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Fishing guides in the Florida Keys began reporting unusual sightings to Ross Boucek last fall. Small bait fish, especially at night, would start spinning in tight circles in the water, seemingly in distress.

As the months went by, more reports trickled in to Dr. Boucek, a biologist with the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust, a nonprofit conservation group. Bigger fish — jacks, snook — were swimming in spirals or upside down in the shallow waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. So were stingrays and the occasional shark.

Dr. Boucek called scientists at state agencies and universities. They held meetings, took samples of the water and fish and tried to figure out what might be causing the fish to behave so strangely. A parasite? A sewage spill? Some other contaminant?

Then, in January, the mysterious ailment began afflicting smalltooth sawfish, a type of large, prehistoric-looking ray named for the look of its snout-like rostrum lined with sharp teeth. The sawfish, which are endangered and reliably found only in southernmost Florida, started dying.

The search for answers became urgent, Dr. Boucek said, “the second an endangered species started dying off at unprecedented rates.”

He now spends much of his time in a wet suit, flippers and a snorkeling mask, collecting samples and recording data from sensors that he deploys along the sea bottom, looking for changes or patterns that might help solve the mystery.

At least 38 sawfish have died so far this year, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, which is investigating the deaths. Perhaps only hundreds of breeding sawfish females remain in the wild, said R. Dean Grubbs, a fish ecologist at Florida State University. The fish can grow as long as 18 feet, according to the commission.

A research team led by state scientists has raced to conduct experiments, tag sawfish and sample their blood. Florida lawmakers designated $2 million in emergency funds to help carry out the work.

Some wonder if last summer’s record-breaking sea temperatures, which bleached coral throughout the Keys, may have altered the ecosystem and triggered unusual microalgal growth.

In their best lead to date, they have learned that microalgae naturally present near the sea bottom have produced an elevated level of toxins that acutely affect the neurological systems of fish when they swim into those areas.

That might explain why spinning fish seem to recover when pulled up from the sea bottom (where toxin concentrations are higher) toward the water surface (where concentrations are lower), said Michael Parsons, a marine science professor at Florida Gulf Coast University. Sawfish are sea-bottom dwellers.

Since early April, the National Marine Fisheries Service has been trying to rescue and rehabilitate sawfish spotted in distress, a logistically daunting effort that the agency calls the first of its kind in the United States. The team rescued its first sawfish, an 11-foot male, on April 5, after a member of the public saw it swimming in circles in Cudjoe Bay. It is now recovering at Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota, in hopes that it can eventually return to the wild.

More than 150 sick sawfish have been observed since the crisis started. Whirling sawfish have been spotted as far north as Palm Beach County, but scientists have not linked their behavior to that of the fish in the Lower Keys.

Gregg Furstenwerth, who lives in Little Torch Key and has been spotting spinning fish for months, sharing videos on social media, said he glimpsed one struggling sawfish, about 14 feet long, late last month on a beach near Key West.

“My wife started crying,” he said. “I wish it was better. I’m sitting here watching the ecosystem tear itself apart, and I’m powerless to stop it.”

Whatever is happening threatens not only the endangered sawfish and other marine life — some 426 dead fish from more than 50 species have been reported to the state — but also the livelihoods of many in the Lower Keys whose jobs are connected to sport fishing.

Some fishing guides have had clients cancel their trips because they are worried that because people are worried that the fish they catch will not be safe to eat, Dr. Boucek said. The state says that people should not consume any fish that has exhibited abnormal behavior.

One of the microalgae species detected, Gambierdiscus, produces several toxins, including a compound responsible for a common form of fish poisoning in humans called ciguatera. But it typically does not sicken fish.

“It’s been a stressful few months, just trying to piece together a very complicated puzzle,” said Allison Delashmit, executive director of the Lower Keys Guides Association.

More than one thing may be to blame for the sick and dying fish, cautioned Alison Robertson, an associate marine science professor at the University of South Alabama. Fish in the Keys, where a number of toxins have been present for years, could be predisposed to behaving abnormally because of prior exposure.

“We actually think the combined effect of multiple toxins are causing the behavioral effects that we’ve been seeing,” Dr. Robertson said.

To collect fresh data, Dr. Boucek, 39, who lives on a sailboat in Marathon, in the Middle Keys, goes out on a boat every few days to check on sensors.

One recent morning, Capt. Nick LaBadie, a 33-year-old fishing guide, took Dr. Boucek to six sites around Sugarloaf Key, about 15 miles north of Key West, reading GPS coordinates to track sensors identified by floating buoys. The first site, nicknamed Tarpon Belly, was where some of the first spinning fish had been reported, Dr. Boucek said.

“You talk to these guys who are 70 years old, and they’re like, ‘I’ve never seen this,’” he recalled.

He donned his swim gear and dove in, squealing “Woo!” as he hit the chilly water. He cleaned the tip of one sensor and deployed another one. He could see clear to the shallow bottom but still looked out for bull sharks, which, he and Mr. LaBadie agreed, can be “very aggro.”

Back on board, Dr. Boucek recorded his work by hand, in pencil. He added fixative to preserve a water sample and placed it in a cooler.

“Every day, you think you have some kind of pattern, and the next week that pattern’s totally gone,” he said.

He failed to find a sensor at another site where the water was more turbid. But Dr. Boucek noted promising signs, including a nurse shark and a red snapper in the Sugarloaf Marina, where few fish had been seen for a while. Near Tarpon Belly, he spotted “mullet mud,” a dark patch created when feeding fish stir the sea bottom, for the first time this season.

He came upon no sawfish.

Not long after docking the boat and leaving the marina, however, word spread among fishing guides and scientists: A thrashing sawfish had washed up on a beach in Key West. Tourists watched it die.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Maybe it’s the superior experience of sipping a crisp, carbonated beverage through a straw. Maybe it’s the rise of Stanley Cups, or the supremacy of cold brew even in the winter months. Whatever it is, straws have evolved beyond the single-use plastic straw-man argument for environmental personal responsibility into so much more.

There are straws made of paper, glass straws, metal straws and durable, reusable plastic straws. Many come with their own silicone accessories, cleaning systems, and personalized carrying cases.

Our endless enthusiasm for sipping things through narrow tubes has birthed much innovation in the straw market. It has also created a new anxiety: lip wrinkles.

Traditional straws force sippers to purse their lips around the opening in an expression that many believe, over time, creates wrinkles around your lips, called perioral lines.

Enter the anti-wrinkle straw, shaped like the number 7, with a small hole at the top horizontal portion that allows users to drink without pursing their lips.

