Science

By Shreya Dasgupta Industrial fishing takes place across more than 55 percent of the world’s oceans, according to a new study published in Science. Fishing is vital for food security and livelihoods across the globe, yet the extent of industrial fishing has remained largely unknown. Now, a team of researchers has tried to solve this […]

Researchers, led by paleontologist Rob Gay, have discovered what may be one of the world’s richest caches of Triassic period fossils at an extensive site within the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument. The team’s initial excavation led to the extraordinary discovery of several intact remains of crocodile-like animals called phytosaurs. The findings were […]

By Sabine Bergmann For millennia, human beings have gazed into the firmament and been awed by the thousands of stars, galaxies, nebulae and other cosmic wonders visible to the naked eye. But in recent generations, much of humanity has become divorced from these marvels. Today, at least 80 percent of people living in the United […]

By Tim Radford Think of it as the day a comet set the earth on fire. Researchers have evidence of widespread and devastating forest fires around half the world—a blaze to blot out the light of the sun—and all of it at a geological boundary called the Younger Dryas, 13,500 years ago. The evidence, they […]

By Justin Mikulka A new technology has the potential to transform the transportation of tars sands oil. Right now, the already thick and slow-flowing oil, known as bitumen, has to be diluted with a super-light petroleum product, usually natural gas condensate, in order for it to flow through a pipeline or into a rail tank […]

For the first time ever, scientists in Antarctica have attached a camera to a minke—one of the most poorly understood of all the whale species. And in an incredible bonus for researchers, the camera (which adheres with suction cups) slid down the side of the animal—but stayed attached—providing remarkable video of the way it feeds. […]

Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D.-Ore.), alongside Representative Jim McGovern (D.-Mass.) and conservation, farmworker, farmer and consumer groups, on Wednesday reintroduced the Saving America’s Pollinators Act, which aims to suspend the registration of certain neonicotinoid insecticides until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducts a full scientific review. In addition, 16 environmental and conservation groups have collected […]

By Jeremy Deaton All press is good press—except when it isn’t. For those who are happy about President Trump‘s attacks on climate science and policy, this will come as bad news. By shining a spotlight on the issue, Trump drove media coverage of climate change last year. New analysis from Media Matters for America finds […]