Today life has conquered every square inch of Earth, but when the planet formed it was a dead rock. How did life get started?

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Submitted on October 31st 2016 by gladsdotter with 2 comments

In his newest project, entitled Pounce, photographer Seth Casteel shows us the goofy faces kittens make mid-pounce. Disclaimer: lots of ‘aww-ing’ up ahead.

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Submitted on October 29th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 5 comments

Scientists have transformed the humble spinach plant into a bomb detector.

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Submitted on November 1st 2016 by jcscher with 1 comments

Aid groups are falling short on some of the world's worst crises, says researcher Sara Pantuliano. There is a way to fix it — but it might not be popular.

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Submitted on October 27th 2016 by rti9

The Peruvian Amazon is a dangerous place when you're small. So the young Inga tree hires ants as bodyguards to protect its vulnerable leaves. Their pay: delicious nectar served up in tiny ant-sized dishes. But will the ants keep up their end of the bargain?

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Submitted on November 1st 2016 by rti9 with 1 comments

The business world is right – let’s just get on with the third Heathrow runway, and the extinction of all life on Earth while we’re at it – why delay the inevitable?

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Submitted on October 28th 2016 by spacepopper with 7 comments

New 598,000 square-mile protected area is more than twice the size of Texas, and will protect everything from penguins to whales. By Brian Clark Howard.

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Submitted on October 29th 2016 by AdelleChattre

Just don't call it "Jurassic Park." All around us, every day, things are disappearing—birds, butterflies, coral reefs, islands. Places we used to live. Things we used to eat. But what if there was a way to bring some of it back? Well, it turns out there is. A few miles north of San Diego, scientists are gathering up specimens of every living thing they can get their hands on in a last-ditch effort to save the planet from an unstoppable predator: us

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Submitted on November 2nd 2016 by Chubros

It's been a brutal forest fire season in California. But there's actually a greater threat to California's trees — the state's record-setting drought. The lack of water has killed at least 60 million trees in the past four years. Scientists are struggling to understand which trees are most vulnerable to drought and how to keep the survivors alive. To that end, they're sending human climbers and flying drones into the treetops, in a novel biological experiment.

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Submitted on October 28th 2016 by gladsdotter

In new book, vivid satellite images of the planet evoke what astronauts call "the overview effect." By Marissa Fessenden.

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Submitted on November 1st 2016 by AdelleChattre

Sea level rise has been underestimated by up to 28 percent in some areas. By Sarah Emerson.

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Submitted on October 30th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 1 Related Links:

1. Before the Flood: Speaking to scientists and world leaders about the dramatic effects of climate change [Video] Added by AdelleChattre on October 31st 2016.

There are corals off the UK coast that are older than the pyramids of Egypt, but the fight for their survival has only just begun

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Submitted on November 2nd 2016 by gladsdotter

An unassuming lump found on a Sussex beach in 2004 contains the first known fossilized brain tissue from a dinosaur. The 133-million-year-old fossil belongs to a relative of Iguanodon, an iconic herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the early Cretaceous. The fossil mostly consists of an endocast—a sediment cast of the skull cavity where the dinosaur’s brain resided.

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Submitted on October 28th 2016 by spacepopper

On a gradient from pristine wilderness to a parking lot, most species live in the middle. After extensive observations, mapping, and analysis, researchers from Stanford University have now generated a method of estimating biodiversity based on tree cover. The analysis showed adding a single tree to pasture could boost, for example, the number of bird species from near zero to 80.

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Submitted on October 30th 2016 by gladsdotter with 3 comments

A new animation from NASA shows the movement of Arctic sea ice, the large mass of frozen water on the Arctic Ocean, in a stunning time-lapse spanning three decades.

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Submitted on October 30th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 1 comments and with 1 Related Links:

1. Q & A about the Gulf Stream System slowdown and the Atlantic ‘cold blob’ Added by AdelleChattre on October 30th 2016.

Bolivia, which holds 20 percent of the world's tropical glaciers has seen its glaciers shrunk by 43% since the mid-1980s. The melting has left behind at least 25 unstable glacial lakes capable of causing sudden and catastrophic outburst floods.

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Submitted on October 31st 2016 by grandsalami

Roots of many plants have light receptors, and now we may have discovered why. They seem to channel light underground using stems as fibre-optic cables. By Alice Klein.

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Submitted on November 2nd 2016 by AdelleChattre

Herman Sörgel wanted to create the largest civil engineering project the world has ever seen: a colossal dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, lowering the Mediterranean sea. There were, of course, a few problems with this.

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Submitted on November 1st 2016 by rti9

Warmer oceans are acting like a catalyst for one of the world's most abundant species of plankton, triggering earlier blooms of blue-green algae in the waters of the North Atlantic. Because of plankton's fundamental role in the marine ecosystem, researchers expect this shift to have far-reaching impacts throughout the world's oceans. The study, published in the journal Science, focused on Synechococcus, a type of blue-green algae that is one of the most abundant phytoplankton in the ocean. The authors drew on 13 years worth of data to measure the spring blooms that cover the North Atlantic in a carpet of green each year.

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Submitted on October 27th 2016 by canuck

An owl in mourning, a parakeet in battle, and a mud-covered flamingo are among the winning images.

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Submitted on October 27th 2016 by AdelleChattre