The Long, Politically Fraught History of Seeds in the U.S.

We’ve come a long way from the government giving away free seeds.

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Losses of soil carbon under global warming might equal US emissions

For decades scientists have speculated that rising global temperatures might alter the ability of soils to store carbon, potentially releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and triggering runaway climate change. Yet thousands of studies worldwide have produced mixed signals on whether this storage capacity will actually decrease—or even increase—as the planet warms.

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At Least Five Dead after Tornadoes Rip through South

At least five people were killed and dozens more were injured after tornadoes tore through Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi overnight and into Wednesday morning, forecasters and local media reported.

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Robots are growing tons of our food. Here's the creepy part.

It's not what you think.

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China Warns of Safety Risks as Rally in Coal Price Spurs Mining

Soaring coal prices have spurred a surge in potentially dangerous mining activity in China, prompting a government warning about the risk of increased casualties in a country that is home to some of the world’s deadliest mines.

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Canada sets in motion microbeads prohibition

Canada this month took steps toward joining the United States in banning the sale of personal-hygiene products that contain tiny plastics known as microbeads in an effort to keep them away from fish and wildlife and address plastic pollution in general. The battle continues against larger plastics such as discarded milk, juice, and soda containers, though.

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3 Dams to Be Removed in American West to Restore Rivers

A new $50 million fund will help communities remove “deadbeat dams,” starting in California, Oregon, and Washington.

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What Oil Pipelines Can Do to Native American Land and Life

Black, ant-like figures crown a russet hill ringed by the Cannonball River at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. Soon they come into focus: dozens of policemen in full riot gear, stationed on high ground so as to better surveil the handful of people lingering in the aftermath of what Native Americans protesting a new oil pipeline and their allies call a "direct action," or a confrontation with the law.

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Get ready for 24-30% reduction in cost of wind power by 2030

Survey of 163 experts sees turbine size going up, costs coming down.

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Why you can’t afford to ignore nature in the workplace

Love your job, but hate your office? For many of us, our physical workplace can be dark, depressing, bland and even dysfunctional. Windowless cubicle farms and airless open-plan floors can kill motivation and take a toll on worker performance, possibly even their health.

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America’s ancient cave art

Mysterious drawings, thousands of years old, offer a glimpse of lost Native American cultures and traditions. By John Jeremiah Sullivan. (March, 2011)

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India Unveils the World's Largest Solar Power Plant

The country is on schedule to be the world’s third biggest solar market next year.

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NASA study confirms rift in Antarctic ice shelf

Ice loss could be happening much faster than previously thought. By Laurel Kornfeld.

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In photos: Standing Rock digs in

The encampment set up to protest a pipeline in North Dakota is now more of a small town, and it’s not going anywhere. By Hilary Beaumont.

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Scientists record biggest ever coral die-off on Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Warm seas around Australia's Great Barrier Reef have killed two-thirds of a 700-km (435 miles) stretch of coral in the past nine months, the worst die-off ever recorded on the World Heritage site, scientists who surveyed the reef said on Tuesday.

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A Wrenching Choice for Alaska Towns in the Path of Climate Change

Alaska is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the nation. So what are the dozens of villages at imminent risk of destruction to do?

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Flight of the Starlings: Watch This Eerie but Beautiful Phenomenon

We know a lot of factual information about the starling—its size and voice, where it lives, how it breeds and migrates—but what remains a mystery is how it flies in murmurations, or flocks, without colliding. Shot by Jan van IJken.

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Michigan plans to sell 100 million gallons of groundwater to Nestle for $200

Nestle, which is arguably the world’s leading advocate of water privatization, is about to acquire 100 million gallons of drinking water in Michigan. By Tom Cahill.

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Which Insecticide Spray Should You Use For Bed Bug Eggs?

Well, it depends. The efficacy of different insecticide sprays depends on a few different factors, such as which strain of bed bug is being treated, how resistant the strain is to the insecticide being used, and the permeability of the chemicals in relation to the egg shell composition.

