New York City's Central Park hosts concerts, rallies, weddings, and over 25 million visitors each year. It's also a hotspot of urban biodiversity. Starting tomorrow, hundreds of scientists and volunteers will swarm through the park during its first-ever, 24-hour "bioblitz" to catalog every plant and animal species they can find.
Enormous lightning-like flashes spanning huge distances between thunderclouds and the outer atmosphere have been seen and photographed for the first time. The discovery of the "giant jets" has excited atmospheric scientists, who wonder what role they play in the Earth's electric circuitry.
For decades, scientists longingly eyed the Gakkel Ridge, a mid-ocean ridge that snakes for 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) beneath the Arctic Ocean. Traveling aboard two icebreakers, researchers embarked on a rare expedition to the region in 2001. Their findings are now changing notions of how the ocean floor forms.
The deaths of 14 firefighters on Colorado's Storm King Mountain in 1994 reawakened public awareness about wildfire dangers. Now, with wildfires taking hundreds of homes, those concerns are once again front and center out West. Tom Foreman talks with author Sebastian Junger about the often uncontrollable infernos.
Traditional farming methods in the Burren, the dramatic limestone landscape in western Ireland, are in decline. The falloff in old-style agriculture has imperiled the region's remarkably diverse plant community, including many rare wildflower species.
Scorpions are known as desert-dwellers with a venomous sting, but non-desert species may outnumber their relatives. Few species are actually dangerous, and fewer have the ability to kill.
Scientists have found that New Guinea is one of the few places on Earth where agriculture developed independently. Evidence of taro and banana cultivation has been discovered at the site of Kuk, indicating the emergence of agriculture approximately 6,500 years ago.
The Inamori Foundation announced the laureates of its 19th Annual Kyoto Prizes, international awards presented to people who have contributed significantly to mankind's betterment in the categories of Advanced Technology, Basic Science, and Arts and Philosophy.
In a vast labyrinth of caves beneath Madagascar's Ankarana nature reserve, off the coast of eastern Africa, scientists are studying cave-dwelling crocodiles—perhaps the only ones in the world. Are the behemoths that inhabit these caves a new subspecies? To find out, Dr. Brady Barr led a team of researchers into the dark depths of the caves. They emerged with tantalizing clues, a scientific first, and lots of unanswered questions.
The first map known to have named the then-new Western continent "America" has been acquired by the Library of Congress for U.S. ten million dollars. Described as "one of the greatest finds of the modern age" after it was lost for more than two centuries, the 1507 map was drawn from data gathered by explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
It is almost certain that Earth will be hit by an asteroid large enough to exterminate a large percentage of our planet's life, including possibly over a billion people, according to researchers. But as such cataclysmic collisions occur on average only once in a million years or so, are they really worth worrying about?
Black holes, dark matter, and mysterious dark energy together make up 96 percent of the universe—the so-called dark side of the cosmos. Scientists are slowly unraveling the secrets of these enigmatic forces, shedding light on the past and future structure of the universe.
The "Jesus Box," touted to be the first archaeological proof that Jesus existed, has been found to contain a forged inscription. The Israel Antiquities Authority released a report Wednesday stating that the box's inscription was forged, though the ossuary itself is believed to be dated correctly.
Why are humans so hairless compared to other primates? Theorists argue that early humans shed their fur to aid cooling on the sun-baked savanna. Now, scientists suggest that clothes, shelter, and fire allowed us to shed our hair along with the ticks, fleas, and other bloodsuckers that hide in it.
Scientists say the sexually precocious offspring of farmed Atlantic salmon threaten the survival of genetically distinct wild stocks. New research suggests the young produced by fish escaping from salmon farms are four times more successful at breeding in rivers than native fish.
