Many countries have made commitments to restore huge areas of forest as part of the Bonn Challenge, organized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. For example, Costa Rica has promised to preserve 1 million hectares (3,861 square miles) of forest by 2020—about 20 percent of the nation’s total area. However, a new paper in Conservation Letters suggests that quickly reforesting large areas may not be the best strategy to yield many of the benefits forests can provide.

As the climate changes, we must radically improve soil health in Canada.

Metal-air batteries are one of the lightest and most compact types of batteries available, but they can have a major limitation: When not in use, they degrade quickly, as corrosion eats away at their metal electrodes. Now, MIT researchers have found a way to substantially reduce that corrosion, making it possible for such batteries to have much longer shelf lives.

On August 21, 2017, at 16 points along the path of last year’s total solar eclipse, tiny microphones—each about the size of a USB flash drive—captured a unique biological phenomenon. As Earth fell into complete darkness, the bees stopped buzzing, according to researchers at the University of Missouri

A 37-year survey of monarch populations in North Central Florida shows that caterpillars and butterflies have been declining since 1985 and have dropped by 80 percent since 2005.

With its wind and precipitation patterns, the South Asian Monsoon influences the lives of several billion people. Recent studies indicate that its drivers are more complex than previously assumed. Scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel have now published a reconstruction of precipitation over the eastern Indian Ocean over the past one million years in the international journal Nature Communications. It points to connections with controlling processes in the southern hemisphere that have received little attention so far.

Extreme drought is one of the effects of climate change that is already being perceived.  This year, the decrease in rainfall and the abnormally hot temperatures in northern and eastern Europe have caused large losses in cereals and potato crops and in other horticultural species. Experts have long warned that to ensure food security it is becoming necessary to use plant varieties that are productive in drought conditions. Now, a team led by the researcher at the Center for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) Ana Caño-Delgado has obtained plants with increased drought resistance by modifying the signaling of the plant steroid hormones, known as brassinosteroids. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to find to find a strategy to increase hydric stress resistance without affecting overall plant growth.

A team of more than 100 scientists has assessed global warming's impact on thousands of tree species across the Amazon rainforest, assessing the winners and losers from 30 years of climate change.

An enzyme known to help our liver get rid of ammonia also appears to be good at protecting our retina, scientists report.

Curcumin – the active ingredient in turmeric spice – is sometimes touted as having ‘miracle’ medicinal qualities for those who consume it.