Palm oil has become part of our daily lives, but a recent study by EPFL and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) serves as a reminder that intensive farming of this crop has a major impact on the environment. Both short- and long-term solutions exist, however.

A new CU Boulder-led study sheds light on the genetic mechanisms that allowed sunflowers to undergo a relatively rapid evolutionary transition from wild to domesticated in just over 5,000 years.

Tropical Depression Carlotta continues to hug the coast of southwestern Mexico and drop heavy rainfall. NASA's Aqua satellite provided a look at cloud top temperatures through infrared imagery to find out where the most powerful parts of Tropical Depression Carlotta were located.

NASA's Aqua satellite found very cold cloud top temperatures and strong storms in fragmented thunderstorms over mainland Mexico and the Eastern Pacific Ocean.   

A diverse mix of species improves the stability and fuel-oil yield of algal biofuel systems, as well as their resistance to invasion by outsiders, according to the findings of a federally funded outdoor study by University of Michigan researchers.

Explosive volcanic eruptions that shot jets of hot ash, rock and gas skyward are the likely source of a mysterious Martian rock formation, a new study finds. The new finding could add to scientists’ understanding of Mars’s interior and its past potential for habitability, according to the study’s authors.

Well, well, well… what have we here? Favorable conditions for El Niño to develop?

The sultry summer months along the Gulf Coast and East Coast are a time of volatile weather as warm ocean water fuels storms, some just bringing rain and some growing into fierce tropical storms and hurricanes.

Optimizing economic welfare without constraints might put human well-being at risk, a new climate study argues. While being successful in bringing down costs of greenhouse gas reductions for instance, the concept of profit maximization alone does not suffice to avoid the tipping of critical elements in the Earth system which could lead to dramatic changes of our livelihood. The scientists use mathematical experiments to compare economic optimization to the governance concepts of sustainability and the more recent approach of a safe operating space for humanity. All of these turn out to have their benefits and deficits, yet the profit-maximizing approach shows the greatest likelihood of producing outcomes that harm people or the environment.

For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets.

A massive world-wide study of dry riverbeds has found they’re contributing more carbon emissions than previously thought, and this could help scientists better understand how to fight climate change.