Environment

When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research.   Those…

The American bison(buffalo) is in trouble, says a survey by the Wildlife Conservation Society, though there are many more of them now than there were a hundred years ago, and we love them - as a…

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama suggested his economic plan would create 5 million jobs in environmental industries - easy enough to do when taxpayers are subsidizing even more federal…

In a study to be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists show that forests may influence the Earth's climate in important ways that have not previously…

You wouldn't ordinarily think of soil as a non-renewable resource, but it is.    Healing damage to soil takes geologic time, not human time.    And increasing levels of nitrogen…

A new Dutch invention makes it possible to reforest large desert and rocky areas in the coming years, they say. Experiments in the Sahara desert have shown that the WaterBoxx allows trees to grow…

A new class of exceptionally effective catalysts that promote the powerful olefin metathesis reaction has been discovered by a team of Boston College and MIT scientists, opening up a vast new…

An unusual microorganism discovered in the open ocean may force scientists to rethink their understanding of how carbon and nitrogen cycle through ocean ecosystems. A research team led by Jonathan…

Scientists may have overcome a major hurdle to calculating how much carbon dioxide (CO2) is absorbed and released by plants, vital information for understanding how the biosphere responds to stress…

There may be less than 20,000 rhinoceros in the world, with one species perhaps already extinct and another with possibly only four animals remaining in the wild. As the populations of these animals…