Southern California went 87 days without a clean air day, the longest stretch of consecutive ozone pollution violations in at least 20 years. Regulators blame the persistence in pollution on hot, stagnant weather and are studying whether climate change is driving it.

The country is using oil and gas riches to engineer emission-free vessels

Did the octopus evolve its unique intelligence by playing fast and free with the genetic code? Elizabeth Finkel investigates.

If you aren't fond of spiders, this scene will sound like a nightmare. A 300-metre-long (1,000-foot) field of spiderweb has sprung up in western Greece in the town of Aitoliko.

A pear seedling selection named Bradford was cloned by the gazillion to become the ubiquitous street tree of America’s postwar suburban expansion. Then it turned invasive. By Adrian Higgins.

The Paris agreement on climate change charts a narrow path to avoiding a global apocalypse. Just one problem: Its centerpiece is a technology that basically doesn’t yet exist. By Abby Rabinowitz, Amanda Simson.

Considered by many to be the least fish-like of fishes, swamp eels are a real oddity and rarely documented. Now Museum scientists have described an entirely new species. The fish was discovered not in water but in damp soil. Museum researcher Dr Rachunliu G Kamei uncovered it while searching the rainforest for an entirely different group of animal, the legless amphibians called caecilians.

Protected forests in Brazil and Peru hold some of the world’s last remote indigenous groups, increasingly threatened by resource-hungry outsiders.

In Pontevedra, the usual soundtrack of a Spanish city has been replaced by the tweeting of birds and the chatter of humans

Wasps are being wiped out as quickly as bees - and their disappearance will be just as disastrous, according to new research. But the plight of wasps is going under the radar compared to that of their close cousins - because of their unpopularity. Nature's unloved insects are best known for ruining picnics - and leaving a painful sting when we try to swat them away.

Bowing to pressure from wildlife groups and after the Post revealed how shark fin was still being offered on under-the-counter menu, popular restaurant chain vows to halt sales by January 1, 2020.

Targeted engineering projects to hold off glacier melting could slow down the collapse of ice sheets and limit sea-level rise, according to a new study published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere. While an intervention similar in size to existing large civil engineering projects could only have a 30% chance of success, a larger project would have better odds of holding off ice-sheet collapse. But study authors Michael Wolovick and John Moore caution that reducing emissions still remains key to stopping climate change and its dramatic effects.

The evidence is in. A mysterious creature that lived on Earth over half a billion years ago has now been proven an animal. A fossil from 558 million years ago was so well preserved, it still had fat molecules.

The once-endangered vicuna is thriving in the Peruvian Andes, thanks to a bold plan to sustainably gather and sell its valuable fleece – and give locals a stake in its survival.

Fossil fuel interest groups will continue debating the reality of human-caused climate change until the seas swallow us all, but among scientists the matter is settled. Last week, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) put out a position statement affirming as much and telling the naysayers to piss off.

The author of a new book also says that animals can feel empathy, like the humpback whale that rescued a seal.

Scientists showed that plants are much less passive than they seem by revealing the secret workings of their threat communication systems.

When darkness fell, the child began to sing. Almost every evening, the shrill voice – somewhere distant and alone – would endlessly call out the same haunting nursery rhyme in the dead of night.

It’s a green beer for a good cause.

A scientific mission into the secret ocean lair of California’s great white sharks has provided tantalizing clues into a vexing mystery — why the fearsome predators spend winter and spring in what has long appeared to be an empty void in the deep sea. A boatload of researchers from five scientific institutions visited the middle-of-nowhere spot between Baja California and Hawaii this past spring on a quest to learn more about what draws the big sharks to what has become known as the White Shark Cafe, almost as if they were pulled by some astrological stimulus.