Stories by Stephanie Pappas

The first images of the cosmos taken by the world’s largest digital camera onboard the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are about to be released to the public. Here’s how to watch the action live

The Asian needle ant looks ordinary, but its sting can be worse than a fire ant’s and can be dangerous for anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis

British climbers recently reached the top of Mount Everest in record time. They inhaled xenon gas before the trip. But was that the decisive factor?

Vitamin D supplements may help prevent the loss of telomeres, DNA sequences that shrink with aging, a large study shows. But the health effects aren’t yet clear

NASA’s nearly complete yet canceled lunar rover VIPER isn’t going to get carried to the moon by a private space exploration company—but it’s also not quite dead yet

Hit by restructuring, the EPA is reportedly planning to end the Energy Star program, a project that has saved hundreds of billions of dollars for businesses and consumers

A new study is fueling speculation and fear about the risks of a major earthquake in the Cascadia subduction zone, including massive flooding in California

A forest fire that erupted in New Jersey and spread overnight highlights the major wildfire risk faced by the state and other urban areas

Autism rates are rising, but RFK, Jr., is wrong about the reasons. Here’s what the science says

Cornell is being slammed with stop-work orders that will seriously impact department of defense research linked to the Air Force and military safety, sources tell Scientific American

After a stellar Yankees win on Saturday, torpedo bats are in the spotlight. Is there science behind these baseball bats?

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has repeatedly suggested that farmers should let bird flu spread through flocks. Experts explain why that’s a dangerous idea

Trump could drop a federal lawsuit against a petrochemical plant that emits chloroprene. Here’s a look at the cancer-causing chemical

A Chinese start-up has stunned the technology industry—and financial markets—with a cheaper, lower-tech AI assistant that matches the state of the art

Wildfires like the Los Angeles blazes destroy so much, but they often spare some evidence of the cause of their ignition

In California and elsewhere, fast-moving fires are particularly damaging and expensive because they take people by surprise, making evacuations difficult

The oldest human genomes ever sequenced reveal that our Neandertal ancestry came from one “pulse” of interbreeding and pins down the timing

Plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth’s crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought—and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life

A finger-sized clay cylinder from a tomb in northern Syria appears to be the oldest example of writing using an alphabet rather than hieroglyphs or cuneiform

Compared with other arachnids, invasive Joro spiders are calm, cool and collected under stress, a new study shows

New drugs may help patients with life-threatening "brain-eating" amoeba infections

Cocaine has been detected in sharks for the first time, but scientists aren’t sure of the impact

Find new ways to fill the long summer days with these quick primers on 10 ancient games

Millions of hand-size Joro spiders are moving up the East Coast. Don’t panic