To Be, Or Not to Be: On Whether Animals Can Commit Suicide

Can animals reflect on, and reject, their conditions of existence? The philosopher Owen Flanagan has pointed out that when Hamlet poses the question that has become the single most powerful query of all English literature, “he is, of course, contemplating suicide.

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As California burns, many fear the future of extreme fire has arrived

Experts say the state’s increasingly ferocious wildfires are not an aberration – they are the new reality

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'Spectacular' ancient public library discovered in Germany

Remains of grand building that may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls uncovered in central Cologne, dating back to second century AD

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Meeting a “wonder pig” made me reconsider eating meat

I was never an enthusiastic carnivore — but Esther the Wonder Pig and her farm pals made me question my own morals

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Humanity Has Killed 83% of All Wild Mammals and Half of All Plants: Study

Of all the birds left in the world, 70% are poultry chickens and other farmed birds. When it comes to planet Earth, humans are very tiny. The weight of all 7.6 billion humans makes up just 0.01% of all biomass on Earth, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Bacteria, by comparison, make up 13% of all biomass, plants account for 83%, and all other forms of life make up 5% of the total weight, according to the report.

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A Toxic Tide Is Killing Florida Wildlife

Florida has an algae problem, and it’s big. This year, an overgrowth in the waters off the state’s southwestern coast is killing wildlife and making some beaches noxious. The toxic algal bloom, known as a red tide, is not unusual. They appear off the state’s coast almost every year. But this one, still going strong after roughly nine months, is the longest since 2006, when blooms that originated in 2004 finally abated after 17 months.

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Enormous penguin population crashes by almost 90%

The world’s second-largest penguin colony has collapsed in just a few decades, falling from half a million breeding pairs in the 1980s to just tens of thousands in 2017. Breeding colonies of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) occupy unvegetated ground on islands in the Southern Ocean, including the remote Ile aux Cochons.

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Cruise line faces backlash over shooting of polar bear

A German cruise line is facing outrage after one of its employees shot and killed a wild polar bear in Norway after the animal attacked another of its employees. Hapag-Lloyd Cruises said its ship was docked at Spitsbergen, the largest island on Norway's Svalbard archipelago, on Saturday when the bear attacked a guard hired to go on shore before passengers to ensure there aren't any polar bears in the area.

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Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist

The extreme heatwaves and wildfires wreaking havoc around the globe are “the face of climate change,” one of the world’s leading climate scientists has declared, with the impacts of global warming now “playing out in real time.” Climate change has long been predicted to increase extreme weather incidents, and scientists are now confident these predictions are coming true. Scientists say the global warming has contributed to the scorching temperatures that have baked the UK and northern Europe for weeks.

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The $3 billion plan to turn Hoover Dam into a giant battery

Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River – along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel – to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century. Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future.

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How Mars’s Close Encounters Helped Us Map the Red Planet

National Geographic’s archive has maps of Mars dating back to when some scientists still thought there might be Martian-made canals on its surface. By Betsy Mason.

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The Mysterious Return of Ozone-Depleting CFCs

CFCs, the harmful ozone-depleting chemicals banned back in the 1980s, are experiencing a mysterious comeback

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First fossilized snake embryo ever discovered rewrites history of ancient snakes

The first-ever discovery of an ancient snake embryo, preserved in 105-million-year-old amber, provides important new information on the evolution of modern snakes, according to a new study led by University of Alberta paleontologists. “This snake is linked to ancient snakes from Argentina, Africa, India and Australia,” explained paleontologist Michael Caldwell, lead author and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “It is an important—and until now, missing—component of understanding snake evolution from southern continents, that is Gondwana, in the mid-Mesozoic.”

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Squares and circles are so basic. Get down with this new shape, the scutoid

It's not just a cool "twisted prism," either. The scutoid plays a role in the development of biological organisms. By Adam Rosenberg.

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Time is running out in the tropics - researchers warn of global biodiversity collapse

A global biodiversity collapse is imminent unless we take urgent, concerted action to reverse species loss in the tropics, according to a major scientific study in the prestigious journal Nature.  

