Seven months after the Supreme Court struck down a deal that would have resolved thousands of opioid cases against Purdue Pharma, the company’s owners, members of the Sackler family, have increased their cash offer to settle the litigation — but with a novel catch. Under the framework for a new deal, the Sacklers would not…
Federal officials who spent the last year grappling with a surge of bird flu infections in cows and people are now confronting a spate of new cases in cats, some of which have died after eating contaminated, uncooked pet food. Since early December, more than two dozen cases have been confirmed in domestic cats in…
A study of more than 30,000 British adults diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., found that, on average, they were dying earlier than their counterparts in the general population — around seven years earlier for men, and around nine for women. The study, which was published Thursday in The British Journal of Psychiatry,…
The Trump administration, moving quickly to clamp down on health and science agencies, has canceled a string of scientific meetings and instructed federal health officials to refrain from all public communications, including upcoming reports focused on the nation’s escalating bird flu crisis. Experts who serve on outside advisory panels on a range of topics, from…
Corals come in a wide array of shapes, sizes and colors, and they build sprawling reefs that serve as refuges for vast amounts of biodiversity in the ocean. But they are not known for being fleet of foot. This is because out of the more than 6,000 species of coral known to science, most are…
With hornlike facial fins and diamond-shape bodies that can stretch nearly 30 feet across, manta rays are among the strangest fish in the sea. Yet these behemoths’ most puzzling feature is a whip-like tail that can measure as long as the rest of the fish’s body. Why mantas and related rays have such long tails…
Parents and their children, or people who know each other well, often share some expression that is unique to them — a phrase or gesture that began by happenstance but gradually acquired a meaning that only they know. The same is true of Beryl, a chimpanzee living in Kibale National Park, in Uganda, and her…
Ena Onishi, a doctoral student at Kyoto University, has spent over 600 hours watching chimpanzees urinating. She has a good reason for all that peeping, though. She is part of a team of researchers that recently discovered that the primates tend to tinkle when they see nearby chimps do the same. In a study published…
Though Mr. Kennedy’s embrace of recovery farms may be novel, the concept stretches back almost a century. In 1935, the government opened the United States Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Ky., to research and treat addiction. Over the years, residents included Chet Baker and William S. Burroughs (who portrayed the institution in his novel, “Junkie: Confessions…
President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked Brandon Williams, a former Navy officer and one-term congressman, to become the keeper of the nation’s arsenal of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads. Mr. Trump’s selection is a shift from a tradition in which the people who served as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration typically had…
