Australia’s unprecedented wildfires are supercharged thanks to climate change, the type of trees catching fire and weather, experts say. And these fires are so extreme that they are triggering their own thunderstorms. Here are a few questions and answers about the science behind the Australian wildfires that so far have burned about 5 million hectares (12.35 million acres), killing at…

For years, Kim Cobb was the Indiana Jones of climate science. The Georgia Tech professor flew to the caves of Borneo to study ancient and current climate conditions. She jetted to a remote South Pacific island to see the effects of warming on coral. Add to that flights to Paris, Rome, Vancouver and elsewhere. All told, in the last three…

An internal team at the Census Bureau found that basic personal information collected from more than 100 million Americans during the 2010 headcount could be reconstructed from encrypted data, but with lots of mistakes, a top agency official disclosed Saturday. The age, gender, location, race and ethnicity for 138 million people were potentially vulnerable. So far, however, only internal hacking...