NEWS
Recent activities
Data
Is Climate Change Losing the Media’s Attention?
Climate change may be accelerating, but news coverage of it is moving in the opposite direction, according to the University of Colorado Boulder-based Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO).
News
Permafrost Thaw behind the Catastrophic Nepal–Tibet Flood
Across the globe, the rapid thawing of permafrost is destabilizing mountain slopes and turning once-settled alpine regions into hazardous zones. As subzero temperatures rise in high-altitude environments, the subterranean ice that binds fractured rock faces together is melting, making living in mountainous regions dangerously unpredictable.
Education
Art at the Heart of Environmentalism
While environmental policy and climate science typically rely on hard datasets and complex graphs, a growing body of research suggests that data alone is insufficient to drive public engagement or political consensus.
Nature
Detecting the Inaudible Chatter of an Endangered Giant
In a dense tropical forest in Central Africa, a mama elephant takes a walk with her two cute calves. The calves stay close to their mother, as she is a hefty giant who shows them how to walk through and feed on the ample vegetation surrounding them. At the same time, these family members are engaged in quiet conversations using low-frequency rumbles that are mostly inaudible to humans.
Food
Seaweed Farming Comes Ashore
The United Nations estimates that 266 million people are at risk of acute hunger this year. And while many converging crises have conspired to create such a troubling statistic—from geopolitics, war, and extreme weather to inflation—the sheer availability of food is perhaps the simplest to understand.
Natural Disasters
Shielding Europe from Extreme Heat Mortality
For millions of Europeans, extreme heat is no longer just an uncomfortable part of summer. It’s a growing threat to life.
News
Anatomy of a Seismic Doublet: The Geophysics behind Venezuela’s Earthquake …
While early coverage of northern Venezuela’s devastating June 2026 disaster centered on victim numbers and rescue efforts, geophysicists are highlighting the tragic geologic story behind the human toll and infrastructure ruin.
Consciousness
Do Plants Think?
For centuries, science viewed plants as silent, passive background scenery. But a wave of groundbreaking research into how flora communicate, adapt, and make decisions is smashing that paradigm—revealing that plants possess complex forms of memory, kin recognition, and decentralized problem-solving.
Data
Plastic-Free Eating Pays Off Fast
Plastic has become an unavoidable part of modern life, from food packaging and kitchenware to personal care products. Along with it come plastic-associated chemicals (PACs), including phthalates and bisphenols such as BPA, which have been linked in previous research to hormone disruption and other health concerns.
Ecosystems
Breaking the Slash-and-Burn Cycle
For centuries, traditional slash-and-burn agriculture has locked tropical smallholders into a destructive cycle of forest clearing and rapid soil exhaustion. But when tropical ecologist Mike Hands set out to uncover why rainforest soils fail so quickly after burning, his 1980s research at Cambridge University laid the foundation for unlocking a permanent, regenerative alternative.
News
Half of All World’s Farmers May Experience Pesticide Poisoning Each …
A new global study estimates that 402 million to 433 million farmers and farmworkers experience unintentional acute pesticide poisoning every year—roughly 46% of the world’s estimated 934 million farmers.
Data
Grocery Store Food for Toddlers Is Mostly Ultraprocessed
The first years of life help shape lifelong eating habits, making nutrition especially important during infancy and toddlerhood. Yet new research presented at the American Society for Nutrition's Nutrition 2026 meeting suggests that the majority of packaged foods marketed specifically for toddlers are ultra-processed and nearly half fail to meet at least one nutrient standard established by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Natural Disasters
Fighting Fire with Fire
For generations, Americans have been taught to think of wildfire as an enemy: Flames “destroy” acres, firefighters “battle” blazes, and successful fire management means extinguishing fire as quickly as possible.
Data
Greenhouse Gases, Sea Level, and Ocean Heat Hit Record Highs …
Earth’s major climate indicators continued to move into unprecedented territory in 2025, according to the newly released 36th annual State of the Climate report from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Pollution
The Dark Side of Solar
To a world desperate to break its fossil fuel habit, solar energy looks almost like magic: a free, infinite wellspring of electricity pulled directly from the heavens with no carbon footprint at all. It is the wunderkind of the clean energy revolution, multiplying across rooftops and desert basins at breakneck speed. But beneath this gleaming, ecofriendly surface lies an uncomfortable paradox.
Data
Global Trust Report 2026
Solving global environmental problems requires something that cannot be manufactured in a laboratory or legislated into existence: trust. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, food security, and other environmental challenges cross national, cultural, political, and economic boundaries, making cooperation among people with different interests and perspectives essential.
Ecosystems
The Mangrove Comeback: A Rare Environmental Success Story
Researchers at Tulane University published a study in June 2026 in the journal Science that found significant regrowth and expansion of mangrove forests, using four decades of Landsat satellite imagery, from 1984 through 2023.
Energy
The Hidden Cost of Thinking Machines
In early September 2026, an artificial intelligence firm reported a proposed solution to one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems of mathematics. Roughly 10,000 AI agents, running through OpenAI, worked in parallel for 88 hours to produce a 165-page proof resolving key parts of the 90-year-old Navier–Stokes problem.
Data
Women Farmers Feed the World
Women are indispensable to the farms and food systems that sustain the world, but their access to land, financing, agricultural training, technology, and positions of influence often falls far short of their contribution.
Consciousness
Can ‘Ecospirituality’ Revive Appreciation of the ‘Sacred Cosmos’?
How do spirituality and ecology combine to promote a closer relationship with nature? What lessons can be learned from the ancient desert Christians? How can Christians move beyond the biblical command to “subdue” and “have dominion over” the natural world and acquire a more positive and harmonious view of the world?
