Research on climate, ecosystems, energy, and land use. Coverage tracks what people do to nature and what nature does back.
A lone attacker may be blocked by cutting off information and materials, but a state program mostly can’t be and has to be deterred instead. A policy analysis lays out nine layered defenses to cover both.
Five climate scientists reviewed three decades of fingerprint research and say rainfall, ocean, snow and stratosphere records now point the same way, while conceding that attributing individual extreme events remains hard.
Six chatbots backed an existing policy about 70% of the time but the same trade-off framed as new only about 34%, while recipe and home heating advice showed no clear bias.
A lithium-doped manganese dioxide insert kept acetic acid readings lower in a bin of rotting food for more than 40 days. Fully converting that acid to carbon dioxide took lab light nearly three times as strong as full sun.
A meta-analysis of 45 studies links short bursts of fine particulate air pollution, and months of elevated nitrogen dioxide, with higher odds of death by suicide, adding pollution to the shrinking list of modifiable risk factors researchers can act on.
Bacteria scooped from an ordinary compost heap outperformed relatives collected from a Kenyan landfill, a tropical zoo, and insect guts at breaking down two of the hardest plastics to recycle.
Phoenix logged zero out-of-season record-heat days in the 1980s and dozens by the 2020s, part of a lopsided worldwide shift pushing heat toward spring in some regions and fall in others.
Contaminated crop residue does not have to be burned or buried. A review of pyrolysis studies finds that heating it slowly, away from oxygen, can trap most heavy metals in place while producing charcoal, oil and gas with real uses.
A faint photosynthetic signal separated stressed forests from matched controls before widespread tree death was visible, but drought and coarse satellite pixels still prevent the method from predicting where mortality will occur.
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.