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Switzerland votes against strict timetable for nuclear power phaseout

People in Switzerland voting in a referendum have rejected a proposal to introduce a strict timetable for phasing out nuclear power. A projection for SRF public television showed the initiative failing by 55% to 45%. A majority of cantons (Swiss states) voted against the initiative. The plan, backed by the Green Party, would have meant closing three of Switzerland's five nuclear plants next year, with the last shutting in 2029.

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Chocolate vs vegetables: The true environmental costs

When it comes to carbon emissions, certain unhealthy snacks may carry an unexpected blessing compared to healthier options.

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Brown water an early sign of water woes

Beaver dams have been demolished, burbling fountains silenced, and the drinking water in one southern town has taken on the light brownish color of sweet tea… By Jeff Martin.

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If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots?

We can think of ourselves as an animal’s peer—or its protector. What will robots decide about us? Harambe, a gorilla, was described as “smart,” “curious,” “courageous,” “magnificent.” But it wasn’t until last spring that Harambe became famous, too. On May 28th, a human boy, also curious and courageous, slipped through a fence at the Cincinnati Zoo and landed in the moat along the habitat that Harambe shared with two other gorillas.

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Fukushima nuclear decommission, compensation costs to almost double: media

Japan’s trade ministry has almost doubled the estimated cost of compensation for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and decommissioning of the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant to more than 20 trillion yen ($177.51 billion), the Nikkei business daily reported on Sunday. By Osamu Tsukimori.

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Swiss nuclear plants to remain on grid - SWI swissinfo.ch

Swiss voters have thrown out a proposal to close the country’s five nuclear power plants after 45 years in operation. The Green Party initiative was rejected by 54.2% of the vote, according to final results.

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Is Thorium A Future Option For Nuclear Energy?

Nuclear reactors running on thorium are widely held to be inherently safer than the awful pressurized-water reactors we have today. So why don’t we have thorium reactors? A new TV documentary also available online answers the question quite well.

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Mexican volcano erupts, sending ash 3 miles into sky

A volcano in Mexico erupted, sending ash three miles into the air and prompting warnings from government officials for tourists and residents to stay away. The Popocatépetl volcano, located in Pueblo state, erupted with a billowing cloud of dark ash billowing into the morning sky Friday. In the 24 hours since the eruption started, Mexican officials said there have been 129 exaltations of ash, three explosions and one measurable earthquake, a magnitude-1.8 tremor.

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Choke Point of a Nation: The High Cost of an Aging River Lock

A symbol of America’s ailing infrastructure, Lock No. 52 on the Ohio River is responsible for a shipping bottleneck that hobbles commerce far and wide.

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If You Drink Coffee From Pods, You May Want to Reconsider

K-Cups are accumulating in landfills at alarming rates.

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Pentagon Plans to Invest Billions in Undersea Drone Network

What will other nations will have to say about the U.S. openly stating its plan to dominate all of the oceans on planet Earth with a drone network? By Nicholas West.

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A New Threat to Oceans: Deep-Sea Mining for Precious Metals

“Whether mining these nodules will help end cycles of war and peace still remains to be seen, but Mero was right about one thing: They are now the precious targets, worth millions of dollars, of an emerging deep-sea mining industry, and that’s making many researchers like Craig Smith, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, cautious.” By Sarah Fahmy.

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Hawaii's Crazy War Over Zombie Cats

There is an evolutionary death match under way in Hawaii, where half a million feral cats, some of them infected with a terrifying zombie parasite, are wreaking havoc on endangered species. Some people call them the "kitties of doom." Others will do anything to save them.

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Elephants are now being born without tusks because of poaching

An increasing number of African elephants are now born tuskless because poachers have consistently targetted animals with the best ivory over decades, fundamentally altering the gene pool. In some areas 98 per cent of female elephants now have no tusks, researchers have said, compared to between two and six per cent born tuskless on average in the past. 

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3D embryo atlas reveals human development in unprecedented detail

The beautiful and otherworldly development of the human embryo has been revealed in unprecedented detail in an interactive three-dimensional atlas. The digital models, built by a team of scientists in the Netherlands, took around 45,000 hours to produce and offer researchers an unparalleled glimpse into the first eight weeks of human development.

