Environment

For nearly a century, a strange band of 5,200 holes carved into a hillside has defied explanation. Stretching for nearly a mile along the edge of the Pisco Valley, Monte Serpe – "serpent mountain" – may have finally revealed its secrets to scientists.

High on sheer cliffs in China, ancient coffins are wedged into rock faces hundreds of feet above the ground. These dramatic burials, now re-examined using ancient DNA, point to a broader practice where disparate cultures all had their own "sky graves."

A new video takes you inside Dyson's impressive vertical farming operation, which is home to 1,225,000 strawberry plants and shows you how the company is applying its manufacturing knowledge to producing homegrown food for British consumers.

Last month, tour guides in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard made a grisly discovery, chancing upon the carcasses of a young male polar bear and an adult walrus in an advanced state of decay.

No matter what we throw at fire detection, from drones to prediction models and watch towers, predicting when and where blazes will start and travel remains challenging. And not all fires are created equal. What if we could stop them at the source?

The aroma of freshly cut grass is one of nature’s most recognizable scents, but it's not produced for our enjoyment. It's actually part of an ancient chemical war that plants have been fighting against predators for millions of years.

A disabled kea has invented a bizarre jousting technique that helped turn him into the undefeated alpha male of his circus. While parrots are known for their smarts, this level of individual benefit shows some real ingenuity and resourcefulness.

For years, bees were among our readers' favorite animals we covered, but then people seemed to switch off. Maybe it was tall poppy syndrome – bees love these nectar treasure chests – but this week we lead a charge to build up their buzz again.

The importance of bees for pollinating wild plants and crops is well known. If we lose the bees, we lose our food. But this is only part of the picture.

The Blue Mountains west of Sydney draw millions of visitors a year. Unfortunately, the Blue Mountains are also the site of a controversial investigation into water contamination with “forever chemicals”, also called PFAS.

Mexico City is trapped in a dangerous feedback loop. As groundwater is pumped from beneath the city, the ground subsides, with some entire regions sinking far faster than others, a problem NASA is tracking from above.

It was cold – but nowhere near what I expected; I’ve been colder in an outdoor swimming pool in Australia. It's part of a global feedback loop, the scale of which I only began to comprehend when I saw this remarkable continent for myself.

Researchers have used satellite data to uncover evidence of methane breaking down above the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption, forcing scientists to rethink how methane actually cycles through the atmosphere.

Newly observed negative-phase waveforms in earthquake data has alerted scientists to a previously unrecognized feature of the "big ones" that occur when tectonic plates clash – and it may help us engineer safer structures in response to the movement.

The Earth's rotation has never been perfectly stable, but for most of its history the changes were tiny and natural. Now, a new study shows human-induced climate change is altering it while lengthening days at unprecedented rates.

The explanation is weirder than you might think – in fact, the sky is probably closer to violet. Tiny air molecules and larger particles like dust and pollution scatter sunlight in different ways, painting the sky from deep violet to hazy white.

In a triple win for green research, scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a new sunlight-activated reactor that uses one waste stream to tackle another – all while producing clean hydrogen, and promising to be profitable at scale.

When escaped domestic pigs bred with wild boar after the Fukushima evacuation, researchers gained a rare chance to observe large-scale hybridization. The result offers a new lens on how fast-breeding traits can quietly reshape wildlife genetics.