The secret to climate-friendly cattle.

The assumption by regulators around the world that it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes is false, according to a chief scientific adviser to the UK government. The lack of any limit on the total amount of pesticides used and the virtual absence of monitoring of their effects in the environment means it can take years for the impacts to become apparent, say Prof Ian Boyd and his colleague Alice Milner in a new article.

Published in a 1936 Atlas of American Agriculture, put together by the United States Department of Agriculture, these 1916 maps of the average dates of ...

You remember Hedwig from Harry Potter, right? – Harry Potter’s mail-fetching Owl companion. Well, a tragic downside to JK Rowling’s wizard phenomenon is the increase in wild-caught birds being used as pets – particularly Owls like Hedwig.

A Coca-Cola bottling plant in Mexico consumes millions of liter of water per day while wells dry up

Scientists found the fungus Aspergillus tubingensis breaking down plastic in a rubbish dump in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention. By Helena Bottemiller Evich.

The government is under pressure to reconsider its commitment to a new generation of nuclear power stations after the cost of state support for offshore windfarms reached a record low yesterday. Experts said green energy had reached a tipping point in the UK after two windfarms secured a guaranteed price for their power of £57.50 per megawatt hour from the government. The subsidised price is far below the £92.50 awarded last year to Britain’s first new nuclear power site in a generation, Hinkley Point C.

f animals are our other, there is nothing quite so other as the octopus. It is the alien with whom we share our planet, a coeval evolutionary life form whose slithery slipperiness and more than the requisite number of limbs (each of which contains its own “brain”) symbolise the dark mystery and fear of the deep.

Asian cities are struggling to accommodate rapid urban migration, and development is encroaching on flood-prone areas. Recent flooding in Mumbai was blamed in part on unregulated development of wetlands, while hastily built urban areas are being affected by flooding across India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

So it’s up to people to keep dangerous trash out of the ocean’s food supply.

Miami’s mayor called on President Trump to acknowledge the role that climate change plays in extreme weather events.

The Scottish government has pledged to phase out new petrol and diesel cars and vans across Scotland by 2032, eight years ahead of the UK Government target.

China will set a deadline for automakers to end sales of fossil-fuel powered vehicles, a move aimed at pushing companies to speed efforts in developing electric vehicles for the world’s biggest auto market.

Sea salt around the world has been contaminated by plastic pollution, adding to experts’ fears that microplastics are becoming ubiquitous in the environment and finding their way into the food chain via the salt in our diets. Following this week’s revelations in the Guardian about levels of plastic contamination in tap water, new studies have shown that tiny particles have been found in sea salt in the UK, France and Spain, as well as China and now the US.

Humans have witnessed many cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, from the one that destroyed Pompeii in 79 A.D. to the extraordinary Krakatoa eruption of 1883. But around the world right now there are about 20 so-called “supervolcanoes” that could outdo them all. One of these monster volcanoes lurks beneath Yellowstone National Park. The Yellowstone Caldera is an enormous craterlike depression measuring 30 miles by 45 miles and filled with molten material. If it were to blast its innards out in a super-eruption, it’s no exaggeration to say that the human race could be imperiled.

Reflective coating won’t make city freeze over, but it’s a start.

China has started "relevant research" but has not yet decided when the ban would come into force.

Now is exactly the time to talk about climate change — and all the other systemic injustices that turn disasters like Harvey into human catastrophes.

If mountain under which last five bombs were ‘almost certainly’ detonated crumbles, radiation would leak across region, expert warns

Cristina Mittermeier's experiences will open your eyes.

Now, the project is lead by Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who couldn’t even remember that he wanted to eliminate the department to begin with. So, while the country spends its days watching The Apprentice-style government that Donald Trump has created with actual Nazis, North Korea and Russian hackers, Oliver hopes people can remember that one in three Americans is 50 miles from a festering, ill-contained paperbag of lethal radioactive garbage.

Research finds endangered Antarctic blue, fin and southern right whales struggling to recover despite hunting bans

In the mid-1990s, 1,000 truckloads of orange peels and orange pulp were purposefully unloaded onto a barren pasture in a Costa Rican national park. Today, that area is covered in lush, vine-laden forest.

Scientists have developed carbon nanotube pores that can exclude salt from seawater. The team also found that water permeability in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with diameters smaller than a nanometer (0.8 nm) exceeds that of wider carbon nanotubes by an order of magnitude.

Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead. A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.

China’s state-run news agency Xinhua has revealed that China has currently halted construction on new coal-fired power plants in an effort to avoid building over-capacity while simultaneously hoping to promote a cleaner energy mix.

China launched nearly 8,000 water clean-up projects in the first half of 2017 with projected total investment of 667.4 billion yuan ($100 billion), the environment ministry said on Thursday. The projects were devised as part of a 2015 action plan to treat and prevent water pollution, and cover 325 contaminated groundwater sites across the country, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) said in a notice.

Rising Arctic temperatures are boosting commercial shipping in the region, worrying environmentalists.

The man-made disaster raises serious questions about the state of U.S. agriculture.

The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee passed a spending bill on Thursday evening that includes $10 million to help fund the United Nations’ climate change body that oversees the Paris Climate Agreement, despite President Donald Trump’s decision to stop funding it. The 30-member Senate panel, which allocates federal funds to various government agencies and organizations, approved a $51 billion spending bill for the State Department and foreign operations, which included an amendment to continue funding the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as the scientific body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Scientists are sucking carbon dioxide from the air with giant fans and preparing to release chemicals from a balloon to dim the sun's rays as part of a climate engineering push to cool the planet. Backers say the risky, often expensive projects are urgently needed to find ways of meeting the goals of the Paris climate deal to curb global warming that researchers blame for causing more heatwaves, downpours and rising sea levels.

There is only a 5% chance that the Earth will avoid warming by at least 2C come the end of the century, according to new research that paints a sobering picture of the international effort to stem dangerous climate change.

NASA isn't all about interplanetary exploration; in fact, the agency spends much of its time studying our home planet. This fun whiteboard animation series explains Earth science to the science-curious.

When doctors in rural Italy began to see a surge in cancer cases, they were baffled. Then they made the link with industrial waste being dumped by local crime syndicates. Ian Birrell learns about the tragic consequences.