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Around the time The Return of the Swamp Thing hit theaters in 1989, the mossy hero collaborated with Greenpeace on this bizarre anti-littering public service announcement. I'm pretty sure Swamp Thing used his eco-powers to transform those children into peat mummies once the cameras stopped rolling. More »
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The subjects of Mandy Barker's photographs look like creatures from another world, but they're actually quite mundane: discarded fishing nets, plastic bottles, and toothpaste tubes. They're what sits beneath the surface of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. More »
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As far as we know, there isn't an army of dolphins wielding chainsaws beneath the Black Sea. And hopefully no Elder God is waking from its millennia-long slumber. But the ice around Odessa is singing and squeaking all the same. More »
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What if all the cats on Earth vanished one day, beamed back to their home planet or taken up in the kitty rapture? We'd certainly miss their funny LOLCat antics and the way they sleep on our keyboards, but what greater disasters lie in store for a feline-free planet Earth? One scientist takes a look at the catpocalypse, and it's not pretty. More »
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In 1000 years, sea levels could rise as much as 28 meters, placing London, as well as many other cities, squarely underwater. Because it can be difficult to picture just what those rising waters mean, one artist has placed a glowing high-water mark around some of London's most prominent monuments. More »
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Fukushima may still be reeling from last year's nuclear disaster, but a global interest in nuclear power looks to be on the up and up — even here in the U.S. More »
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The science of dendrochronology observes changes in the pattern of tree rings in an attempt to create a time line and infer climate changes. Using tree ring data, it is possible to link the past 11,000 years in parts of Germany & Northern Ireland, but only the past few centuries in other parts of the world. More »
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In the most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date, scientists have used NASA satellites to gauge just how much of the world's ice has been lost to the oceans. Their results? Data collected over eight years of the past decade indicates that melting ice raised sea levels worldwide by an average of 1.48 millimeters. More »
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Australia faces serious ecological threats posed by feral animals and out-of-control wildfires. Non-native species gone wild have contributed to both problems, and one biologist is suggesting that Australia fight fire with fire by introducing more non-native species. More »
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The CERES Experiment is a NASA project that measures Earth's incoming and outgoing energy. The picture above is a look at Earth's reflected heat energy, as it would be seen from space. More »
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Seriously. This map suggests that unless you live in California, a smattering of states out East, or a small handfull of other states sprinkled across the country, you're looking at a very grave problem when it comes to scientific illiteracy in your community's youth (and, presumably, its population in general). Come to think of it, this map should really concern you, no matter where you live. More »
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Later this year, Dark Horse Comics will release The Massive, a new ongoing comic book from writer/illustrator Brian Wood (DMZ, Channel Zero, Northlanders). More »
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It seems counterintuitive, but new research suggests that it is actually the world's biggest trees that suffer the most from climate change and forest fragmentation. More »
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National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore has a mission: to shoot (with a camera) Earth's endangered species in a studio setting, so that human viewers are forced to confront exactly who's going extinct face-to-face. So far, Joel's photographed 1,800 species, and shooting these creatures presents its own set of challenges. Namely, his subjects love defecating on set. More »
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In Sirenia Shadows, a short film by video production house Built By Wildman, a submarine cameraman captures the endangered West Indian manatee placidly gliding through Florida's Crystal River. It's a marvel seeing these sea cows serenely traverse the riverbed (without the risk of getting skimmed by some gaudy cigarette boat). More »
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If you've ever visited California's Yosemite National Park, then you have an appreciation for how absurdly majestic its scenery is. You also know how difficult it can be to encapsulate that majesty when describing it to others; somehow, adjectives like "breathtaking" don't even begin to describe it. More »
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Here's a new candidate for the world's most precarious school commute. Sorry, two-day Chinese mountaineering expedition. More »
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We've been recording global surface temperatures since 1880, the beginning of what meteorologists call the modern record. In that time, worldwide temperatures have been on the rise. Now, NASA scientists are reporting that the global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest that we've ever recorded. So what's the big deal? In the last 132 years, nine of the ten warmest on record have occurred in the last eleven years.

