The news sounds almost too good to be true.

Cultural evolution has made humans enormously potent ecosystem engineers and has enabled us to survive and flourish under a variety environmental conditions.

Naturally occurring algae on Greenland’s massive ice sheet absorb large amounts of the sun’s energy and speed up the melting of the ice sheet even more than black carbon and mineral dust, according to a new study.

Short-term exposures to fine particulate air pollution and ozone—even at levels well below current national safety standards—were linked to higher risk of premature death among the elderly in the U.S. according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The risk was even higher among elderly who were low-income, female, or Black.

The study was published December 26, 2017 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Charcoal remains after a forest fire help decompose fine roots in the soil, potentially accelerating CO2 emissions in boreal forests.

The air we breathe contains particulate matter from a range of natural and human-related sources. Particulate matter is responsible for thousands of premature deaths in the United States each year, but legislation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is credited with significantly decreasing this number, as well as the amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere. However, the EPA may not be getting the full credit they deserve: New research from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) proposes that the EPA’s legislation may have saved even more lives than initially reported.

China has released plans to create the world’s largest carbon emissions trading scheme, several news outlets reported. The market will initially be focused on the power sector, which produced almost half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions last year, and will encompass 1,700 energy suppliers producing more than 3 billion tons of CO2 annually, according to Reuters.

An imbalance between the trends in two common air pollutants is unexpectedly triggering the creation of a class of airborne organic compounds not usually found in the atmosphere over urban areas of North America, according to a new study from Caltech.

Carbon capture could help the nation’s coal plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet economic challenges are part of the reason the technology isn’t widely used today. That could change if power plants could turn captured carbon into a usable product.

Human emissions of the potentially harmful trace metal vanadium into Earth’s atmosphere have spiked sharply since the start of the 21st century due in large part to industry’s growing use of heavy oils, tar sands, bitumen and petroleum coke for energy, a new Duke University study finds.