Today we face a perfect storm. As the crises related to the climate, economy, food and poverty collide and combine they threaten to overwhelm us.
Today we face a perfect storm. As the crises related to the climate, economy, food and poverty collide and combine they threaten to overwhelm us.
In order to stop dangerous climate change we may be forced to construct giant solar shades and cover great swathes of land with artificial trees that suck up carbon dioxide.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long been known worldwide for its engineering programs, and a symposium at MIT this week will draw scientists from around the globe to focus on a hot facet of the field -- climate engineering.
The ice and snow that cap majestic Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania are vanishing before our eyes.
Coral reefs around the world are worth a staggering $172 billion dollars a year to the global economy. But the wealth of the oceans' reefs, and their amazing monetary value, is on the verge of being destroyed.
Midway Atoll, a small stretch of sand and coral in the middle of the north Pacific, is home to one of the world's largest populations of Laysan Albatrosses.
A salty soup of seawater, microscopic pieces of plastic and marine debris. Those are the ingredients in the North Pacific Gyre, an ocean vortex estimated by Greenpeace to be the size of Texas, contaminated with the floating detritus of our modern lives.
If you harbor a bit of angst over Facebook friend requests gone unanswered, a surprise "defriending" or being deserted by your Twitter followers, you're not alone.
If you harbor a bit of angst over Facebook friend requests gone unanswered, a surprise "defriending" or being deserted by your Twitter followers, you're not alone.
Making a set of subway stairs into a piano and a bottle bank into an arcade game; just two ingenious ways to get people to take time to do the right thing and have fun.
The next time you see a motorist obliviously straddling two lanes, don't fault bad driving, but genetics.
Silent Sound completed her voyage through the Canadian Arctic on October 10, four months and four days after slipping her moorings in Victoria, British Columbia.
Hidden under a quaint resort 60 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, lies a treasure trove of potential energy that's free and available 24/7.
The smile never came off of my face as we heard who placed third, second, and first in the 2009 Solar Decathlon.
Thirty-two planets have been discovered outside Earth's solar system through the use of a high-precision instrument installed at a Chilean telescope, an international team announced Monday.
A university team from Germany has won the U.S. Energy Department's Solar Decathlon for the second competition in a row, officials declared Friday. In second place was Team Illinois, and third place went to Team California.
For two weeks the National Mall in Washington D.C. has been transformed into a boulevard of homes of the future.
Scientists say a very rare find of some 20 fossilized pterodactyls has produced the first clear evidence of a controversial theory of evolution.
Like a lot of people, Anna Owens began using MySpace more than four years ago to keep in touch with friends who weren't in college.
Pliny Fisk III has been called a "mad scientist," a "dreamer" and a "visionary." His favorite word to describe the architectural work he does is "crazy."
"The Earth is just too small," sighed South African adventurer Mike Horn, one of the few people on the planet who can get away with saying such a statement.
NASA plans to launch next week the first of 17 planned flights to study changes in Antarctic ice and collect data that may help scientists better predict the consequences of those changes, officials said Thursday.
The oldest-known hominid skeleton was a 4-foot-tall female who walked upright more than 4 million years ago and offers new clues to how humans may have evolved, scientists say.
The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding quicker than those in other parts of the world and could disappear altogether by 2035 according to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
It's taken 11 years, thousands of miles and a few fistfuls of dollars for Josh Tickell to complete his film. But when you've devoted your life to a cause as important as helping save the planet, it's a small price to pay.
The last 50 years have borne witness to a spate of climate-related disasters across the world causing over 800,000 fatalities and $1 trillion in economic losses.
A frog that eats birds and a gecko with leopard stripes are among the 163 new species discovered last year in the Greater Mekong region of southeast Asia, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund.
On Tuesday, more than 100 world leaders gathered at the United Nations for a climate summit. They were called together by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to build momentum for the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, this December.
A small part that tells computers on some highly-automated Airbus aircraft how fast the plane is flying became a concern again Wednesday.
Much of Atlanta is underwater. Highways and neighborhoods have been submerged. Creeks are swollen. Several are dead.
The world's tropical forests are disappearing, and one reason is simple economics: People, companies and governments earn more by logging, mining or farming places such as the Amazon jungle than by conserving them.