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Grieving orca mother carries dead calf for days as whales fight for survival

Whale is one of just 75 in an endangered group off the coast of Washington state and Canada. A grieving mother orca near Vancouver Island has been carrying her dead calf for four days, after refusing to leave her baby behind when the rest of her pod left. The mother whale, named J35 by researchers, gave birth Tuesday in what was initially a hopeful moment. Mother and female calf were seen swimming together that morning near Victoria, British Columbia, according to the Washington state-based Center for Whale Research.

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How Bad Karma and Bad Engineering Doomed an Ancient Cambodian Capital

Never doubt the power of the monsoon.

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Indian warrior king's rocket cache found in abandoned well

Archaeologists find corroded shells stored by powerful 18th-century ruler Tipu Sultan

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Human actions boosted heatwave odds

Climate change resulting from human activities made the current Europe-wide heatwave more than twice as likely to occur, say scientists. Researchers compared the current high temperatures with historical records from seven weather stations, in different parts of Europe. Their preliminary report found that the "signal of climate change is unambiguous," in this summer's heat.

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These Indian fishermen take plastic out of the sea and use it to build roads

Every one of India’s 1.3 billion people uses an average 11kg of plastic each year. After being used, much of this plastic finds its way to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, where it can maim and kill fish, birds and other marine wildlife. Fisherman in India’s southern state of Kerala are taking on the battle to cut the level of plastic waste in the oceans. When the trawlers drag their nets through the water, they end up scooping out huge amounts of plastic along with the fish. Until recently the fishermen would simply throw the plastic junk back into the water.

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‘Amazing Dragon’ Discovery in China Reshapes History of Dinosaurs’ Evolution

Fossilized remains of Lingwulong shenqi show that big herbivores with long necks reached East Asia and evolved earlier than scientists had thought.

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After Last Year's Hurricanes, Caribbean Lizards Are Better at Holding on for Dear Life

A stunning case of natural selection in action.

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A century-old model for life's origin gets significant substantiation

In an article just appeared in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Lancet and colleagues report an extensive literature survey, showing that lipids can exert enzyme-like catalysis, similar to ribozymes.

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Worms frozen in permafrost for up to 42,000 years come back to life

Nematodes moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age in major scientific breakthrough, say experts.

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New study linking warming with disrupted Atlantic flow has scientists “grumpy”

Recent paper makes a big claim, but other scientists are unconvinced.

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Tesla Powerpacks aid Samoa's transition to 100% renewable energy

The island nation of Samoa is continuing its effort to convert from diesel-reliant powerplants to 100% renewable energy with the help of Tesla’s scalable Powerpack battery storage solution. Over the past year, the California-based electric car and energy company had been hard at work installing and launching two Tesla Powerpack sites in the country, both of which are designed to capture the abundance of renewable energy, otherwise lost without a means for storage, and offer grid stability to local utilities.

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First Documented Person Born On The Continent Of Antarctica

First Documented Person Born On The Continent Of Antarctica

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2,700 Scientists Warn US-Mexico Wall Endangers Wildlife

More than 1,000 species of animals would face serious threats to their survival if U.S. President Donald Trump's proposed border wall with Mexico is built, scientists warned on Tuesday. Iconic creatures such as the Peninsular Bighorn sheep, Mexican gray wolf and the Sonoran pronghorn antelope — all of which are already endangered -- would see their populations dangerously fragmented by a wall, said the letter published in the journal BioScience.

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Climate Change Makes Spiders Bigger—And That’s a Good Thing

High temperatures make arctic wolf spiders ditch their favorite food, indirectly helping the environment.

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Uncanny Portraits of Cats Crafted with Realistic Glass Eyes and Felted Wool

Japanese artist Wakuneco makes incredibly realistic portraits of feline heads, handcrafting the three-dimensional creations from felted wool. Making such lifelike cat faces has provided Wakuneco with quite the following on Youtube, where she posts how-to videos that lead her audience through the pro

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Earth's resources consumed in ever greater destructive volumes

Humanity is devouring our planet’s resources in increasingly destructive volumes, according to a new study that reveals we have consumed a year’s worth of carbon, food, water, fibre, land and timber in a record 212 days. As a result, the Earth Overshoot Day – which marks the point at which consumption exceeds the capacity of nature to regenerate – has moved forward two days to 1 August, the earliest date ever recorded.