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See the Historic Maps Declassified by the CIA

As with much of the CIA Cartography Center’s work, these maps were classified, seen only by people in the intelligence community and at the highest levels of the government. But in honor of the center’s 75th anniversary this year, the agency has released a remarkable collection of declassified maps that illustrate—and perhaps even played a role in—many significant events in U.S. history.

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Army Corps Of Engineers Tells [Dakota Access] Pipeline Protesters To Leave Camp By Dec. 5

The agency on Friday ordered anyone in the encampments north of the Cannonball River in North Dakota to immediately leave. Anyone remaining on Corps-managed property risks arrest.. By Martha Ann Overland.

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What it's like inside the doomsday vault that stores every known crop on the planet

If climate change or nuclear war wipes out most of life on the planet, there's still a place where we've got genetic copies of hundreds of thousands of crops.

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Sperm Whales Found Dead In Germany, Stomachs FULL Of Plastic And Car Parts

In January, 29 sperm whales were found stranded on shores around the North Sea, an area that is too shallow for the marine wildlife. Only recently were details of the animals’ necropsy released. However, scientists were deeply disturbed by what they found in the animals’ stomachs. According to a press release from Wadden Sea National Park in Schleswig-Holstein, many of the whales had stomachs FULL of plastic debris, including a 13-meter-long fishing net, a 70 cm piece of plastic from a car and other pieces of plastic litter.

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The Arctic is experiencing such extreme climate change it could end up above freezing

The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard has seen such extreme warmth this year that the average annual temperature could end up above freezing for the first time on record, scientists have said. Ketil Isaksen of the Norwegian Meterological Institute said that the average temperature in Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard, is expected to be around 0 Celsius (32 Fahrenheit) with a little over a month left of the year. "This is a little bit shocking," Isaksen said. "If you had asked me five or 10 years ago, I could not have imagined such numbers in 2016."

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The Speyer Wine Bottle: the oldest unopened bottle of wine in the world

The origin of man’s romance with wine apparently predates written records, hence no one is really sure as to when humans started getting drunk. Archaeology

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The map-maker’s task may never be done

Three new atlases of strange, improbable places show that, even with GPS, islands have a weird habit of appearing and disappearing.

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It could be Last Call for Northern Gateway as Ottawa makes a Key Decision on the Pipeline

The federal cabinet will make a decision on the Enbridge-backed Northern Gateway pipeline today, after years of delays and false starts, but it will be days before the public knows the fate of the controversial project.

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Gardens: about a boysenberry

Now’s the time to plant this most delicious of hybrids

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Perils of Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate

Homeowners are slowly growing wary of buying property in the areas most at risk, setting up a potential economic time bomb in an industry that is struggling to adapt.

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This island is now powered almost entirely by solar energy

A small island in American Samoa is making the switch from diesel generators to 100 percent renewable energy. Ta’u, the easternmost of the Samoan islands, has just been equipped with a new microgrid with 1.4 megawatts of solar-generation capacity and six megawatt hours of battery storage. It’s enough to power the entire island night and day.

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Overheated Arctic sign of climate change 'vicious circle'

Freakishly high temperatures in the Arctic driven by heat-packed oceans and northward winds have been reinforced by a "vicious circle" of climate change, scientists said Thursday. Air above the Polar ice cap has been 9-12 degrees Celsius (16.2 to 21.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above average during the last four weeks, according the data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), which tracks hourly changes in Arctic weather.

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Bright city lights are keeping ocean predators awake and hungry

Light pollution is changing the day-night cycle of some fish, dramatically affecting their feeding behaviour.

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Top Ancient Sites for Stargazing

From petroglyphs to castles carved into hilltops, explore our night sky through our ancestors at these amazing archaeological sites. By Babak A. Tafreshi.

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To keep the cranberry industry in its birthplace, a farm turns to drones, data, and automation

Keith Mann faces the same problem each year: frost. The icy condensation is detrimental to his crop in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the modern American cranberry industry. As the temperatures drop into the fall months, the owner of 150 acres of cranberry bogs throws on some layers and preps a network of sprinklers, which spray enough temperate water to keep the vines above freezing until the sun rises.

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From Across the Country, Gifts of Tiny Houses Arrive for Standing Rock

How five large trees in remote Oregon ended up as winter housing for water protectors, including their first newborn baby. By Jane Braxton Little.

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