The straws work, “in theory,” said Jenny Liu, a Board-Certified dermatologist and Assistant Professor of Dermatology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. But she noted that there are “no studies to back it up.”

“The way the opening is designed, it allows for one to drink out of straw but not have to use the muscles around the lips as readily compared to traditional straws,” Dr. Liu said. Because there is less repetitive contraction of these muscles when using an “anti-wrinkle” straw, it’s less likely that perioral lines will form.

“But, again, all of this is theoretical,” Dr. Liu said. “Lip wrinkles are not just from repetitive movement. Genetics, sun damage, and other factors like occupation — like, for example musicians, that play with their mouth — can all affect the likelihood of developing lip wrinkles.”

Frequency of use also factors into the equation

“For someone who doesn’t usually use a straw to drink but does have lip wrinkles, using an anti-wrinkle straw is not going to be very helpful,” she continued, “so it’s really a misnomer.”

The lack of peer-reviewed studies has not prevented the aesthetically minded TikToking straw-enthusiasts out there from making anti-wrinkle straws the new thing.

In a video that has received more than 1.6 million views on TikTok — and even more on X — the aesthetician and online influencer Michaela Scott raved about the product.

“This straw is an anti-wrinkle straw, so you’re not pursing your lips as much when you drink out of it sideways like this,” she said in the video, posted last week.

The wellness and beauty influencer Lauren Erro claimed that it “might be the best invention for anti-aging ever.”

“They always say that straws give you mouth wrinkles, but this straw literally is trying to prevent that,” she said in a recent TikTok.

Some commenters were less than impressed with the invention.

“This is such a tiring way of living,” one commenter declared.

“Just use a straw bro,” replied another.

Whether or not it’s a fleeting trend the straws are part of a budding market on e-commerce sites. The most popular anti-wrinkle straw — the Lipzi — has been purchased by tens of thousands of people, according to its inventor, Tim McManaman.

Mr. McManaman, 58, lives in Normal, Ill., and works in procurement for a large financial services company. In his spare time, he enjoys inventing and patenting original ideas. An avid Diet Coke drinker, he got the idea for the Lipzi when he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview as he was drinking from a straw and noticed just how many wrinkles formed around his lips when he sipped.

When he presented the prototype to his wife and four young adult children, they were uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the invention. “I brought this straw to the kitchen table and my wife’s first reaction was: ‘OK, this idea might actually work,’” he said in an interview.

As it goes from side gig to profitable family business Lipzi has started doing wholesale supply to spas in the Midwest; and Mr. McManaman said he has recently received patent approval, which could help minimize knockoff sellers on Amazon.

His daughter Grace has been helping him build the brand on social media, and his son TJ, a senior in college, is hoping to join the business after graduation.

Mr. McManaman added that personally doesn’t care much about lip wrinkles.

“But there’s a lot of people that do,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that take it pretty serious.”

Former Vice President Al Gore was in New York City over the weekend for a leadership training convened by the Climate Reality Project, his nonprofit organization.

On Saturday, before thousands of attendees, Mr. Gore highlighted mounting climate perils but also spoke of progress. He slammed fossil fuel companies for ramping up plastics production and promoting technology to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which he called “utterly preposterous.”

Afterward, Mr. Gore explained in an interview why he was not surprised that major oil and gas companies have walked back their pledges to decarbonize. And he said he believed that former President Donald J. Trump would lose his campaign to return to the White House. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Oil and gas companies recently gathered in Houston for the industry’s annual conference. Many of the major companies have walked back their promises to decarbonize. In Houston, the head of Saudi Aramco said the “fantasy of phasing out oil and gas” should be ditched.

I don’t think their pledges were sincere in the first place. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was this pinch in Europe’s access to fossil fuels which translated into a crunch and in demand elsewhere in the world. There was a sudden surge to try to replace the Russian supplies. That had a global impact on the price of fossil fuels, and on the profits of the large companies.

When they got a taste of these higher windfall profits, they came under pressure from their investors to capitalize while the getting was good. So they just decided en masse to abandon their pledges and just go forward, without regard to what they had pretended to be doing in the past. I think it was always a fraud. It remains to be seen whether they are going to be able to walk back their pledges without incurring significant damage politically and in the business community.

What does that mean for the need to stop burning fossil fuels, which scientists say is imperative?

We have to change the laws and policies. We must stop subsidizing. We have to put a tax on carbon, as we have already put a tax on methane. So-called carbon border adjustment mechanisms rising up elsewhere in the world offer a pathway to do that.

Former President Donald J. Trump has made it clear he would dismantle President Biden’s climate policies and promote fossil fuels. If he wins in November, what would that mean for the fight against global warming?

First of all, I refuse to accept the hypothetical. Trump’s not going away. I don’t think he’s going to win.

Why?

I think that the long political tail of inflation is going to be attenuated by November. I think that the increasing economic strength and America’s job market is going to continue to give benefits to President Biden. Trump is vulnerable to making more mistakes as the pressure on him increases. You see him flailing a bit on the questions related to choice. I don’t portray myself as a skilled political analyst, that’s not my forte. But the number of months between now and the election is, to use a cliché, a lifetime in politics. I would way prefer to have Biden’s political position right now than Trump’s.

And the climate impact, if you’re wrong?

If Trump were to be elected, I think that the favorable trends in renewable energy, battery storage, electric vehicles, green hydrogen, circular manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, sustainable forestry, would all continue to move in the right direction. However, the momentum from what they’re doing now will not get us to where we need to be.

We need skilled and determined leadership from the White House in the United States in order to accelerate progress. The crisis is still getting worse faster than we’re deploying the solutions. If we gain more momentum, we’ll begin to gain on the crisis itself.

We’re here at your Climate Reality conference, which trains people around the world to push for climate solutions in their communities.

At this point, it’s 3.5 million members worldwide.

The story of David and Goliath aside, given the huge profits that the fossil fuel industry has been realizing, is there a mismatch between the companies and climate activists?

We don’t have just one David, we have 3,000 Davids here at this training. And there are millions around the world. If you look at all the groups that are doing this work, it is the largest grass roots movement in the entire history of the world, and it is continuing to build.

I draw an analogy between this movement and the abolitionists, women’s suffrage, civil rights, etc. With all of those movements, when the central issue was really crystallized as a choice between what is clearly right and just, and what is clearly unjust and wrong and deadly and dangerous, then the outcome becomes foreordained.

I bet on humanity. I believe that in spite of the well known limitations we all have, and our vulnerabilities to pettiness and greed, and all of the things that can go wrong, we also really and truly have a capacity to rise above those limitations, as we have demonstrated in times past. We are capable of this. And the ability of the special interests, in this case the fossil fuel polluters to dominate laws and policies, is going to come to an end.

