Hurricane Dorian: Why it’s so destructive

Dorian, the 2nd most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, has devastated the Bahamas, with the death toll expected to rapidly rise as rescue work gets under way.

Wow! Night skies and petroglyphs

Gorgeous night skies over North America's best petroglyphs and ruins - and don't miss 2018’s Super Blue Moon lunar eclipse (at 1:03) - in Skyglow's newest video.

Evolution doesn’t proceed in a straight line

If you go by cartoons and T-shirts, you might think evolution proceeds as an orderly march toward a preordained finish line. But evolution has no endpoint in mind.

Hurricane Dorian viewed from space

NASA astronaut Christian Koch snapped this image of Hurricane Dorian from the International Space Station on Monday, September 2, 2019. The station orbits more than 200 miles (300 km) above Earth.

Why the Amazon is burning: 4 reasons

Nearly 40,000 fires are burning in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the latest outbreak in an overactive fire season. Don’t blame dry weather, say environmentalists. These Amazonian wildfires are a human-made disaster.

Snow algae thrives in extreme conditions

On tall ice structures high in the Chilean Andes, researchers found algae growing on snow. They don’t entirely understand how the algae are able to bloom.

Large 2019 dead zone in Gulf of Mexico

This year's Gulf of Mexico dead zone of oxygen-depleted waters is the 8th largest ever recorded.

It’s raining plastic in the Rocky Mountains

A USGS study identified plastic in more than 90% of rainwater samples taken from across Colorado.

Microplastics found in Lake Tahoe

Research at one of the world's clearest, cleanest lakes suggests the problem of microplastics is widespread in freshwater systems and not just in oceans.

How do monarch butterflies know when it’s time to migrate?

Overwintering monarch butterflies rely on a temperature-sensitive internal timer to wake them up to make the trip back north, researchers report.

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