Lichen

The yak is an imposing animal that lives in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet: the Himalayas. How can it withstand the extreme cold? The post The yak is an imposing giant of the high mountains first appeared on EarthSky.

Sometimes last month feels like a long time ago, but considering our planet, the long perspective can really help.

Matthew Hutson on how some animals can remember where they've buried hundreds of thousands of seeds, and yet we can't remember where we've put our eyeglasses.

The former President Jimmy Carter has died at age one hundred. Lawrence Wright recalls his life and political career in an obituary.

Casey Cep on the oddity, and the importance, of state symbols—such as state birds, desserts, and even fossils—in promoting regional tourism and legislative actions.

As the Atlantic grew wider, the ancestral population of all of today's oaks may have been straddling the continents of the Northern Hemisphere. If so, the ancestor of the oaks we know today was a widespread population that was cleaved in half as North America inched westward.

For thousands of years, the Arctic's tundra sequestered more carbon than it emitted. Not anymore.

'Absolution,' the latest book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series, begins with a mysterious alligator experiment that seems to have gone wrong. Read the first two chapters here.

New research indicates Antarctica's melting ice is showing more plants, an ominous shift for the continent

Plant growth is accelerating on the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby islands.

Europe's only indigenous group are in a battle to survive on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Meet the community determined to live on.

I love Orwell's description of the sort of things people actually do remember: "A million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost…

For the past two years, Bill Bray has been on a mission to restore abandoned cemeteries. Bray, 57, of Penn Township, has cleaned headstones covered in years of mold, moss and lichen and reset stones that tipped over or sunk into the earth. The Army veteran has replaced nearly 75

I'm First Amendment all day, people, but I'm also political animal enough to know this leads nowhere good.

The "climatization" of forests has led to the rise of carbon offset markets that prioritize short-term profits, a landmark report found.

Once known only to those studying biology, the word symbiosis is now widely used. Symbiosis is the intimate relationship of different species living together. It's much more common and older than many of us might realize.

Just as the world's zoos breed critically endangered animals in captivity to repopulate the wild, scientists are building a global effort to freeze corals...

Carbon materials, due to their appropriate physicochemical characteristics such as high surface area, adjustable pore structure, variable morphology, and multifunctional surface properties based on chemical modifications, low cost, and ease of preparation from various precursors, are ideal carrier materials for functional metal components.

Specimens collected on Voyage of the Beagle have been in Cambridge University archive for nearly 200 years

Focus is often put on preserving disappearing languages, but what of other traditions? For some, vitality rests with maintaining a culture's visual representations, too.