The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life.

An Ecuadorian fishing crew describe their ordeal as victims of Trump’s purported war on ‘narcoterrorists’

Nigerian authorities have charged six military officers over an alleged plot to overthrow President Bola Tinubu.

Archaeologists working at the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt’s Minya Governorate have uncovered a Roman-era burial that combines rare funerary objects with an unexpected literary find: a papyrus fragment from Homer’s Iliad concealed inside a mummy. A Spanish-Egyptian excavation team working at the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus (modern-day El-Bahnasa) has uncovered a Roman-era necropolis containing mummies adorned with golden tongue amulets. The discovery was announced by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, highlighting it as one of the most significant recent finds in Middle Egypt. The excavation was led by researchers from the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East, under the direction of Dr. Maite Mascort and Dr. Esther Pons Mellado.

Salmon exposed to cocaine and its byproduct swam farther than unexposed fish, raising alarms about drug pollution in aquatic ecosystems.

Japan could soon sell weapons overseas, including fighter jets, in a shift from its decades-old pacifist policy.

Chavez-DeRemer had been facing a probe from the Labor Department’s inspector general over potential misconduct.

While a welcome reprieve from the bombing, the deal could allow Israel to make even more demands of Lebanon.

A scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had simmered for years with such resentment and jealousy over a colleague that he poisoned the man’s water with chemicals this month, local authorities said.

A federal judge must end his contempt investigation of the Trump administration for failing to comply with an order over flights carrying Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador last year, a divided appeals court panel ruled.

The alleged gunman, who is related to some of the children, was killed after a vehicle chase, according to police.

Every fandom is The Pitt fandom

Lebanese health ministry says killing of 91 healthcare workers shows ‘total disregard’ for international law

WASHINGTON, April 18 (Reuters) - U.S. President ​Donald Trump signed an executive order on Saturday intended to speed up access to medical research and treatment based on psychedelic ‌drugs. The order instructs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expedite the review of drugs such as ibogaine, which U.S. military veteran groups have said can help treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

In what is possibly another sign of climate change, mosquitoes have landed in Iceland for the first time. For many years, the island was the only Arctic country that could claim to be mosquito-free. But that all changed in 2025, when three Culiseta annulata specimens were discovered in a garden in Kjós, just north of the capital Reykjavík.

Many, though not all, of the lawyers who attempted to overturn the 2020 election continue to face the fallout.

St. Vincent Medical Center, a seven-floor yellowish-white structure that looms over MacArthur Park, is the oldest hospital in Los Angeles. Or it was — the hospital closed six years ago, and the building has been vacant since. In case that wasn’t clear, the words “MEDICAL CENTER” on the facade have been covered up by a big white tarp. But this historic complex, recently controversial for being inactive in a high-need neighborhood, is notable right now for the opposite reason. St. Vincent is preparing not just to reopen, but to take on several completely new identities at once — including a homeless shelter, a large supportive housing development, and an immersive, selfie-friendly pop-up art museum with 70 rooms.

“These people that say, ‘It was an accident, move on,’ they don't have to worry about what the contamination is going to do to their health long term... I can't afford to just go move.”

Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

Lemkin defined genocide as being aimed at ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’. He was thinking about the way the Nazis saw the Jewish ghettos and enslaved labour camps as means of slow, indirect extermination. But he was also aware of the colonial origins of this mode of destruction. Though direct acts of massacre took place in colonised territories everywhere, slow, indirect killings have more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples. Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on which they depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations, Indigenous populations were destroyed to free up the best land for European settlement. Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. The tide of destruction flowed inwards from Gaza’s perimeter fences, pushing Palestinians into enclaves referred to by the Israeli army as ‘safe areas’ and ‘humanitarian zones’, though they were never safe or humane. These overcrowded coastal sites, such as al-Mawasi, with its barren sand dunes, were without housing, healthcare or other services, and were continuously bombed from the air and attacked on the ground. The bulldozers turned the agriculturally rich land of eastern Gaza into a monochrome desert of crushed grey cement mixed with the area’s yellowish soil. Entire cities such as Rafah, towns such as Beit Hanoun and refugee camps such as Jabalia were erased. When buildings are bombed or bulldozed, their remains – plastics, wiring, solvents, insulation, asbestos – release toxic chemicals into the soil. Some bombs penetrate the ground before exploding and release heavy metals or metalloids – such as uranium, lead and arsenic – deep underground. Many of these substances are slow to decay and will affect the composition of the soil for decades. A lived-in landscape has been turned into what a former Israeli general, Giora Eiland, described as a place ‘where no human being can exist’.