The world’s coral reefs are in the throes of a global bleaching event caused by extraordinary ocean temperatures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and international partners announced Monday.

It is the fourth such global event on record and is expected to affect more reefs than any other. Bleaching occurs when corals become so stressed that they lose the symbiotic algae they need to survive. Bleached corals can recover, but if the water surrounding them is too hot for too long, they die.

Coral reefs are vital ecosystems: limestone cradles of marine life that nurture an estimated quarter of ocean species at some point during their life cycles, support fish that provide protein for millions of people and protect coasts from storms. The economic value of the world’s coral reefs has been estimated at $2.7 trillion annually.

“This is scary, because coral reefs are so important,” said Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program, which monitors and predicts bleaching events.

The news is the latest example of climate scientists’ alarming predictions coming to pass as the planet heats. Despite decades of warnings from scientists and pledges from leaders, nations are burning more fossil fuels than ever and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

Substantial coral death has been confirmed around Florida and the Caribbean, particularly among staghorn and elk horn species, but scientists say it’s too soon to estimate what the extent of global mortality will be.

To determine a global bleaching event, NOAA and the group of global partners, the International Coral Reef Initiative, use a combination of sea surface temperatures and evidence from reefs. By their criteria, all three ocean basins that host coral reefs — the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic — must experience bleaching within 365 days, and at least 12 percent of the reefs in each basin must be subjected to temperatures that cause bleaching.

Currently, more than 54 percent of the world’s coral area has experienced bleaching-level heat stress in the past year, and that number is increasing by about 1 percent per week, Dr. Manzello said.

He added that within a week of two, “this event is likely to be the most spatially extensive global bleaching event on record.”

Each of the three previous global bleaching events has been worse than the last. During the first, in 1998, 20 percent of the world’s reef areas suffered bleaching-level heat stress. In 2010, it was 35 percent. The third spanned 2014 to 2017 and affected 56 percent of reefs.

The current event is expected to be shorter-lived, Dr. Manzello said, because El Niño, a natural climate pattern associated with warmer oceans, is weakening and forecasters predict a cooler La Niña period to take hold by the end of the year.

Bleaching has been confirmed in 54 countries, territories and local economies, as far apart as Florida, Saudi Arabia and Fiji. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is suffering what appears to be its most severe bleaching event; about a third of the reefs surveyed by air showed prevalence of very high or extreme bleaching, and at least three quarters showed some bleaching.

“I do get depressed sometimes, because the feeling is like, ‘My God, this is happening,’” said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a professor of marine studies at the University of Queensland who published early predictions about how global warming would be catastrophic for coral reefs.

“Now we’re at the point where we’re in the disaster movie,” he said.

The most recent confirmation of widespread bleaching, prompting Monday’s announcement, came from the Western Indian Ocean, including Tanzania, Kenya, Mauritius, the Seychelles and off the western coast of Indonesia.

Swaleh Aboud, a coral reef scientist at CORDIO East Africa, a research and conservation nonprofit group based in Kenya and focused on the Indian Ocean, said coral species that are known to be thermally resistant are bleaching, as are reefs in a cooler area considered to be a climate refuge.

Recently he visited a fishing community in Kenya called Kuruwitu that has worked to revive its reef. Many of the restored coral colonies had turned ghostly white. Others were pale, apparently on their way.

“Urgent global action is necessary to reduce future bleaching events, primarily driven by carbon emissions,” Mr. Aboud said.

Scientists are still learning about corals’ ability to adapt to climate change. Efforts are underway to breed coral that tolerate higher temperatures. In a few places, including Australia and Japan, coral appear to be migrating poleward, beginning to occupy places where reefs don’t exist. But scientists say a variety of factors, such as how much light penetrates the water and the topography of the sea floor, make such migration limited or unlikely in much of the world. Plus there’s the problem of ocean acidification; as seawater absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it becomes more acidic, making it harder for coral to build and maintain reefs.

Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg, who has studied the impact of climate change on coral reefs for more than three decades, was an author of a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that found the world would lose the vast majority of its coral reefs at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, and virtually all at 2 degrees. Current pledges by nations put the Earth on track for about 2.5 degrees by 2100. Still, he has not lost hope.

“I think we will solve the problem if we get up and fight to solve the problem,” Dr. Hoegh-Guldberg said. “If we continue to pay lip service but not get on with the solutions, then we’re kidding ourselves.”

To introduce her children to the hidden marvels of the animal kingdom a few years ago, Anne De Cian stepped into her garden in Paris. Dr. De Cian, a molecular biologist, gathered bits of moss, then came back inside to soak them in water and place them under a microscope. Her children gazed into the eyepiece at strange, eight-legged creatures clambering over the moss.

“They were impressed,” Dr. De Cian said.

But she was not finished with the tiny beasts, known as tardigrades. She brought them to her laboratory at the French National Museum of Natural History, where she and her colleagues hit them with gamma rays. The blasts were hundreds of times greater than the radiation required to kill a human being. Yet the tardigrades survived, going on with their lives as if nothing had happened.

Scientists have long known that tardigrades are freakishly resistant to radiation, but only now are Dr. De Cian and other researchers uncovering the secrets of their survival. Tardigrades turn out to be masters of molecular repair, able to quickly reassemble piles of shattered DNA, according to a study published on Friday and another from earlier this year.

Scientists have been trying to breach the defenses of tardigrades for centuries. In 1776, Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian naturalist, described how the animals could dry out completely and then be resurrected with a splash of water. In the subsequent decades, scientists found that tardigrades could withstand crushing pressure, deep freezes and even a trip to outer space.

In 1963, a team of French researchers found that tardigrades could withstand massive blasts of X-rays. In more recent studies, researchers have found that some species of tardigrades can withstand a dose of radiation 1,400 times higher than what’s required to kill a person.

Radiation is deadly because it breaks apart DNA strands. A high-energy ray that hits a DNA molecule can cause direct damage; it can also wreak havoc by colliding with another molecule inside a cell. That altered molecule may then attack the DNA.

Scientists suspected that tardigrades could prevent or undo this damage. In 2016, researchers at the University of Tokyo discovered a protein called Dsup, which appeared to shield tardigrade genes from energy rays and errant molecules. The researchers tested their hypothesis by putting Dsup into human cells and pelting them with X-rays. The Dsup cells were less damaged than cells without the tardigrade protein.

