Category: 9. Environment

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…

Nearly two dozen pesticides are associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer in the United States, researchers report November 4 in Cancer. Four of those, the study finds, are also linked to prostate cancer deaths.

The…

People are flocking to nature’s doorstep, and into wildfire territory.

Homes constructed where human development meets undeveloped wildland are particularly vulnerable to wildfires and other natural hazards (SN: 11/9/23)….

Pooping whales changed the course of Asha de Vos’ career.

The Sri Lankan marine biologist was aboard a research vessel near her home island in 2003 when she spotted six blue whales congregating. A bright red plume of whale waste…