Category: 9. Environment

“Forever chemicals” are pervasive, and researchers have in recent years been ringing the alarms about the negative impacts on human health. But humans aren’t the only animals to be concerned about.

Freshwater turtles in…

It’s perhaps historically appropriate that the word “ironic” contains “iron.” Mining and smelting minerals like iron represented technological highs at the Roman Empire’s peak. But those activities also produced enough lead pollution…

Scientists are experimenting with an unconventional source to trap the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide: zooplankton poop.

Earth needs more carbon sinks. As the planet warms, many of the places that trap CO2 are now releasing it into the atmosphere,…

It might seem like magic. Type a request into ChatGPT, click a button and — presto! — here’s a five-paragraph analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and, as an added bonus, it’s written in iambic pentameter. Or tell DALL-E about the…

Over and over, the numbers tell the same story: 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, knocking the previous record holder — 2023 — out of the top spot (SN: 12/6/23). But temperatures alone can’t describe the human cost:…

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…

Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain and temperatures devolve into suitors who woo mostly with cheap, useless gifts.

Researchers have described gift giving in…

Camera collar footage is unveiling the secret lives of Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus), South America’s only surviving ursid. A wild Andean bear in Peru was caught eating soil or clay, courting females and even cannibalizing a dead…

In April 2022, forestry workers started a small number of fires in the Santa Fe National Forest near a remote mountain called Hermit’s Peak. The plan, part of a nationwide program of controlled burns, was to thin out the dense pine woodlands to…

If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and…