That research prompted Dr. De Cian’s interest in tardigrades. She and her colleagues studied the animals she had gathered in her Paris garden, along with a species found in England and a third from Antarctica. As they reported in January, gamma rays shattered the DNA of the tardigrades, yet failed to kill them.

Courtney Clark-Hachtel, a biologist at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and her colleagues independently found that the tardigrades ended up with broken genes. Their study was published on Friday in the journal Current Biology.

These findings suggest that Dsup on its own does not prevent DNA damage, though it’s possible the proteins provide partial protection. It’s hard to know for sure because scientists are still figuring out how to run experiments with tardigrades. They cannot engineer the animals without the Dsup gene, for example, to see how they would handle radiation.

“We’d love to do this experiment,” Jean-Paul Concordet, Dr. De Cian’s collaborator at the museum, said. “But what we can do with tardigrades is still quite rudimentary.”

Both new studies revealed another trick of the tardigrades: They quickly fix their broken DNA.

After tardigrades are exposed to radiation, their cells use hundreds of genes to make a new batch of proteins. Many of these genes are familiar to biologists, because other species — ourselves included — use them to repair damaged DNA.

Our own cells are continually repairing genes. The strands of DNA in a typical human cell break about 40 times a day — and each time, our cells have to fix them.

The tardigrades make these standard repair proteins in astonishing large amounts. “I thought, ‘This is ridiculous’,” Dr. Clark-Hachtel recalled when she first measured their levels.

Dr. De Cian and her colleagues also discovered that radiation causes tardigrades to make a number of proteins not seen in other animals. For now, their functions remain mostly a mystery.

The scientists picked out a particularly abundant protein to study, called TRD1. When inserted in human cells, it seemed to help the cells withstand damage to their DNA. Dr. Concordet speculated that TRD1 may grab onto chromosomes and hold them in their correct shape, even as their strands start to fray.

Studying proteins like TRD1 won’t just reveal the powers of tardigrades, Dr. Concordet said, but could also lead to new ideas about how to treat medical disorders. DNA damage plays a part in many kinds of cancer, for example. “Any tricks they use we might benefit from,” Dr. Concordet said.

Dr. Concordet still finds it bizarre that tardigrades are so good at surviving radiation. After all, they don’t have to survive in nuclear power plants or uranium-lined caves.

“This is one of the big enigmas: Why are these organisms resistant to radiation in the first place?” he said.

Dr. Concordet said that this tardigrade superpower could just be an extraordinary coincidence. Dehydration can also break DNA, so tardigrades may use their shields and repair proteins to withstand drying out.

While a Paris garden may look to us like an easy place to live, Dr. Concordet said that it might pose a lot of challenges to a tardigrade. Even the disappearance of the dew each morning might be a catastrophe.

“We don’t know what life is like down there in the moss,” he said.

Tesla plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its work force in an effort to cut costs, Elon Musk, the automaker’s chief executive, told employees on Monday. The job cuts, amounting to about 14,000 people, come as the company faces increasing competition and declining sales.

“As we prepare the company for the next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity,” Mr. Musk told employees in an email, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.

“There is nothing I hate more, but it must be done,” he wrote.

The email was earlier reported by Electrek, an online news site, and Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper.

The move is the latest sign that Tesla may not be as unstoppable as it once seemed. The company’s sales are no longer growing at a rapid pace, and it has been slow to introduce new models. Automakers in Asia and Europe have been flooding the market with electric cars.

Mr. Musk’s many other ventures, and his penchant for making polarizing political statements, have raised questions about how focused he remains on managing Tesla. Wall Street is increasingly concerned about the company: Tesla’s share price has lost about one-third of its value this year.

This month, Tesla reported a decline in sales that caught investors off guard. The company said it delivered 387,000 cars worldwide in the first quarter, down 8.5 percent from the year before. It was the first time Tesla’s quarterly sales have fallen on a year over year basis since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

The company slashed prices significantly over the course of 2023 to increase demand, which has reduced the profit Tesla makes on each car. But that strategy appears to be losing its effectiveness.

Rivals like BYD of China, BMW of Germany, and Kia and Hyundai of South Korea reported increases in electric vehicle sales for the same period, suggesting that slower overall demand for battery-powered models was not the only explanation for Tesla’s problems.

Many of Tesla’s workers are based at four large car factories in Fremont, Calif., Austin, Texas, Shanghai or near Berlin.

A new Pentagon review of the events leading up to the bombing that killed 13 American service members at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021, has reaffirmed earlier findings that U.S. troops could not have prevented the deadly violence.

The review’s conclusions focus on the final days and hours at Abbey Gate before the attack, which also killed as many as 170 civilians. The review provides new details about the Islamic State bomber who carried out the suicide mission, including how he slipped into the crowds trying to evacuate the capital’s airport just moments before detonating explosives.

Some Marines who were at the gate have said they identified the suspected bomber — who became known to investigators as “Bald Man in Black” — in the crowds hours before the attack but were twice denied permission by their superiors to shoot him. But the review, building on a previous investigation made public in February 2022, rejected those accusations.

The narrative of missed opportunities to avert tragedy has gained momentum over the past year among conservatives and has contributed to broader Republican criticisms of the Biden administration’s troop withdrawal and evacuation from Kabul in August 2021.

The bombing was a searing experience for the military after 20 years of war in Afghanistan. Thirteen flag-draped coffins were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and a succession of funerals were held across the country for the service members, most of them under the age of 25.

Military officials had stood by the conclusions of the earlier inquiry that a lone Islamic State suicide bomber carried out the attack and was not joined by accomplices firing into the crowd.

But under mounting political pressure to address disparities in the earlier review and the accounts of the Marines at the gate — which also included reports that the Islamic State had conducted a test run of the bombing — a team of Army and Marine Corps officers interviewed more than 50 people who were not interviewed the first time around.

One of the main issues was the identity of the bomber. Almost immediately after the attack, the Islamic State identified him as Abdul Rahman Al-Logari. U.S. and other Western intelligence analysts later pieced together evidence that led them to the same conclusion.

American officials at the time said that Mr. Logari was a former engineering student who was one of several thousand militants freed from at least two high-security prisons after the Taliban seized control of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021. The Taliban emptied the facilities indiscriminately, releasing not only their own imprisoned members but also fighters from ISIS Khorasan or ISIS-K, the terrorist organization’s Afghanistan branch and the Taliban’s nemesis.

Mr. Logari was not unknown to the Americans. In 2017, the C.I.A. tipped off Indian intelligence agents that he was plotting a suicide bombing in New Delhi, U.S. officials said. Indian authorities foiled the attack and turned Mr. Logari over to the C.I.A., which sent him to Afghanistan to serve time at the Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base. He remained there until he was freed amid the chaos after Kabul fell.

