In the 1980s I was fascinated by the pictorially oriented books on the wildlife of the world which dated to the 1960s and 1970s. One of the great conservation success stories of that era were the Saiga antelope of Eurasia. In 1920 there were only 1...

Last week on Twitter I lamented the simplistic public discourse on climate change, how it's often framed by those who dismiss the legitimate concerns of a warming planet and those who play up those concerns. American Politicians, especially those wit...

The Global Water System Project at the University of Bonn, in Germany, just released a video on water in the Anthropocene. If you can get past the melodramatic narration, there is a pretty stellar data visualization, based on a lot of federal agency ...

In a recent report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) lamented: The picture is as clear as it is disturbing: the carbon intensity of the global energy supply has barely changed in 20 years, despite successful efforts in deploying renewable energy...

Mark Bittman, the popular food writer for the New York Times, has written a column that is almost beyond parody for its unintentional irony. The only way to fully appreciate his lack of self-awareness is to stop and marvel at numerous passages. Let's...

by Richard Schiffman The recent boom in fracking has turned America into the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, almost overnight. Proponents say that this burgeoning industry has ensured U.S. energy independence for years to come, and created a more cl...

A paper published this week in Science reviews what we know about the water quality impacts of shale gas development and hydraulic fracturing. And the conclusion is… still not that much. This despite the fact that “fracking,” as it is commonly calle...

Sometimes I think the climate debate remains stalled because those who are most concerned refuse to ask the pertinent questions. Instead, they keep refighting old battles that are no longer relevant to a constructive discourse. The latest example is ...

I launched the ImaGeo blog here at Discover back in February, and ever since I've been focusing on spectacular visuals related to the science of our planet. Starting Thursday, May 16, I'll be slowing down a bit on my posts as I head off to China an...

Newly discovered water trapped more than a mile below ground in Canada could be billions of years old — and could hold clues both to Earth’s past climate and possible habitats for life on Mars. A research team reporting today in Nature has found p...

When the definitive history of the GMO debate is written, Jeffrey Smith is going to figure prominently in the section on pseudoscience. He is the equivalent of an anti-vaccine leader, someone who is quite successful in spreading fear and false inform...

One way to understand how the ecosystem of the Antarctic originated is to look at its very base: tiny organisms called dinoflagellates, the little creatures that attract bigger creatures, and thus in effect support all of life in the ocean. Dinoflag...