environment
Simple physics makes hauling vast ice chunks thousands of miles fiendishly difficult — but not impossible.
Slimy biofilms made up of bacterial and eukaryotic life forms have taken over an abandoned, flooded uranium mine in Germany.
Smoke taint from wildfires is gross, even to wine amateurs.
A toxicologist explains the impacts of antidepressants on fish — and no, they’re not getting any happier.
What we’ve learning from the world’s coldest, most forbidding, and most peaceful continent.
Each year, several trillion pounds of microscopic silicon-based skeletons fall down the water column to pile up into siliceous ooze.
Why can’t more rainwater be collected for the long, dry spring and summer when it’s needed?
Carnivores, herbivores, omnivores — and now virivores.
From synthetic biology to xenotransplantation, biotech will continue to march forward in 2023, in part powered by data and AI.
If dogs are out in coats and boots, how are the squirrels feeling?
Passing chunks of ice can fertilize ocean waters and play a role in the planet’s carbon cycle.
The media sells bad news, but scientific evidence shows that we are making progress toward a greener planet.
Merely 256 genetically engineered mice could make an island’s pest population go extinct.
It’s like radar, but with light. Distributed acoustic sensing — DAS — picks up tremors from volcanoes, quaking ice and deep-sea faults, as well as traffic rumbles and whale calls.
Goodbye, Arabica? Learn to love Liberica.
It’s an agricultural moonshot: Scientists hope to increase plant yields by hacking photosynthesis, the process that powers life on Earth.
Maybe bring an umbrella just in case.
A 19th-century surveying mistake kept lumberjacks away from what is now Minnesota’s largest patch of old-growth trees.
A researcher explains a little-known niche within modern physics: animal collective behavior.
It’s on a 100,000-year timescale, though, so the next few centuries might not be so comfortable.
We want to fight invasive species. But to wage a war, you have to know who your enemy is.
Environmental activists want us to feel “flight shame” if we can take a train, instead. But this isn’t entirely realistic, even in Europe.
Overwintering is profoundly stressful for trees. So why do they bother?
Many countries just ship their plastic waste overseas.
“Ghost gear” leads to hundreds of thousands of animal deaths.
Many animals engage in “zoopharmacognosy” or self-medication.
Economic growth is more about quality than quantity.
Flashy desalination technology is more costly and cumbersome than many other solutions.
Based on product labeling claims, scientists hypothesized that green cleaners were less toxic. They were wrong.