When the World Health Organization approved a malaria vaccine for the first time in October 2021, it was widely hailed as a milestone. “This is a historic moment,” said WHO director-general Tedros ...

In 2015, Peter Stout, head of the Houston Forensic Science Center, began administering a test that was designed to not look like a test. Like many crime labs in the United States, analysts at the ...

For decades, a global transition has been underway: The slow, sometimes clumsy shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Changing just one industry requires a significant infrastructural makeover.

In many Western societies, parents eagerly await their children’s first words, then celebrate their arrival. There’s also a vast scientific and popular attention to early child language. Yet there is ...

By Mark Olalde and Lucas Waldron, ProPublica, and Jimmy Tobias for High Country News. Photography by Roberto “Bear” Guerra, High Country News Once every 10 years, ranchers must renew the permits that ...

Bradley P. Clawson spent more than three decades handling highly radioactive materials at Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear energy testing and production hub outside Idaho Falls. His work ranged ...

When Alan Lightman was nine years old, he had a mystical vision that upended his ideas about life and the universe. “I had the sensation of seeing my entire life, and indeed the life of the entire ...

It was after seeing a friend go through multiple miscarriages that Kristin Spaans decided to help. With two children of her own, the now 38-year-old offered to become a surrogate and carry her ...

When organizations need to make an announcement they hope the public won’t pay much attention to, they often drop the news right before the weekend. On a Friday afternoon this past October, in the ...

In 1676, Dutch fabric merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek held a magnifying glass to a sample of rainwater and saw a slew of tiny creatures squirming around. The first to observe such microscopic beings, ...

When George W. Maschke applied to work for the FBI in 1994, he had already held a security clearance for over 11 years. The government had deemed him trustworthy through his career in the Army. But ...

Tourists visiting the Netherlands often stop to take selfies in front of one of the country’s more than 1,000 windmills. Afterward, they might taste one of the many varieties of cheese for which the ...