Research on climate, ecosystems, energy, and land use. Coverage tracks what people do to nature and what nature does back.
Companies under pressure from ESG (environmental, social and governance) investors do shrink their own carbon footprint, new research finds, but a meaningful share of that pollution simply resurfaces at suppliers, leaving the combined total largely unchanged.
A decade-spanning survey of 1,361 radiocarbon dates across the Amazon Basin finds charcoal nearly absent before human arrival and widespread soon after, tracing 10,000 years of fire driven almost entirely by people, not climate.
Correcting a single accounting error in how regulators value fuel savings could turn the federal rollback of vehicle pollution rules from a $790 billion win into a net loss, ten economists argue in a new Science paper.
Corals in the Galapagos hold a thousand years of ocean chemistry showing El Nino has grown far stronger over the last four decades, a trend that tracks rising global temperature and stumps the climate models built to predict it.
Thermal-shock quenching shatters a ceramic into disordered atomic clusters that move oxygen ions almost 18,000 times faster than a standard oxide, and a trace amount blended into an electrode tripled power output while reversing wear over time.
Lawrence Livermore simulations show fusion capsules absorbing radiation asymmetry without losing yield, until a sharp threshold flips a working implosion into a failed one, shaping how future fusion power plants might be tuned.
A raft of native reeds anchored across an Australian wastewater lagoon began slashing greenhouse gases within months, well before it managed to strip out any extra nutrients from the water.
A survey experiment with 100 MPs found that they underestimated support for four climate policies, even when costs were made explicit. MPs who thought an environmental pricing policy lacked support said they were less willing to defend it, but a polling-based correction had uncertain effects.
A study of abrupt Ice Age climate shifts suggests the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation regulates not just where heat goes, but how much of it the whole planet retains.
A rocket-propelled semitrailer carrying mock nuclear-weapon cargo has smashed into a barrier in New Mexico, completing Sandia National Laboratories’ full-scale crash-test series for a new secure transporter. The decisive evidence is now in the data, which have not been publicly released.
Tracking 56 barred owls in northwestern California, researchers found each bird claiming large territories in the tallest, oldest forest, with nearly two-thirds of an average home range overlapping spotted owl habitat. Removing resident owls reopened habitat, but only where control is sustained.
An MIT plasma physicist and a financial economist have built a ten-parameter test, modeled on fusion’s famous Lawson criterion, that asks the question the industry tends to dodge: can a fusion power plant bring in more money than it consumes?