3+ day, 2+ hour ago   (574+ words) A 22% drop in butterfly populations from 2000 to 2020 signals a troubling, widespread decline across the broader pollinator community. Scientists count butterflies more thoroughly than any other insect, which makes them an early-warning system for the health of other animal species that…...

4+ day, 2+ hour ago   (791+ words) A 23-million-year fossil record shows Africa's giant mammals slowly vanished over time because evolution stopped replacing them. Ten million years ago, an African floodplain carried more kinds of giant plant-eaters than most people could name today. Early relatives of elephants,…...

5+ day, 1+ hour ago   (722+ words) Alligators exposed to PFAS carry double the toxic chemicals and suffer from severe, lupus-like autoimmune reactions that leave them with unhealed wounds. For more than a century, scientists have borrowed from animals’ senses to detect dangers humans cannot see. Coal…...

5+ day, 1+ hour ago   (820+ words) An earthquake triggered a massive rock avalanche on remote Jan Mayen, but scientists say thawing permafrost may have weakened the slope long before it collapsed. Something strange happened on Jan Mayen last March. An earthquake shook the island, and within…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (1105+ words) Climate action may be missing a crucial piece. Researchers say models often overlook how human behavior, politics and the climate continuously shape one another. Slow progress on climate change is often blamed on technology that isn’t ready or political systems…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (639+ words) Indonesia’s peatlands are drying out as El Niño strengthens, allowing fires to smolder underground and produce enormous amounts of hazardous smoke. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features fires burning across Indonesia as an intensifying El Niño…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (1111+ words) Steel, cement, aluminum, and fertilizer sit behind a fifth of global emissions, and a carbon price floor could raise $200 billion a year. In almost every large economy, making steel, cement, aluminum, and fertilizer releases large amounts of carbon, and those…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago   (1019+ words) Coastal marshes lock away carbon for centuries. But when they erode, that buried carbon slips sideways into the sea. Coastal marshes sit where land meets the sea. Their plants trap mud and sand, while their soils store carbon from roots…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1099+ words) Greenland meltwater may change conditions in the Atlantic Ocean, increasing the chances of extreme summer heat and storms across Europe. Greenland’s melting ice does more than raise sea levels. The meltwater enters the North Atlantic, where it may change ocean…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (679+ words) A catastrophic flood tore through northern Nepal after a glacier collapsed, sending a torrent of water, ice, and debris nearly 100 kilometers downstream. Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency shows the region of Nepal struck by a…...