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For years, the energy industry has been looking to seaweed to become the next big source of biofuel. But the algae plant has its drawbacks. Much of its energy is stored in a form of sugar that is difficult to tap into; this snag drives the cost of biofuel produced from seaweed up, and its viability as an alternative to petroleum-based fuels down. More »
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The latest State of Observed Species report is out. And biologists might have just earned the title of Hardest-Working People in Science, discovering a staggering 19,232 species in just one year, including nearly 10,000 new types of insects. More »
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For decades, the world has relied on incredibly accurate atomic clocks to keep time; but atomic clocks are much more consistant than the rotation of the Earth, which varies in speed ever-so-slightly as it spins about its axis. Consequently, every few years, the time based on the Earth's rotation falls out of sync with time kept by atomic clocks. More »
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In the last several hundred years, human activity has shifted large quantities of the world's carbon from long-term storage (i.e. carbon bound up in rocks, fossil fuels, and forests) into forms of short-term storage such as croplands and pastures, which tend to store less carbon for shorter periods of time. More »
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That's the recommendation from a new report by the US National Research Council, who say reclaimed waste water is needed as a necessary substitute for the dwindling supply of freshwater. What's more, reprocessed urine might actually be cleaner than freshwater. More »
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Scenes from Miyakejima can look downright post-apocalyptic. Each resident on the tiny Japanese island is required to carry a gas mask, just in case they need to quickly pull it on. But why? More »
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Siberia enjoys a well-deserved reputation as one of the coldest places on Earth. But the last time the planet got really cold, Siberia apparently didn't go along for the ride, providing animals a warm oasis from the Ice Age. More »
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In the Sahafina Forest in eastern Madagascar, a joint German-Malagasy research team has discovered a new species of primate they've dubbed Gerp's Mouse Lemur (Microcebus gerpi). Named after Madagascar's Groupe d'Étude et de Recherche sur les Primates de Madagascar and weighing in at 68 grams, Gerp's trumps the previously discovered Goodman's mouse lemur by a hearty 20 grams. More »
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While a huge body of research has been done on the immense oil spill in the Gulf Coast, another, smaller, spill in the San Francisco Bay has shown not only that we don't know much about how different types of oil behave in the environment — but also that they can interact in ways we didn't predict. More »
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While politicians battle over climate regulations, a growing number of urban planners and landscape managers are quietly preparing for a more arid world. A fascinating book review in the New York Times today explores two recent books about the future of the American Southwest, a region that is today gripped by drought - and will likely be even drier as the years go by. Writes Cornelia Dean: More »
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Myrrh and frankincense have bewildered countless generations of children who have no idea what they are, nor why they'd be given as a present to the baby Jesus in the Biblical myth that's celebrated on Christmas. Now, future generations will be even more confused, because Balthazar's present of frankincense may be on its way to extinction. Frankincense is resin from the Boswellia tree, generally found in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It's used for perfume and incense, partly due to its link to the Christmas story. Now research is showing that farming, coupled with environmental hazards, have put the population of this tree severely at risk. More »
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Research scientists, especially environmental scientists, are always looking for funding. A recent project, studying how debris move and decay in the ocean, has come up with a controversial way to bankroll their project. They'll take tourists on a cruise of the March tsunami debris. More »
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While traveling in Peru last year, London filmmaker and amphibian aficionado Lucy Cooke witness firsthand how the critically endangered Titicaca Water Frog (Telmotobius Culeus, which happens to be Latin for "aquatic scrotum") was being liquified for aphrodisiac smoothies in downtown Lima. Explains Cooke: More »
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No, this wasn't the work of Vigo the Carpathian or a bunch of overzealous Slayer fans. In the city of Luoyang, illegal manufacturing workshops dumped chemical dye in the Jian River. The dye turned the river an unpleasant shade of hemoglobin crimson. It's not clear what the health ramifications of this unholy mess will be, at least there's the cold comfort that the Earth hasn't punctured an aorta. More »
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Get excited, people. The critically acclaimed BBC documentary series Frozen Planet is slated to begin airing stateside on March 18th, but here's the really good news: the controversial final episode addressing climate change? It will be airing in the U.S., after all. More »
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The abandoned cities and giant monuments of the Maya, found throughout the Yucatán, are one of the greatest mysteries in human history. Why did this great empire collapse suddenly in 950 AD, leaving its massive urban centers to be consumed by jungle? New evidence suggests that the Mayans may have created such vast farms that they managed to change the local climate in a catastrophic way. More »
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To call attention to the environmental toll of fossil fuel consumption, a group of motorbikers/performance artists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia strapped weighty shrubbery to their heads and tooled around town. This is a smashing look for the incognito Hell's Angel looking to masquerade as office foliage. Explains the Szpilman Awards, which celebrate ephemeral artwork: More »
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As global temperatures rise and the oceans heat up, a huge question is how fish that are adapted to one set of temperatures will survive this upheaval. Now we know at least one species could adapt fast enough to survive. More »
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There are animals with badass names, and then there's the Ozark Hellbender. This salamander-like creature might sound like a reject from a particularly gritty and/or rural episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but it's actually a critically endangered species. More »
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Global fossil fuel emissions skyrocketed last year to the highest levels ever recorded, undermining the widespread belief that the global financial crisis would cut carbon emissions. Though there was a brief, two-year decline in emissions, a new scientific report published this week offers compelling evidence that emissions in 2010 soared far above anything we've ever experienced. More »
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The final episode of Frozen Planet — the popular new series from the creators of Planet Earth — addresses the impending threat of climate change on the Earth's poles. In the episode, which will air on BBC One on December 7th, narrator David Attenborough is expected to claim that the Arctic could be completely devoid of ice by 2020. More »
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Over the course of the last century, the exponential expansion of industry has seen the production of materials like steel, aluminum, cement and plastics skyrocket. It is estimated that the amount of these so-called energy-intensive materials produced every single year comes to 10 times the total weight of every living person on Earth, and accounts for a fifth of the world's carbon emissions. More »
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