Jane Goodall, the renowned and beloved primatologist and conservationist, passed away at age 91, leaving behind a legacy of compassion, scientific discovery, and environmental advocacy. Her pioneering work with chimpanzees in Tanzania revealed the emotional depth and...
Europe is bracing for a new phase of energy turmoil, the most severe since the COVID‑19 pandemic and Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel carried out coordinated, wide‑ranging strikes on Iran, sharply escalating the...
Currently, the U.S. federal government has shifted its stance on scientific investment, reducing support and enforcement for research and development, particularly in biological health and environmental fields. While this creates a major challenge, it also presents an...
The Fix Our Forests Act, while ostensibly aimed at improving forest health, has drawn criticism for potentially prioritizing logging interests over genuine ecological restoration. Critics argue that the Act, by streamlining environmental reviews and expediting logging...
Last time on The Normals, we learned that in the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to recruit many healthy volunteers for basic research. Two peace churches, the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, had an excess of healthy human volunteers. The “Normals” recruited from these Anabaptist churches were surprisingly happy, even […]
First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Hannah Richter joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss NASA’s plans to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars in less than 3 years. Having not launched a fission reactor to space in more than 60 years, the organization faces many technical and bureaucratic hurdles to make that deadline. […]
How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it […]
In a first last month, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the shift to clean energy. However, rising power demand is complicating the transition away from fossil fuels by extending the lives of many aging coal power plants.Read more on E360 →
As oceans warm and whale prey becomes increasingly scarce, gray whales have begun venturing into San Francisco Bay in search of food. But nearly one in five gray whales who enter the bay die there, many of them killed by passing boats, new research shows.Read more on E360 →
Scientists have long known that deadly diseases, from HIV to SARS to Ebola, can begin in animals and spill over to humans. But a new study is the first to quantify the risks from the global trade in wildlife, finding that nearly half of traded mammals share at least one pathogen with humans.Read more on […]