My taxi driver is telling me about his meal last night. His name is William. He ate whale.
There are several definitions of where the Northwest Passage begins and ends, but using the Arctic Circle is certainly the most encompassing, so we've been holding our breath until we crossed this line.
Much has been made of the problem of livestock emissions of methane -- a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 -- but a solution might be just around the corner.
A pint-sized version of the Tyrannosaurus rex, with similarly powerful legs, razor-sharp teeth and tiny arms, roamed China some 125 million years ago, said scientists who remain startled by the discovery.
Fossilized bones of a saber-toothed cat and dinosaurs that may be 100 million years old are among "priceless" artifacts that the United States handed over to China in a ceremony Monday.
"The Last Beekeeper" will change the way you see honeybees.
There are many reasons why Roz Savage is an extraordinary woman -- she has rowed single-handed across the Atlantic and is now tackling the Pacific, after all.
When the chips are down, the world may one day owe a debt of gratitude to a group of potato farmers high up in the mountains of Peru.
Arctic temperatures in the 1990s reached their warmest level of any decade in at least 2,000 years, new research indicates.
Jean Paul Libert knows motor sport.
Hurricane experts are throwing cold water on an idea backed by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates aimed at controlling the weather.
Schools of robotic fish could one day map the ocean floor, detect pollution or inspect and survey submerged boats or oil and gas pipelines, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say.
The world has a new alliance to save vanishing frogs, toads and salamanders.
Climate change has taken a short break in the Arctic this summer, leaving Silent Sound to sail through some heavy ice as we steer her for home before winter sets in.
Three years ago many would have dismissed the notion that a significant supply of the world's automotive fuel could come from algae. But today the idea, while still an adventurous one, is getting much harder to ignore.
Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth's climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
You're probably not thinking about what you would like for Christmas yet. But ask any environmentalist for their ideal gift and you'll get a version of this answer: a binding agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December that is strong enough to match the science.
A new study shows capuchin monkeys prefer humans whose behavior mimics theirs, a trait they share with humans, scientists say.
The world's population is forecast to hit 7 billion in 2011, the vast majority of its growth coming in developing and, in many cases, the poorest nations, a report released Wednesday said.
We asked you what you thought about in-vitro meat, and hundreds of you replied. Read a selection of your comments, below, or visit the main page to read the full article, all your comments and watch the report.
You're sitting in an airport lounge and seize the chance to check your e-mails before your flight departs. You log on and are tempted by a wireless Internet provider offering free Internet access. So, do you take it?
Over 350 new species including the world's smallest deer, a "flying frog" and a 100 million-year old gecko have been discovered in the Eastern Himalayas, a biological treasure trove now threatened by climate change.
U.S. scientists monitoring shrinking glaciers in Washington and Alaska reported this week that a major meltdown is under way.
Efforts to curb overfishing in five of the world's marine ecosystems are starting to show signs of working.
Clouds of black smoke from burning plastic hang over the sites of Nigeria's vast dumps, as tiny figures pick their way through slicks of oily water, past cracked PC monitors and television screens.
It is a problem of massive plastic proportions -- a giant floating debris field, composed mostly of bits and pieces of plastic, in the northwest Pacific Ocean, about a thousand miles off the coast of California.
Meat is murder? Well, perhaps not for much longer.
Airbus has urged airlines to replace most of the European-made speed sensors on their A330 and A340 planes for more "consistent" ones made in the U.S.
Aircraft manufacturer Airbus is ready to fund a third search of the Atlantic Ocean if a second search, now under way, fails to find debris from last month's Air France crash, the company said Friday.
The earthquake in Sichuan, southwestern China, last May left around 69,000 people dead and 15 million people displaced. Now ecologists have assessed the earthquake's impact on biodiversity and the habitat for some of the last existing wild giant pandas.
Dry-eye sufferers and glaucoma patients may soon be able to trade their messy eye drops for a contact lens that delivers medication gradually over time.
The first human trials of a swine flu vaccine are expected to start in Australia Wednesday, as the World Health Organization confirmed that more than 700 people had died from the virus worldwide.
ExxonMobil is teaming up with the biotech research company run by genomics pioneer Craig Venter to produce algae-based biofuels.
We all know what happens when urban sprawl gets out of control: Commutes back up, smog thickens, and concrete suburbs gobble up green spaces.
