NYT > Science

1. NASA Is Selecting Future Astronauts. Here’s How to Apply.
   The space agency is recruiting its next class of space travelers for missions to low-Earth orbit and the moon. Applications are due Dec. 3.
2. Top Astrophysicist Leaves U.S. After Trump Policies Affect Her Work 
   Kelly Holley-Bockelmann was one of the top astrophysicists in the country until President Trump’s policies affected every part of her work.
3. Still on the President’s Agenda: Daylight Saving Time
   Following an election-year rout for Republicans, Trump castigated lawmakers for not passing the Sunshine Protection Act. Some scientists have warned against the change.
4. What a Democratic Congress Could Mean for Science
   The Trump administration has sought to reshape the nation’s research infrastructure. Democratic lawmakers, newly empowered, are preparing to push back.
5. These Newly Elected Lawmakers Know Something Trump Doesn’t: Science
   Among those elected to Congress on Tuesday are a mathematician, a microbiologist and a chemical engineer. They plan to take on a White House that has threatened funding cuts to research.
6. Biotech Firm Claims Some Credit for Groundbreaking Virus Research
   Radical Numerics turned heads with its announcement about a novel treatment. Now a former partner, Tabula Bioscience, says it performed much of the research.
7. How A.I. Just Blew Up a Key Tenet of Computer Science
   A longstanding hypothesis held that some problems would always be hard for computers to solve quickly. But OpenAI disproved it — raising the possibility of radical new efficiencies.
8. Were These Ancient Siberian Nomads the First Stoners?
   Scientists ran a drug test on hair found in a 2,800-year-old burial mound. It came back positive for pot, the earliest known evidence of psychoactive cannabis use.
9. Tiny Chihuahuas Hold a Big Surprise: A Sliver of Coyote DNA
   The breed is descended from indigenous canines, which may have been intentionally mixed with wild coyotes long before Europeans arrived in the Americas.
10. How Cardiologists’ High Hopes for Two Drugs Were Dashed
    By every measure, the drugs were no better than placebos, full data revealed on Saturday. Was it the fault of the design of the studies, or our very hypotheses about heart disease?
11. Lonnie Thompson Has Died. He Dodged Avalanches to Preserve Climate History.
    His observations helped establish shriveling mountain glaciers as an unmistakable consequence of human-caused warming. He was 78.
12. Disaster-Prone Communities Face Cuts and Slowdowns in Federal Help
    The Trump administration is scaling back or stalling investments that help vulnerable places harden themselves to rising flood and fire threats.
13. Environmental Ballot Wins
    Voters around the country approved measures on conservation, water and data centers on Tuesday.
14. Beverly Whipple Has Died. She Introduced the G-Spot to the Mainstream.
    Dr. Whipple studied the female erogenous zone and, with collaborators, wrote a best seller about women’s sexuality. She was 85.
15. Prosecutors Seek to Drop Charges Against Russian Scientist Accused of Smuggling Frog Embryos
    Kseniia Petrova, a researcher at Harvard, has argued that she was vindictively prosecuted after her arrest in 2025.
16. A NASA Telescope Has Crashed Back to Earth
    The space agency estimated that there was a one-in-2,100 chance that debris from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory could injure someone on the ground.
17. The Election Day Edition
    In the 2022 midterms, Democrats made global warming an issue. Things have changed.
18. House Republicans Accuse Top Psychology Group of Antisemitism
    A monthslong G.O.P. effort culminated in a scathing report about emails and other exchanges within the American Psychological Association.
19. The Southwest Is Parched. Can the Recent Floodwaters Quench It?
    A series of storms has added to reservoirs in the Colorado River basin, but the long-term water outlook remains bleak.
20. Neanderthals Used Wood for Tools, Housing — and Murder?
    In one case, 75,000-year-old bones reveal what may be the earliest identifiable victim of death by wooden spear.
21. Investigators Looking for Cause of Learjet Crash Say Ice Was ‘Certainly a Factor’
    Ice, experts said, can change the shape of a plane’s wing, disrupting its aerodynamics.
22. Do Animals Grieve?
    The feeling of existential loss was long thought to be uniquely human. But studies of coyotes, cockatoos and other creatures are prompting some scientists to reconsider.
23. Why Did Snakes Lose Their Legs? And 9 More Animal Mysteries
    There are more than 1.5 million known zoological species on Earth, with at least as many enigmas. Here are our top 10.
24. These Snakes Cartwheel Out of Dangerous Situations
    To escape predators, dwarf reed snakes trade slithering for rolling to safety.
25. Cyril Hilsum, Who Helped Invent Flat-Panel Displays in TVs and iPhones, Has Died at 101
    The man who helped develop the technology for liquid crystal displays — the screens in flat-panel televisions and laptops — has died at 101.
26. Swarms of Butterflies Land at New York’s Natural History Museum
    The cartoonist Peter Kuper has filled a corridor with drawings of monarchs, depicting the beauty of the annual mass migration to Mexican forests — as well as its perils.