One-third of tropical plants in Africa threatened with extinction, study estimates
A third of the species of tropical plants in Africa are potentially threatened with extinction, according to a preliminary estimate published Wednesday by the journal Science Advances. The most authoritative list of threatened species is the famous "Red List" maintained by the International Union for ...
Trump administration to auction off Arctic Alaskan oil and gas sites next month
The Trump administration said on Tuesday it will be auctioning off nearly 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of land in Arctic Alaska for oil development next month, and it is promising much more territory will be open to development in the future. The Bureau ...
Hordes of brain-munching undead terrorizing neighborhoods make for fun television and movies, but zombies could never be real ... or could they? There are, in fact, a growing number of documented examples in the animal kingdom of parasites that change their hosts' behavior — and ...
Britain's Natural History Museum on Friday named a tiny, blind and wingless beetle after climate activist Greta Thunberg. The honey-colored insect, measuring less than 1 millimeter, was discovered in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi in the 1960s. But it apparently remained nameless until the venerable London ...
Post-apocalyptic fossils show fast rise of mammals after dinosaur demise
A revelatory cache of fossils dug up in central Colorado details as never before the rise of mammals from the post-apocalyptic landscape after an asteroid smacked Earth 66 million years ago and annihilated three-quarters of all species, including the dinosaurs. The fossils, described by scientists ...
Amazon river dolphins being poisoned by mercury from illegal gold operations, conservationists say
Amazon river dolphins are showing alarming levels of contamination mainly because of illegal panning for gold, conservationists say. Researchers measured contamination levels in 46 of these large freshwater creatures known for long, bottle-like snouts in major basins of Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. All of them ...
Reducing herds of wild horses and burros likely to cost U.S. $5 billion over 15 years
Reducing the tens of thousands of wild horses and burros on public lands to a level that is better for both the animals and their habitat will cost U.S. taxpayers $5 billion and take 15 years, a Trump administration official said on Wednesday. On a ...
World's fastest ant sprints the equivalent of a 1-second 200-meter dash
The Saharan silver ant is officially the fastest of the world's 12,000 known ant species, clocking 855 millimeters per second, researchers say. The six-legged sprinter covers 108 times its body length per second, a feat topped only by two other creatures: the Australian tiger beetle ...
A new green fund being set up by Indonesia should prioritize protecting its rainforests and creating a carbon trading program to help the country meet its goals to curb climate change, environmentalists and officials said. Indonesia's Environment Ministry last week launched an agency to manage ...
For the first time, corals that were thought to have been killed by heat stress have been found to have recovered — a glimmer of hope for reefs threatened by climate change. The chance discovery, made by Diego K. Kersting from the Freie University of ...
Killer fungus native to Japan and Korea discovered growing in northeast Australian rainforest
One of the world's deadliest fungi has been discovered in Australia's far north for the first time, thousands of kilometers from its native habitat in the mountains of Japan and the Korean Peninsula. The poison fire coral fungus was discovered in a suburb of Cairns ...
Eleven years after return to the wild, crested ibises eyed to boost Sado tourism
A little more than a decade after the release of crested ibises back into the wild, the city of Sado and others are looking to the endangered birds as a possible tourism resource. This year marks the 11th anniversary of the start of a project ...
