Stories by Meghan Bartels

The 2015 Paris Agreement forged a path for the world to stave off the worst climate change scenarios. Here’s where we stand 10 years later

Hurricane Melissa raged as a Category 5 storm in the Caribbean last month—and now scientists have confirmed that its strongest gusts neared record speeds

NASA spacecraft across the inner solar system captured new views of Comet 3I/ATLAS—the third known interstellar object

The sun’s current 11-year activity cycle has already peaked—but extreme outbursts from our star may still be in store

The same region on the sun that’s responsible for this week’s stunning auroral display just erupted in another powerful solar flare early on Friday morning

Nearly two million U.S. turkeys have died from bird flu in recent months. An agricultural economist explains what ongoing outbreaks could mean for Thanksgiving meals

A severe geomagnetic storm brought spectacular auroras to much of the U.S. on Tuesday night

The sun just spat out several coronal mass ejections that could trigger a serious solar storm on Wednesday

An early cold snap will chill much of the U.S., potentially breaking records in the Southeast

Debris from Comet Encke creates two annual meteor showers, but it might also pose a small risk to Earth. Scientists are investigating

Astronomers are hustling to use interplanetary spacecraft to study the interstellar comet dubbed 3I/ATLAS while the sun is hiding it from Earth

Hurricane Melissa’s powerful winds and drenching rains devastated Jamaica. But is its wrath a sign that we need a new designation for monster storms?

After a quiet summer, bird flu cases are rising again. Scientists expected the development, but what happens next is still uncertain

Melissa is a Category 5 major hurricane and moving relatively slow—a brutal combination that will drench some parts of Jamaica with up to 40 inches of rain

Scientists suspected that Europe’s largest bats snack on migrating songbirds when they can, but a stunning newly published observation proves it

Tim Flach captures his fascination with the science of cats in stunning photographs from his new book Feline

The anthropologist was famous for her pioneering research with chimpanzees and her influence on conservation

Hurricane Humberto and a system that may become Tropical Storm Imelda in the coming days are swirling quite close to each other in the western Atlantic Ocean

The San Francisco Bay Area was rattled early this morning by a magnitude 4.3 earthquake along the Hayward fault line

A powerful magnitude 7.8 aftershock off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula that arose from July’s magnitude 8.8 earthquake is raising concerns about possible tsunami impacts, although risk appears to be waning

Three vaccines were on the agenda for this week’s meeting of ACIP, the CDC’s key advisory panel on immunization: the combined measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine and COVID vaccines

After nearly 40 years of global efforts, the ozone hole over Antarctica is continuing to heal

Hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin is historically at its peak on September 10—but not this year

Many questions still surround COVID vaccine access this fall, but here’s what we know so far