Following a public outcry, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced December 5 it had walked back plans that would have put time limits on health insurance payments for anesthesia care in certain states. But the brief brouhaha shined a light on an often neglected, yet central, component of surgical care. Anesthesiologists don’t just put people

Notre Dame is back. And so are its acoustics. The Paris cathedral, which burned dramatically in a fire in 2019, is reopening to the public on December 8. In the aftermath of the fire, acoustics researcher Brian Katz has been studying the sonic qualities of the cathedral, such as the echoes and reverberations created by the

From monitoring Mercury to launching a new adventure to an icy moon of Jupiter, spacecraft and astronauts made great strides in 2024. Here are some of the highlights of this year in space. New lunar visitors The moon has been a hot destination for space agencies and private companies in recent years, and 2024 was

A comparable hot gas bubble around the sun shields Earth from galactic cosmic rays A young star nicknamed the Moth plows through a dense cloud of interstellar dust and gas. That movement pushes the star's own dust disk back into a winglike shape, as seen in this simulation, but does not affect the bubble of

CHICAGO — ­New clinical trial results on the diabetes and obesity drug tirzepatide have doctors buzzing about its potential to treat heart failure, keep weight off and prevent type 2 diabetes. One of the newer heavy hitters in the ever-growing lineup of this class of drugs, tirzepatide is sold under the brand names Mounjaro (for

Unbearable heat waves around the world killed scores of people and upended daily life A boy in Delhi pours water on himself to cool off during a heat wave in May. The territory set a record-high temperature of nearly 122° Fahrenheit. SONU MEHTA/HINDUSTAN TIMES/GETTY IMAGES Over and over, the numbers tell the same story: 2024

Pablo Guerrero has been visiting cacti in the Atacama Desert his whole life, first on family trips to the Chilean coast and later as a researcher studying the impacts of climate change and illegal poaching on the fragile flora. The desert, which is the driest spot on Earth beyond the planet’s poles, can be so

Certain fungi give trees nutrients and water, but heat and drought put both at risk  For trees and fungi that rely on one another to survive, moving into new suitable habitats as climate change progresses is a particularly complicated process. Michael Rucker/500px, Getty Images More than one-third of the world’s tree species, from tropical magnolias

Males still wrap surprises for female spiders in silk but inside there’s just a bit of junk A male Paratrechalea ornata woos with a silk-wrapped gift. Its contents might be a morsel of insect meat or something far less delectable, like a bit of exoskeleton. Biologists are studying how an unpredictable climate can affect gift

ESA’s Proba-3 mission will demonstrate precision flying and study the sun’s mysterious corona The two Proba-3 spacecraft (illustrated) will be the first to fly in precision formation, which will let them make observations of the sun that are nearly impossible any other way. P. Carril/ESA A pair of spacecraft just launched to create hundreds of