The head of Latin America’s top development bank made a pitch to Pope Leo XIV last week in the face of the Vatican’s call to divest from the mining industry: that the mistakes of the past can be avoided in extracting rare earth minerals to supply a global tech boom. Ilan Goldfajn, head of the…
WASHINGTON —The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) inked a pair of conditional loans totaling $1.2 billion this week within the rare earth elements sector, according to department announcements. Today the department announced it has singed a $725 million conditional loan with Denver-based Energy Fuels — a company specializing in uranium production — to support…
James Brown used to call himself “the hardest working man in show business.” As he left us almost two decades ago, I trust it’s not sacrilegious to suggest the sobriquet be passed to Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, a musician, producer, author and filmmaker (as in the incredible “Summer of Soul” from 2021). His…
It’s that time again, New Yorkers. Manhattanhenge is upon us. Each year at the end of May, and again in the middle of July, residents and tourists alike flood the streets of Manhattan for a spectacular view of the sun setting in the west, flanked by the city’s famous streetscapes. Nicknamed Manhattanhenge, the event attracts…
Some 425 million years ago, leggy creatures called myriapods crawled onto land and never looked back. Today, the 13,000 species of centipedes, millipedes and other living myriapods (from the Greek words for “countless” and “legs”) are found in nearly every terrestrial environment on Earth, including caves, houses and the leaf-strewn grounds of Central Park. Some…
Realism, contrary to appearances, isn’t a form closed off to horror. The stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection, Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 US National Book award, rivetingly bore out this fact. Neither strictly realistic nor wholly supernatural, they seized on ordinary events pulsing with sinister possibility: a mother distraught at her inability to…
Mammals once shared the planet with dinosaurs until a catastrophic event 66 million years ago wiped out about 75% of all life on Earth. Even so, some species managed to survive. Among them were small, rodent-like mammals belonging to the genus Cimolodon. These animals were part of the multituberculates, a long-lived group that first appeared…
I’ve always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA’s picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. Yeah, I was in San Francisco and bored. And one of the things you did with boredom at that time was drop some acid…
NASA follows international guidelines called the Planetary Protection protocol, aimed at making sure Earth’s biology doesn’t taint celestial bodies, and vice versa. The agency also has a dedicated team, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s biotechnology and planetary protection group, or B.P.P.G., that oversees efforts to avoid cross-contamination on missions. Several scientists behind the new research, including…
House Republicans had big plans for Earth Day this year: They would pass a bill to narrow protections for endangered species that they had long seen as federal overreach. It didn’t work out that way. On Wednesday afternoon, Republican leaders suddenly canceled a vote on the measure after an initial procedural vote showed shaky support…
