Articles & Videos

Is an organism a sum of its parts, or should they be considered as a whole? New research on ferns shows how the way scientists understand evolution affects how they study life.

Understanding what happens to Antarctica’s ice matters, because as it melts, sea levels rise, affecting lives and economies around the world.

X-energy, an SMR startup backed by Amazon, closed one of the largest-ever fundraising rounds for that technology on Monday.

The hole remains vast — twice the size of the contiguous US — but is shrinking, and is on track to disappear by the end of the century, NASA said.

The blast sent a column of smoke nine miles, or 14.5 kilometers, into the sky and coated the landscape with ash, which could cause problems for local farmers.

Global negotiations at the annual U.N. climate summit ended Saturday in Belém, Brazil, with a watered-down agreement that does not even mention fossil fuels, let alone offer a roadmap to phase out what are the primary contributors to the climate crisis. The COP30 agreement also makes no new commitments to halt deforestation and does not address global meat consumption, another major driver of global warming. “I’m angry at a really weak outcome. I’m angry at the fossil fuel lobbyists roaming the venue freely, while the Indigenous activists [were] met with militarized repression,” says Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA. “I have a special level of incandescent outrage at … the rich, developed countries of the Global North who come in to these conferences, and they act like they’re the heroes, when, in fact, what they’re doing is shifting the burden of a crisis that they caused onto the backs of the poor.” “The absence of the United States is critical,” adds Jonathan Watts, global environment writer at The Guardian. “The United States under Donald Trump is trying to go backwards to the 20th century in a fossil fuel era, whereas a huge part of the rest of the world wants to move forward into something else.”

Will the universe keep existing forever? An astrophysicist explains how scientists aren’t entirely sure, but they can make predictions.

The people who manage America’s aquifers, wetlands, shorelines and recreation areas rely on federal science as they face new and rising risks in a changing climate.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine. I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian […]