People who live in the Amazon basin are not likely to forget the great storm of January, 2005. Over the course of two days, a squall line measuring 620 miles (1,000 km) long and 124 miles (200 km) wide raged across the region from southwest to northeast, with buzzsaw-like winds of 90 mph (146 km/hr) causing widespread damage to property …
There are some new numbers worth pondering as the east coast sizzles through day three of a heat wave and the Time offices operate at brown-out levels so that the air conditioning doesn’t crash the building-wide power grid. Whether or not the current scorcher has anything to do with climate change, there’s no doubt that we’re in for a …
NASA junkies continue to howl at the Obama administration’s plans for human space exploration, and with good reason: there’s just no there there. Space partisans won’t be any happier with a 14-pg. policy statement released by the White House yesterday. (You can read a summery here at whitehouse.gov and download a PDF of the report.) But …
It’s always about this time of year—when the first air-sucking, clothes-wilting, soul-smothering heat wave hits a big swath of the country—that people who rarely think about climate change start to worry. Never mind that a single sweltering summer can never be traced directly to global warming. Hot weather causes even some of the …
Alarm bells have been sounding for a long time about the perilous state of the world’s fish supplies. Species are collapsing and once-fertile fishing areas are growing barren as global consumption—driven in part by the exploding popularity of sushi—is slowly strip-mining the seas. One answer is aquaculture. Farm-raised fish—like …
There’s no body of water on the planet that’s getting more attention—and causing more worry—than the Gulf of Mexico, and rightly so. Until BP’s gushing oil well is capped, that will be central fight in the environment wars. The good news is that even pessimists believe that the relief wells now being drilled will do the job and seal …
It’s axiomatic in the recovery field that addicts don’t get better until they hit bottom. For some, the bottom is shallow—a single DWI may be enough. Others sink much deeper, sobering up only after years of lost jobs, busted relationships and wrecked cars.
The U.S.—famously addicted to fossil fuels—has been struggling for …
TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger examines the high and low points of space exploration in the years before and since Yuri Gagarin went into orbit