Stories by Meghan Bartels

Most of the eastern U.S. has been swathed in smoke billowing off more than 400 wildfires across Canada

Where is it coming from? How long will it last? What's in the smoke? Whose health is at risk? How do you clean your own air?

For lung cancer patients who have a specific genetic mutation, taking a pill called osimertinib after surgery greatly reduced the risk of lung cancer recurrence

Smoke from record-setting wildfires in Canada has blanketed parts of the eastern U.S., but shifting summer weather patterns should bring relief

The combination of a massive seaweed bloom, plastic in the ocean and climate change is increasing the risk of dangerous infections

Scientists are using satellite observations of a massive volcanic eruption’s impact to better understand Earth’s atmosphere

The weight of New York City’s 1.1 million buildings is making the city slowly sink

The ChatGPT AI can ace an IQ test, but it can’t beat brainteasers like those devised by legendary math puzzler Martin Gardner

The death throes of a massive star in the galaxy M101, located just 21 million light-years away from Earth, are entrancing professional and amateur astronomers alike

Dozens of people reported tremors on the island of Bornholm, but seismologists say there was no earthquake

Betelgeuse, the red star at the shoulder of the constellation Orion, has been acting strange, raising hopes for the spectacle of a lifetime

Scalloped hammerhead sharks take dramatic dives to hunt for food in cold, deep waters—and new evidence suggests they hold their breath to keep warm while they do so

Flavor is a tricky target, but technology and powerful genetic techniques are making it more feasible to improve the taste of vegetables

SpaceX’s Starship launch site in southern Texas is now the subject of a lawsuit after the vehicle’s first flight caused concerning damage

’Tis the season for hordes of blue jellyfishlike creatures to wash up on California beaches

With an apparent crash, the HAKUTO-R mission from the private space exploration company ispace has joined a long list of failed moon landers

Influenza D is only known to sicken cattle and pigs, but it “has everything it needs” to jump into people

Starship, a super powerful launch system that could revolutionize access to space, soared for mere minutes—but its test flight is still being hailed as a success

Lengthening days set off a cascade of events in migratory birds that culminates in the birth of a clutch of chicks

In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic creates strange communities that bring coastal and open-ocean animals together

Using machine learning, researchers have now created a much sharper portrait of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87

A recent Food and Drug Administration decision that makes naloxone available without a prescription may increase the drug’s accessibility. But cost could be a barrier

Our first known interstellar visitor is now long gone, but new research has some ideas about why it moved the way it did while it was in our cosmic neighborhood.

Artificial-intelligence-powered image-generating systems are making fake photographs so hard to detect that we need AI to catch them