Adnan Saidi

Fossilized footprints in White Sands National Park USGS, NPS, Bournemouth University When picking up a tired toddler on a long walk, or hunting and confronting a giant sloth, the humans walking the wetlands around a shrinking lake were simply going about their lives in prehistoric North America. They could never have imagined that their everyday […]

Sarah Kuta Daily Correspondent I hear them long before I see them. As I clamber out of my car in the parking lot near Point Piedras Blancas just off California’s Highway 1, the grunting noises of dozens of elephant seals fill the air. I walk quickly to the wooden viewing platform, lean up against the […]

An artist’s illustration of Quetzalcoatlus flying De Agostini via Getty Images On May 17, 1986, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum unleashed its flying reptile at Andrews Air Force Base. Known as Q.N. to the engineers and experts who created the flyer, the model was a half-size replica of the immense pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi […]

At an average of 140 million miles away, Mars is pretty much in Earth’s planetary backyard. With a well-timed launch, a rocket can reach it in less than a year. Since 1965, humankind has successfully sent over 20 missions—flybys, orbiters, landers, rovers—to survey Mars’s dusty terrains. And we’ve learned a lot about our neighbor, from […]

By Carlyn Kranking Assistant Editor, Science and Innovation As darkness descends across the eastern coast of Australia, thousands of gray-headed flying foxes take to the skies. Armed with a keen sense of smell and sharp night vision, they roam to find food after resting all day. Some might travel as far as 30 miles in […]

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One muggy day in July 1986, a news helicopter was recording footage of a festival in Minneapolis when the pilot and photographer glimpsed a tornado over nearby Brooklyn Park. They moved toward it, filming the powerful twister for 25 minutes, mesmerizing viewers watching it live on TV.

About 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object smashed into the young Earth, spraying debris that coalesced to form the moon, many scientists think. Some remnants of that object, called Theia, exist today as large amounts of dense material sitting atop Earth's core, researchers propose November 1 in Nature

Adnan Saidi The last 12 months were the hottest in 150 years of recordkeeping — and probably in the last 125,000 years — thanks to human-caused climate change, a new report finds.

Firefighters with California State Parks monitor a prescribed burn at Wilder Ranch State Park near Santa Cruz, California, in October 2023. In a forest in northern California, a line of people spread out through the trees, setting fire to shrubs and fallen branches in an act of intentional arson aimed at making the woodland better […]