At the airport, investigators said, the bomber detonated a 20-pound explosive, probably carried in a backpack or vest, spraying 5-millimeter ball bearings in a tremendous blast that was captured in grainy video images shown to Pentagon reporters.

All this was known to the Marine and Army officials as they started their supplemental review last September. But they were assigned to address the lingering questions.

On the day of the bombing, Marines at the gate were given intelligence to be on the lookout for a man with groomed hair, wearing loose clothes and carrying a black bag of explosives. The review team determined, after additional interviews and assessing security camera footage and other photographs of the chaotic scene, that the description was not specific enough to meaningfully narrow the search.

But Marines at the gate came forward later to say that at about 7 a.m., they saw an individual matching the suicide bomber’s description. The Marines said that the man had engaged in suspicious behavior and that they had sent urgent warnings to leaders asking for permission to shoot. Twice their request was denied, they said.

The review team concluded that the Marines had conflated the intelligence reports with an earlier spotting of a man wearing beige clothes and carrying a black bag. The team also reviewed a photo taken of the suspect from one of the sniper team’s cameras.

The man in question did not actually match the description, the review team concluded. He was bald, wore black clothes and was not carrying a black bag. Moreover, photographs taken of Mr. Logari when he was in American custody did not match the photographs of the suspect, even after facial recognition software was used.

“Al-Logari and ‘Bald Man in Black’ received the strongest negative result,” concluded a slide from the supplemental review team’s findings that was briefed to reporters.

Moreover, the review team concluded, Mr. Logari did not arrive at Abbey Gate on Aug. 26 until “immediately before” the attack, minimizing his chances of being detected by the Marines.

The review team went through a similar process to discount the sightings of specific individuals whom Marines had suspected of carrying out a dry run of the eventual attack.

Members of the review team did not challenge the motives or dedication of the Marines who raised the vexing questions. But in the end, the review team concluded, the Marines were mistaken.

As traumatic as the bombing was, perhaps it is not surprising that the recollections and conclusions of Marines and soldiers that day, however sincere, were not supported by subsequent inquiries.

The findings of the original Army-led investigation in February 2022 contradicted initial reports by senior U.S. commanders that militants had fired into the crowd of people at the airport seeking to flee the Afghan capital and had caused some of the casualties.

The accounts of what unfolded immediately after the attack — from the Pentagon and people on the ground — changed several times. Defense Department officials initially said that nearby fighters from Islamic State Khorasan began firing weapons. That turned out not to be true.

Some people near the scene said the Marines had shot indiscriminately into the crowd, apparently believing they were under fire. That, too, according to the accounting by the military’s Central Command, turned out not to be true, although investigators said that British and American forces had fired warning shots in the air.

A Chinese company targeted by members of Congress over potential ties to the Chinese government makes blockbuster drugs for the American market that have been hailed as advances in the treatment of cancers, obesity and debilitating illnesses like cystic fibrosis.

WuXi AppTec is one of several companies that lawmakers have identified as potential threats to the security of individual Americans’ genetic information and U.S. intellectual property. A Senate committee approved a bill in March that aides say is intended to push U.S. companies away from doing business with them.

But lawmakers discussing the bill in the Senate and the House have said almost nothing in hearings about the vast scope work WuXi does for the U.S. biotech and pharmaceutical industries — and patients. A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of records worldwide shows that WuXi is heavily embedded in the U.S. medicine chest, making some or all of the main ingredients for multibillion-dollar therapies that are highly sought to treat cancers like some types of leukemia and lymphoma as well as obesity and H.I.V.

The Congressional spotlight on the company has rattled the pharmaceutical industry, which is already struggling with widespread drug shortages now at a 20-year high. Some biotech executives have pushed back, trying to impress on Congress that a sudden decoupling could take some drugs out of the pipeline for years.

WuXi AppTec and an affiliated company, WuXi Biologics grew rapidly, offering services to major U.S. drugmakers that were seeking to shed costs and had shifted most manufacturing overseas in the last several decades.

WuXi companies developed a reputation for low-cost and reliable work by thousands of chemists who could create new molecules and operate complex equipment to make them in bulk. By one estimate, WuXi has been involved in developing one-fourth of the drugs used in the United States. WuXi AppTec reported earning about $3.6 billion in revenue for its U.S. work.

“They have become a one-stop shop to a biotech,” said Kevin Lustig, founder of Scientist.com, a clearinghouse that matches drug companies seeking research help with contractors like WuXi.

WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics have also received millions of dollars in tax incentives to build sprawling research and manufacturing sites in Massachusetts and Delaware that local government officials have welcomed as job and revenue generators. One WuXi site in Philadelphia was working alongside a U.S. biotech firm to give patients a cutting-edge therapy that would turbocharge their immune cells to treat advanced skin cancers.

The tension has grown since February, when four lawmakers asked the Commerce, Defense and Treasury Departments to investigate WuXi AppTec and affiliated companies, calling WuXi a “giant that threatens U.S. intellectual property and national security.”

A House bill called the Biosecure Act linked the company to the People’s Liberation Army, the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party. The bill claims WuXi AppTec sponsored military-civil events and received military-civil fusion funding.

Richard Connell, the chief operating officer of WuXi AppTec in the United States and Europe, said the company participates in community events, which do not “imply any association with or endorsement of a government institution, political party or policy such as military-civil fusion.” He also said shareholders do not have control over the company or access to nonpublic information.

Last month, after a classified briefing with intelligence staff, the Senate homeland security committee advanced a bill by a vote of 11 to 1: It would bar the U.S. government from contracting with companies that work with WuXi. Government contracts with drugmakers are generally limited, though they were worth billions of dollars in revenue to companies that responded to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr. Connell defended the company’s record, saying the proposed legislation “relies on misleading allegations and inaccurate assertions against our company.”

WuXi operates in a highly regulated environment by “multiple U.S. federal agencies — none of which has placed our company on any sanctions list or designated it as posing a national security risk,” Mr. Connell said. WuXi Biologics did not respond to requests for comment.

Smaller biotech companies, which tend to rely on government grants and have fewer reserves, are among the most alarmed. Dr. Jonathan Kil, the chief executive of Seattle-based Sound Pharmaceuticals, said WuXi has worked alongside the company for 16 years to develop a treatment for hearing loss and tinnitus, or ringing in the ear. Finding another contractor to make the drug could set the company back two years, he said.

“What I don’t want to see is that we get very anti-Chinese to the point where we’re not thinking correctly,” Dr. Kil said.

