Flooding from torrential rain in China's Henan province has killed at least 33 people this week and eight more remain missing, according to CNN.
The big picture: Flooding has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and led to at least 1.22 billion yuan (around $190 million) in damage across the province, which is home to more than 99 million people.
AI is speeding up thediscovery of the structure of proteins that drive biological processes across organisms.
Why it matters: If researchers can predict what shape a protein will take, they can better understand how it works — and potentially target medicines for proteins that cause disease or create antibiotics that can disable resistant bacteria's proteins.
Space travel once unified Americans with the excitement of scientific discovery and wonderment. But the recent suborbital trips headlined by Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have been much more divisive, with critics accusing the billionaires of taking pricey joyrides while the Earth below them literally burns.
Axios Re:Cap goes deeper with engineer and Virgin Galactic executive Sirisha Bandla, who flew alongside Branson, to better understand what space tourism could also mean for the future of science.
Seismic action on Mars is revealing new details about the inner structure of the Red Planet.
Why it matters: Mars' interior holds the key to understanding how the planet and its atmosphere formed — and provides clues about how other rocky planets, like Earth, become habitable.
Wildfires across parts of the U.S. and Canada are burning unusually intensely and emitting larger amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than typical during midsummer, scientists say. Massive blazes in Siberia are also adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, while contributing to local air pollution.
Why it matters: The fires are thriving in areas experiencing extreme heat and drought conditions. They are both a consequence of climate change and an accelerant of global warming.
A top Chinese health official said Thursday the government doesn't accept World Health Organization plans for a follow-up investigation into COVID-19's origins — labeling a theory that it started from a laboratory leak a "rumor," per AP.
Why it matters: National Health Commission Vice Minister Zeng Yixin's comments come days after WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was "too early" to rule out the lab leak theory and proposed a second phase of study into the virus' origins.
A massive, uncontained wildfire has crossed the border from Northern California into Nevada — triggering fresh evacuations, this time in the Silver State, AP reported early Thursday.
The big picture: The Tamarack Fire, south of Lake Tahoe, has razed over 68 square miles since erupting on July 4 — one of 23 blazes ignited by lightning strikes, according to the U.S. Forest Service. It's one of 78 large fires raging across 13 U.S. states.
Smoke from the wildfires engulfing the U.S. West and Canada and carrying harmful air pollution has triggered air quality alerts in the Upper Midwest and East Coast cities including New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.
Driving the news: The coast to coast smoke, which is clearly visible from space, is due to the nearly 300 wildfires burning in British Columbia and the more than 80 large blazes in the U.S.
U.S. life expectancy fell by a year and a half in 2020 — and the drop was some three years for Black and Hispanic Americans, CDC data published Wednesday shows.
Why it matters: The overall life expectancy decline to 77.3 years is the biggest since World War II to 77.3 years is driven by the COVID-19, per the provisional data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). It also underscores the racial disparities of the pandemic.
A couple whose gender reveal party in Southern California triggered a wildfire that killed a firefighter last September has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson announced Tuesday.
Torrential rain caused severe flooding in parts of China's Henan province on Tuesday, killing 12 and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate their homes, per Reuters.
The latest: Zhengzhou, Henan's capital, picked up 21.75 inches of rain over the 24-hour period ending on Tuesday. That's roughly 87% of the city's average annual precipitation in 24 hours, and about the same as its average seven-month total from April to October, according to the Weather Channel.