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Oregon woman finds cougar in living room, says telepathy helped her get it out

An Oregon woman who found a mountain lion in her living room says she relied on "frequency and attunement," "feline-speak eye blinking," and telepathy to calm the animal and safely guide it out after it took a six-hour nap behind the couch. "This is wild," Lauren Taylor of Ashland posted on Facebook at the beginning of July.

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Weird new fruits could hit aisles soon thanks to gene-editing

Smooth or hairy, pungent or tasteless, deep-hued or bright: new versions of old fruits could be hitting the produce aisles as plant experts embrace cutting-edge technology, scientists say. While researchers have previously produced plants with specific traits through traditional breeding techniques, experts say new technologies such as the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 could be used to bring about changes far more rapidly and efficiently.

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China made solar panels cheap. Now it’s doing the same for electric buses.

Thanks, China.

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Global Warming Will Cause More People To Die By Suicide, Study Finds

New research from Stanford University finds that higher temperatures are leading to more suicides. And by 2050, the study predicts, thousands of additional suicides will have occurred in North America alone due to the rising temperatures caused by climate change. Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the study examined decades of county-level suicide data — nearly 1.5 million observations spanning all of the United States and Mexico...

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Ocean acidification to hit levels not seen in 14 million years

The world’s oceans are likely to become more acidic than at any time in the past 14 million years, scientists have found. New research led by Cardiff University has shown that under a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, ocean acidification is likely to hit unprecedented levels.

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Japan declares heatwave a natural disaster

At least 65 people have died and more than 22,000 are treated in hospital amid record temperatures.

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What Happens to the Plastic We Throw Out

How a piece of trash can travel from land to Henderson Island, an uninhabited, remote island in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean.

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Largest dinosaur foot to date discovered in Wyoming, say paleontologists

A group of researchers with the American Museum of Natural History said they discovered the largest dinosaur foot to date belonging to a brachiosaur in Wyoming.

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Trump is going after California’s clean car mandate

The Trump administration is planning a proposal that would seize control away from California regulators and prevent them from enforcing the state’s own emissions standards.

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Acidic oceans cause fish to lose their sense of smell

Fish are losing their sense of smell because of increasingly acidic oceans caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, new research shows.

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Greece has declared a state of emergency over deadly forest fires

The Mediterranean country is now calling for international help battling the flames.

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The country that brought a sea back to life

The Aral Sea is bringing new wealth to fishing villages in Kazakhstan, but their neighbours on the opposite shore in Uzbekistan are suffering a very different fate.

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Take if from the military: Climate security is national security

President Trump has insisted that national security is his top priority, repeatedly pledging to protect Americans and equip our military to be the most effective in the world. However, Trump’s failure to act decisively on climate change puts Americans at more risk than ever before.

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Is Mars Not So Earthlike After All?

In August 2012, the Mars Science Laboratory’s rover Curiosity landed at the base of Gale crater, a 5-kilometer-high mountain that formed when a meteor hit Mars billions of years ago. Using its 2-meter-long arm to drill into the planet’s surface, Curiosity scooped up and analyzed rock and soil samples, including some light-colored, crystal-studded rocks surprisingly similar to the ancient granitic rock that forms much of Earth’s continental crust.

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Meet the tick that’s forcing Americans to give up their meat

Lone star ticks hunt in packs and spread an allergy to beef and pork. Thanks to climate change, they’re spreading. By Zoya Teirstein.

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Back from extinction: The Mallee emu wren makes a comeback in South Australia - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

After a series of catastrophic wildfires in 2014, the Mallee emu wren became extinct in South Australia, but the birds are making a comeback in the state with the help of environmentalists. When the tiny bird — weighing only as much as a 10 cent piece — could no longer be found in SA, there were still numbers that existed in parts of Victoria's north-west, but they were listed as endangered.

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Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic

The Caribbean nation is known for sapphire seas and ivory beaches, but it is grappling with sludgy trash washing up on some famous shores.

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Is the future of farming inside this 40-foot shipping container?

A 3.6-metre shipping container that once sent goods overseas is now an urban farm on the Dartmouth waterfront that's feeding customers closer to home. Very Local Greens planted itself in a large parking lot across the street from the King's Wharf development. The industrial location is in stark contrast to what's inside — a tiny, high-tech farm teeming with life.

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Geology’s Timekeepers Are Feuding

“It’s a bit like Monty Python.”

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