It is unclear whether a bill targeting WuXi will advance at all this year. The Senate version has been amended to protect existing contracts and limit supply disruptions. Still, the scrutiny has prompted some drug and biotechnology companies to begin making backup plans.

Peter Kolchinsky, managing partner of RA Capital Management, estimated that half of the 200 biotech companies in his firm’s investment portfolio work with WuXi.

“Everyone is likely considering moving away from Wuxi and China more broadly,” he said in an email. “Even though the current versions of the bill don’t create that imperative clearly, no one wants to be caught flat-footed in China if the pullback from China accelerates.”

The chill toward China extends beyond drugmakers. U.S. companies are receiving billions of dollars in funding under the CHIPS Act, a federal law aimed at bringing semiconductor manufacturing stateside.

For the last several years, U.S. intelligence agencies have been warning about Chinese biotech companies in general and WuXi in particular. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the arm of the intelligence community charged with warning companies about national security issues, raised alarms about WuXi’s acquisition of NextCODE, an American genomic data company.

Though WuXi later spun off that company, a U.S. official said the government remains skeptical of WuXi’s corporate structure, noting that some independent entities have overlapping management and that there were other signs of the Chinese government’s continuing control or influence over WuXi.

Aides from the Senate homeland security committee said their core concerns are about the misuse of Americans’ genomic data, an issue that’s been more closely tied to other companies named in the bill.

Aides said the effort to discourage companies from working with WuXi and others was influenced by the U.S. government’s experience with Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant. By the time Congress acted on concerns about Huawei’s access to Americans’ private information, taxpayers had to pay billions of dollars to tear Huawei’s telecommunication equipment out of the ground.

Yet WuXi has far deeper involvement in American health care than has been discussed in Congress. Supply chain analytics firms QYOBO and Pharm3r, and some public records, show that WuXi and its affiliates have made the active ingredients for critical drugs.

They include Imbruvica, a leukemia treatment sold by Janssen Biotech and AbbVie that brought in $5.9 billion in worldwide revenue in 2023. WuXi subsidiary factories in Shanghai and Changzhou were listed in government records as makers of the drug’s core ingredient, ibrutinib.

Dr. Mikkael A. Sekeres, chief of hematology at the University of Miami Health System, called that treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia “truly revolutionary” for replacing highly toxic drugs and extending patients’ lives.

Janssen Biotech and AbbVie, partners in selling the drug, declined to comment.

WuXi Biologics also manufactures Jemperli, a GSK treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year for some endometrial cancers. In combination with standard therapies, the drug improves survival in patients with advanced disease, said Dr. Amanda Nickles Fader, president of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology.

“This is particularly important because while most cancers are plateauing or decreasing in incidence and mortality, endometrial cancer is one of the only cancers globally” increasing in both, Dr. Fader said.

GSK declined to comment.

The drug that possibly captures WuXi’s most significant impact is Trikafta, manufactured by an affiliate in Shanghai and Changzhou to treat cystic fibrosis, a deadly disease that clogs the lungs with debilitating, thick mucus. The treatment is credited with clearing the lungs and extending by decades the life expectancy of about 40,000 U.S. residents. It also had manufacturers in Italy, Portugal and Spain.

The treatment has been so effective that the Make-A-Wish Foundation stopped uniformly granting wishes to children with cystic fibrosis. Trikafta costs about $320,000 a year per patient and has been a boon for Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals and its shareholders, with worldwide revenue rising to $8.9 billion last year from $5.7 billion in 2021, according to a securities filing.

Trikafta “completely transformed cystic fibrosis and did it very quickly,” said Dr. Meghan McGarry, a University of California San Francisco pulmonologist who treats children with the condition. “People came off oxygen and from being hospitalized all the time to not being hospitalized and being able to get a job, go to school and start a family.”

Vertex declined to comment.

Two industry sources said WuXi plays a role in making Eli Lilly’s popular obesity drugs. Eli Lilly did not respond to requests for comment. WuXi companies also make an infusion for treatment-resistant H.I.V., a drug for advanced ovarian cancer and a therapy for adults with a rare disorder called Pompe disease.

WuXi is known for helping biotech firms from the idea stage to mass production, Dr. Kolchinsky said. For example, a start-up could hypothesize that a molecule that sticks to a certain protein might cure a disease. The company would then hire WuXi chemists to create or find the molecule and test it in petri dishes and animals to see whether the idea works — and whether it’s safe enough for humans.

“Your U.S. company has the idea and raises the money and owns the rights to the drug,” Dr. Kolchinsky said. “But they may count on WuXi or similar contractors for almost every step of the process.”

WuXi operates large bioreactors and manufactures complex peptide, immunotherapy and antibody drugs at sprawling plants in China.

WuXi AppTec said it has about 1,900 U.S. employees. Officials in Delaware gave the company $19 million in tax funds in 2021 to build a research and drug manufacturing site that is expected to employ about 1,000 people when fully operational next year, public records and company reports show.

Mayor Kenneth L. Branner Jr. of Middletown, Del., called it “one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to land a company like this,” according to a news report when the deal was approved.

In 2022, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts expressed a similar sentiment when workers placed the final steel beam on a WuXi Biologics research and manufacturing plant in Worcester. Government officials had approved roughly $11.5 million in tax breaks to support the project. The company announced this year that it would double the site’s planned manufacturing capacity in response to customer demand.

And in Philadelphia, a WuXi Advanced Therapies site next to Iovance Biotherapeutics was approved by regulators to help process individualized cell therapies for skin cancer patients. Iovance has said it is capable of meeting demand for the therapies independently.

By revenue, WuXi Biologics is one of the top five drug development and manufacturing companies worldwide, according to Statista, a data analytics company. A WuXi AppTec annual report showed that two-thirds of its revenue came from U.S. work.

Stepping away from WuXi could cause a “substantial slowdown” in drug development for a majority of the 105 biotech companies surveyed by BioCentury, a trade publication. Just over half said it would be “extremely difficult” to replace China-based drug manufacturers.

BIO, a trade group for the biotechnology industry, is also surveying its members about the impact of disconnecting from WuXi companies. John F. Crowley, BIO’s president, said the effects would be most difficult for companies that rely on WuXi to manufacture complex drugs at commercial scale. Moving such an operation could take five to seven years.

“We have to be very thoughtful about this so that we first do no harm to patients,” Mr. Crowley said. “And that we don’t slow or unnecessarily interfere with the advancement of biomedical research.”

Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting, and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

The Biden administration will give up to $6.4 billion in grants to Samsung, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, the latest in a slew of awards intended to shore up domestic production of cutting-edge semiconductors.

