A conservation team, including Elizabeth Fly, standing at rear, on the Edisto River in South Carolina, July 25, 2025. “We’ve been testing and piloting things for so long, and now is the time to scale it up,” said Fly, who is the director of resilience and ocean conservation at the Nature Conservancy’s South Carolina chapter. (Madeline Gray/The New York Times) By DELGER ERDENESANAA Working from a dock on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, on a sweltering day this summer, Ed At

An image provided by Rocket Lab shows an artist’s concept of an ESCAPADE spacecraft above Mars. The ESCAPADE mission, which launched to space on a Blue Origin rocket on Nov. 13, 2025, breaks the mold of how planetary science missions typically come together. (Rocket Lab via The New York Times) By KENNETH CHANG NASA’s latest robotic mission to Mars, ESCAPADE, should perhaps have been named the Great Escape, given how many times it has eluded doom. The data that the mission eve

In an undated photo from M. Eulàlia Subirà, a lower jawbone from Individual 39, found at the settlement site of Puig Castellar, with a cut mark from decapitation visible on its chin. Skulls displayed in public 2,000 years ago were intended as a warning to enemies and a celebration of comrades, a new paper argues. (M. Eulàlia Subirà via The New York Times) By FRANZ LIDZ Some 2,000 years ago, a macabre ritual was observed in the northeastern Iberian Peninsula, a region of Spain

More than half the plastics found in sea turtles were soft types, such as plastic bags that can resemble their jellyfish prey. (Freepick) By SACHI KITAJIMA MULKEY Two baseballs for a sea turtle. Three sugar cubes for a puffin. A soccer ball for a harbor porpoise. That’s roughly how much ingested plastic would be deadly for each animal, according to a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers analyzed data from more than 10,000 auto

In an image provided by Marco Villegas, an orca swimming with a young great white shark with a visible wound in waters off Baja California, Mexico. New research has documented how a pod of orcas in the Gulf of California has repeatedly hunted juvenile white sharks to feast on their livers. (Marco Villegas via The New York Times) By ALEXA ROBLES-GIL In mid-August 2020, Erick Higuera’s drone recorded a brutal hunt off Baja California in Mexico. A pod of orcas was hitting a grea

James Watson, who helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA, in the Library of the Human Genome at the Wellcome Collection in London, June 20, 2007. The discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s is one of the most riveting dramas in the history of science, crammed with brilliant research, naked ambition, intense rivalry and outright deception. (Jonathan Player/The New York Times) By CARL ZIMMER The discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s is one

Jane Goodall, the celebrated primatologist, in New York, Oct. 17, 2017. Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa, grasped the vast power that lay in careful, mutual observation. (Gabriela Herman/The New York Times) By RHONDA GARELICK We don’t think of Jane Goodall as a style icon. But we should. Style is about having a keen awareness

By ALEXA ROBLES-GIL and ALI WATKINS Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry...