a sixth tagged with an editor’s note, underscoring concerns about research misconduct that have lately bedeviled Columbia as well as cancer labs at several other elite American universities. With the latest retractions, …

North-facing, sloping ground with loose, sandy soil — if you’re a bumblebee queen on the market for a winter home, these features will have you racing to make an offer. But scientists were recently stunned to find there’s something else these monarchs like in a place to hibernate: pesticides. In …

Astronomers have identified thousands of planets orbiting distant stars using sophisticated observatories. But there’s something they have yet to spot with any certainty: moons around those worlds. Now a recent discovery around a Saturn-size planet 635 light-years from Earth offers one of the best potential clues that exomoons orbit exoplanets …

Europa Clipper, the biggest interplanetary spacecraft that NASA has ever built, lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Monday afternoon. The mission will tackle one of biology’s core questions: Can life exist anywhere else in our solar system? The spacecraft’s destination is Europa, a moon of Jupiter, …

SpaceX pulled off a feat of technical wizardry on Sunday, not only flying a 233-foot rocket booster back to its launch site, but also catching it out of the air with two giant mechanical arms. It occurred during the fifth test flight of the Starship rocket and was a huge …

Night skies came aglow on Thursday with the shimmering palette of the northern lights, or the aurora borealis if you prefer. Above rooftops in Brooklyn and along the shores of Maine, amid Scottish trees and between Russian monuments to artistry, human eyes looked up, surprised to spot colorful bands of …

In British East Africa in 1898, two lions living along the Tsavo River were hungry. This was bad news for the workers building a railroad there. They would retreat to their tents at night and, come morning, some of the men would be missing, the latest victims of big cats …

It happens every fall: The days grow colder, the nights grow longer, the birds grow restless and then they take flight. In North America alone, billions of birds fly south for the winter, sometimes in enormous undulating flocks. It is one of nature’s great spectacles as well as an athletic …

The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is one of the solar system’s most astonishing marvels. An elliptical storm with inky swirls of burnt orange and dulled copper, it is longer than the Earth is wide, and its winds screech through the tops of the planet’s clouds at 400 miles per …

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to three scientists for discoveries that show the potential of advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, to predict the shape of proteins, life’s chemical tools, and to invent new ones. The laureates are: Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who …