The money will help Samsung, the South Korean company, fund its new chip manufacturing hub in Taylor, Texas, and expand an existing site in nearby Austin. Samsung will now build an additional manufacturing plant and upgrade a facility under construction in Taylor. It will increase its investment in Texas to roughly $45 billion, up from the $17 billion it announced more than two years ago, administration officials said on Sunday.

Federal officials said the grants would help create a U.S. hub for the development and production of leading-edge semiconductors. Aside from manufacturing chips, Samsung will now construct a research and development facility in Taylor as well as an advanced factory for packaging them, the final step before semiconductors can be used in electronic systems.

The announcement follows other awards that federal officials have made to semiconductor manufacturers in recent weeks. The initiative is funded by the CHIPS Act, which a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed in 2022 to strengthen the domestic supply of semiconductors, the vital components that power everything from phones and computers to cars and weapons systems. The legislation gave the Commerce Department $39 billion to dole out as grants as incentives to chipmakers to construct and expand plants in the United States.

The effort is intended to help reverse a decades-long decline in the U.S. share of global chip manufacturing. Although semiconductors were invented in America, only about 10 percent of the world’s chips are currently made in the United States.

The Samsung grant is the third big award aimed at increasing U.S. production of the most sophisticated semiconductors. Last week, federal officials said they would award up to $6.6 billion in grants to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the leading maker of the most advanced chips. The administration also announced last month that Intel, a Silicon Valley chipmaker, would receive up to $8.5 billion in grants, which officials said would be the single largest grant under the new program.

Both Samsung and TSMC have committed to producing two-nanometer chips, using what is currently the world’s most advanced production technology, in the United States in the coming years.

Samsung’s investment also includes the construction of a new advanced packaging facility. Packaging typically involves encasing chips in combinations of plastic and metal that allow them to connect to other devices in a system. New packaging technologies have become a focal point for the industry as more companies have taken to bundling multiple small chips — sometimes called chiplets — in a package to boost computing power rather than trying to pack more capability into each semiconductor.

In addition, Samsung will build a research and development facility that will study advances in manufacturing processes, which add computing power and storage capability to chips. Among the largest chip manufacturers, only Intel currently conducts such research in the United States. Federal officials view Samsung’s new research and development facility as vital for ensuring the country’s access to cutting-edge developments in the field, senior Biden administration officials said.

As part of the award, Samsung will also directly supply chips to the Defense Department. The Austin facility’s expansion is intended to support the production of chips used in industries that are critical for national security, including aerospace, defense and automotive.

In addition to receiving the grants, Samsung is expected to claim federal tax credits that could cover 25 percent of the cost of building and outfitting the Texas factories with production equipment.

Samsung’s award brings the total announced federal grants to more than $23 billion. GlobalFoundries, Microchip Technology and BAE Systems received the first three awards.

The pandemic set off a global shortage of semiconductors that crippled major industries and shed light on the vulnerabilities in the domestic supply chain for chips, motivating lawmakers to pass the CHIPS Act.

Federal officials view the lack of domestic manufacturing capacity as a major national security risk, given that the components power missiles, satellites and fighter jets. Cutting-edge semiconductors are also critical for major technological industries like artificial intelligence.

Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, emphasized that much of the semiconductor supply chain — from research and development to packaging — was concentrated in a few Asian countries.

“That leaves the U.S. supply chain incredibly vulnerable to disruption,” Ms. Raimondo said on Sunday. “It’s unsafe and it weakens our national and economic security.”

Ms. Raimondo said the new investment would help create a “state-of-the-art semiconductor ecosystem” in Texas and re-establish the United States as a leader in the production of the most advanced semiconductors. In February, Ms. Raimondo said new investments would put the United States on track to produce roughly 20 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips by the end of the decade. Currently, the United States produces none.

In November 2021, Samsung first announced that it would build a $17 billion semiconductor factory in Taylor, responding to a push by the Biden administration and U.S. customers to ramp up chip production in the United States. The company will now upgrade the facility’s manufacturing capacity. In addition to four-nanometer chips, the first plant will now produce two-nanometer chips. Samsung is expected to open the first facility in 2026, administration officials said.

The second plant will also manufacture two-nanometer chips and is slated to begin production in 2027, according to the officials. The research and development facility is expected to open in 2027, too, and the advanced packaging facility is set to open in 2028.

Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, said the Samsung award would be the “third and final leg” of the president’s plan to bring leading-edge chip manufacturing back to the United States. About $40 million in grants will be set aside for the company to develop and train its workers, Ms. Brainard said. Samsung’s investment is expected to create more than 4,500 manufacturing jobs and at least 17,000 construction jobs, federal officials said.

Similar to the other award recipients, Samsung will have to meet certain milestones before payments are made.

Samsung plays an unusually influential position in the industry by supplying two major varieties of semiconductors. It is the largest maker of memory chips, which store data in smartphones, computers and other products. But the company also makes and designs logic chips — a category that includes processors that handle calculations in electronic hardware. And the company offers a service that manufactures such chips to order for other companies.

Most of Samsung’s factories are in South Korea. But in 1996, the company built a facility in Austin, which initially produced memory chips and later shifted to logic chips for products such as Apple’s iPhone. In recent years Apple has frequently turned to TSMC to manufacture chips that Apple designs, though Samsung also boasts some of the industry’s most advanced production processes.

It was spring in Queensland, Australia, a season when many wild animals find themselves in trouble, and the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital was a blur of fur and feathers.

A groggy black swan emerged from the X-ray room, head swaying on its long neck. A flying fox wore a tiny anesthetic mask. An injured rainbow lorikeet squawked in its cage. (“Very angry,” a sign warned.)

“We see everything,” Dr. Michael Pyne, the hospital’s senior veterinarian. Also on the schedule for the day: three eagles, two carpet pythons, a blue-faced honeyeater, a short-eared brushtail possum and, Dr. Pyne said, “a whole heap of koalas.”

More than a dozen koalas were convalescing in open-air enclosures, wrapping their woolly arms around the trunks of eucalyptus trees. The wards were often full; in 2023, the hospital admitted more than 400 koalas, a fourfold increase from 2010.

The surge has been driven largely by the spread of chlamydia, a devastating bacterial infection. But the hospital was also seeing more koalas with traumatic injuries, including those caused by cars and dogs. Starving, dehydrated koalas came in during droughts; burned koalas appeared after wildfires. Occasionally, koalas even turned up with injuries caused by cows.

“That’s why they’re endangered,” Dr. Pyne said. “Everything’s against them.”