Twenty milligrams; that's the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.
In Dutch Harbor the smell of fish wafting from the docks and the canneries is the smell of money. And lately, the town has smelled a lot less fishy.
I'm writing this blog from Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, where a cold katabatic wind is blowing off the ice onto the deck of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise.
Researchers in the U.S. have proposed a new way of allocating responsibility for carbon emissions they say could solve the impasse between developed and developing countries.
In the northwest of China's mountainous Yunnan province, among the world's most biodiverse areas, a green revolution is under way among rural residents.
Changing winter conditions are causing Scotland's wild Soay sheep to get smaller, according to a study that suggests climate change can trump natural selection.
Walk past the southern face of the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, and you will be greeted by a massive wall of brilliant green foliage -- an 8,600 square feet plant installation by the designer Patrick Blanc, featuring more than 170 different species.
A long line of hospital staff wraps around the corridor outside a small conference room in New York to catch a glimpse of the precious cargo.
One 12-year-old Virginia boy was playing baseball when it happened.
Scientists in the United States are developing a "synthetic tree" capable of collecting carbon around 1,000 times faster than the real thing.
Growing up surrounded by generations of jewelry wearing tradition, I was drawn to the brilliance and transparency of diamonds from an early age. Later, it was the fact that diamonds are a unique resource, evoking beauty and eternal love that lead me to found DIAZ Fine Jewelry.
"Refugees are the most vulnerable people on Earth. They are fighting to survive." -- Angelina Jolie, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees goodwill ambassador
Man-made climate change threatens to stress water resources, challenge crops and livestock, raise sea levels and adversely affect human health, according to a report released by the Obama administration on Tuesday.
A former motor-racing engineer has unveiled a prototype of a new hydrogen-powered city car which claims to emit less than one third of the carbon emissions produced by its nearest rival.
The wind blowing through the streets of Manhattan couldn't power the city, but wind machines placed thousands of feet above the city theoretically could.
Cell phone technology is helping developing nations prepare for disease threats such as a new strain of swine flu, an outbreak of measles or the increased spread of HIV.
There is a region of the world where the weather is always hot and humid and it rains almost every day of the year. Sounds predictable, right? But weather in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, can be volatile and dangerous.
The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has rejected suggestions that the United States has adopted too soft a stance on climate change negotiations with China.
A small band of sailors are facing a summer of raging Arctic storms, cramped quarters and soggy clothes in their search for the human face of climate change.
Today, Monday, June 8, we recognize the first U.N.-sanctioned World Oceans Day. The event comes after years of pressure from conservation groups and thousands of activists who clamored for everyone to know and understand what's happening in our oceans.
The world's oceans are full of trash, causing "tremendous" negative impacts on coastal life and ecology, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
The world's oceans are full of trash, causing "tremendous" negative impacts on coastal life and ecology, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
The massive amount of garbage in the ocean likely complicates the search for the remains of an Air France flight that went missing Monday near Brazil, oceanographers who spoke with CNN said.
Today's not only the first of the month or the start of the summer season meteorologically: It's the first day of hurricane season 2009.
If we don't know our history, then we can't know our future. Historians arguing the relevance of their subject often repeat that mantra.
At the 1964 New York World's Fair, people stood in line for hours to look at a strange sight.
Advances in the study of coral in the last few years has led a group of scientists to conclude that corals almost rival humans in their genetic complexity and their relationship to algae is key to their survival.
Continental shelves beneath the retreating polar ice caps of the Arctic may hold almost double the amount of oil previously found in the region, scientists say.
Researchers have found that rooks, a member of the crow family, are capable of using and making tools despite not doing so in the wild.
Dawa Steven Sherpa is leader of Eco Everest Expeditions, aiming to educate climbers about their impact on the Himalayas and highlight the affects of climate change on the region.
A pea-sized seahorse, the world's longest insect, a "ghost slug" and the world's smallest snake were among the top 10 species discovered in 2008, a committee of scientists said Friday.
A new study dispels the widely accepted theory that the Komodo dragon kills by infecting its prey with toxic bacteria.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Tuesday urged urban leaders and policymakers they need to take the lead now in fighting climate change.
Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient "small cat"-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, humans and other primates.
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