Stories by Meghan Bartels

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

The asteroid Didymos witnessed its companion get slammed by NASA’s DART spacecraft, and Didymos itself may have interesting activity

Here’s how to tell whether your eye drops are safe to use and how to recognize a potential infection

A new study suggests that ‘Oumuamua, the mysterious visitor that whizzed through our solar system in 2017, may have been merely a small comet from another star

In Key Largo, Fla., scientists are looking to protect endangered native rodents and slow the invasion of massive Burmese pythons

Florida beaches are already receiving hefty batches of brown seaweed, kicking off a year that could break records

Recent research offers a tantalizing glimpse at a future in which two men can have biological children together, but any human applications remain far in the future

A team of moth and butterfly scientists decided to go from a restaurant bar to the lab bench to understand mescal’s iconic “worm”

Archaeologists have found a handful of human skeletons with characteristics that have been linked to horseback riding and are a millennium older than early depictions of humans riding horses

Scientists may have spotted two pairs of merging dwarf galaxies, each pair with a duo of soon-to-collide black holes

Gonzalez v. Google seeks to hold tech giants accountable for recommendation algorithms in a complicated case that could see the Supreme Court meddle in more than 25 years of Internet policy

A train carrying toxic and combustible materials derailed recently in Ohio. Here’s what we know about the situation—and what we can’t know yet

When humans return to the moon, they’ll likely visit one of these 13 regions near the moon’s south pole

The impact has slightly degraded one of the observatory’s mirror segments, but NASA says the telescope has sustained no significant damage

The launch will now occur no earlier than Christmas Day

The giant planet’s hefty gravitational tug helps explain a spate of recent asteroid strikes