The koala, long an Australian icon, has become an unfortunate emblem of the country’s biodiversity crisis. The animals are threatened by deforestation, climate change and infectious disease. Together, these forces put the koala at the real risk of extinction. Although koalas are notoriously difficult to count, populations in some places have plummeted by as much as 80 percent, scientists estimate.

“We don’t know what the threshold is where there’s a point of no return,” said Tanya Pritchard, the senior manager for species recovery and landscape restoration at the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia. “So we do need to act pretty urgently.”

Scientists and conservation groups are giving the koala everything they’ve got. Some are pursuing traditional time-tested strategies, including the protection of koala habitats and the advocacy of tougher conservation laws.

Others are trying more experimental approaches, from koala probiotics to tree-planting drones. Many of these projects are in the early stages, and none represent a complete solution. But given the wide array of threats that koalas are facing, saving them might require deploying every available tool.

“At this point,” Ms. Pritchard said, “every koala counts.”

Here are some of the tools in development.

Put shots in arms

Chlamydia, a common sexually transmitted infection in humans, is also widespread in the animal kingdom. How koalas were first infected is unknown, but one possibility is that the marsupials picked up chlamydia from the feces of livestock.

The disease, which can spread through sexual contact and from mothers to joeys, has become staggeringly widespread in parts of Australia. Chlamydia can cause urinary tract infections, blindness and infertility, suggesting that koalas could be in even worse shape than their declining numbers would indicate. “How many of those koalas that are out there can’t breed anymore because chlamydia has made them sterile?” Dr. Pyne said.

Scientists are now collaborating with the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital in Currumbin, Australia, to test a new chlamydia vaccine in wild koalas. So far, the vaccine is producing “quite spectacular results,” said Ken Beagley, an immunologist at the Queensland University of Technology who led the development of the vaccine.

Across two ongoing studies, more than 300 wild koalas have been vaccinated, and many vaccinated females have gone on to have healthy joeys, some of which have now had joeys of their own, Dr. Beagley said. “It was far better than we expected,” he said of the outcome.

Still, it will be challenging to inoculate thousands of wild koalas with the current vaccine, which requires two shots given 30 days apart. So Dr. Beagley and his colleagues are developing a delayed-release vaccine implant, which could be injected under the skin when a koala receives its first shot. Over the course of several weeks, the small capsule would slowly absorb water and then burst, thus delivering the second dose.

Koalas are notoriously picky eaters with highly unusual tastes. “They feed on a really unpalatable diet of eucalyptus leaves, which is high in fiber, low in protein, high in toxins,” said Michaela Blyton, a molecular ecologist and microbiologist at the University of Queensland.

Living on eucalyptus requires a cooperative community of gut microbes, which help digest the leaves. Dr. Blyton’s work suggests that these microbial communities are so finely tuned that they may dictate which eucalyptus species, of the many that dot Australia, an individual koala can eat. That microbial specificity could explain why koalas are sometimes unable to diversify their diets, even in the face of starvation.

In a 2019 study, Dr. Blyton showed that she could shift koalas’ microbiomes, and expand their diets, by giving them fecal transplants from koalas that dined on a different type of eucalyptus. (To perform the transplant, Dr. Blyton packaged fecal samples from donor koalas in small capsules, which were administered orally.)

Now, she is hoping to use the same approach to maintain microbial equilibrium in koalas taking antibiotics, which are the frontline treatment for chlamydia. The drugs can throw the gut microbiome out of whack, prompting koalas to stop eating altogether, with sometimes fatal results. “It’s a hard ask to get the animal going again, and a lot of the time we just can’t,” said Dr. Blyton, who collaborates with Currumbin and other wildlife hospitals.

Dr. Blyton has developed a technique for freeze-drying fecal samples from healthy koalas, yielding shelf-stable capsules that can be given to koalas with chlamydia as a sort of oral probiotic. Unfortunately, early trial results suggested that administering the capsules was stressful for sick koalas. So Dr. Blyton is now trying to turn the freeze-dried fecal samples into a powder that could be added to other nutritional supplements the animals already receive.

Deploy the drones

Koalas — sedentary, tree-dwelling animals — are tricky to spot in the wild, adding to the challenges of tracking how their populations are faring, identifying critical habitats and safeguarding the animals from threats.

Grant Hamilton, a quantitative ecologist at the Queensland University of Technology, has developed a new koala-spotting system that is powered by artificial intelligence. A drone equipped with a thermal camera flies over the treetops, looking for pockets of body heat hidden under the canopy. Machine learning algorithms can quickly process this footage, tallying the koalas. The scientists then use statistical models to estimate the total koala population in a given area.

The scientists are now teaching local conservation groups how to fly the drones in their own neighborhoods. Dr. Hamilton and his colleagues will then analyze the data to help these organizations identify critical koala habitats that might benefit from protection or restoration. “We can use A.I. to help people to manage their backyards or their parks,” he said. “That’s a really exciting idea.”

The World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia, which is currently running a campaign to save or plant two billion trees by 2030, is experimenting with using drones for habitat restoration. Over the course of eight hours, a single tree-planting drone can rain some 40,000 seeds across the landscape.

Drones aren’t suited for all environments, but they offer a way to “scale up this work,” Ms. Pritchard said. “To me, it’s a little bit symbolic of our own plight,” she added. “If we can’t save the koala, as our most important and most loved species, what does that mean for our own situation and the health of our own habitats?”

Harness solar (and people) power

Despite the threats they face, koalas do have one thing going for them. “They are one of the cutest animals on Earth,” said Dr. Romane Cristescu, a conservation ecologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

To harness the public’s natural affection for koalas, she and her colleagues are developing a suite of technological tools, including solar-powered, location-tracking ear tags, which send data to a mobile app. The app, which is still undergoing testing, aims to help Australians get to know the koalas that live in their neighborhoods — “where they go, who they meet, their children, their boyfriend,” Dr. Cristescu said. “We’re going to tell people, ‘Hey, look, that koala’s got a life.’”

Dr. Cristescu hopes that people who develop attachments to their local koalas will be more inclined to support conservation efforts and change their own behaviors, like choosing not to cut down the trees in their yards. “We have a lot more empathy for a koala that has a name and a story,” she said.

The app also encourages users to log koala sightings and to report sick koalas, data that can be sent to scientists and wildlife care teams, she said.

The ear tags could be used for other purposes, too, said Dr. Cristescu, who also leads a research program that uses trained dogs to sniff out koalas and koala scat. After Australia’s catastrophic wildfires in 2019 and 2020, her team used dogs and drones to find and rescue injured koalas. The location-tracking ear tags could provide a quicker way to find koalas in danger, she said.