Melting icecaps, mass flooding, megadroughts and erratic weather are no laughing matter. However, a new study shows that humor can be an effective means to inspire young people to pursue climate change activism. At the same time, fear proves to be an equally effective motivator and has the added advantage of increasing people’s awareness of climate change’s risks.

Much like detectives study fingerprints to identify the culprit, scientists used NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to find the “fingerprints” of water in the atmosphere of a hot, bloated, Saturn-mass exoplanet some 700 light-years away. And, they found a lot of water. In fact, the planet, known as WASP-39b, has three times as much water as Saturn does.

Data centres and smartphones will be the most damaging information and communications technologies to the environment by 2040, according to new research from W Booth School's Lotfi Belkhir.

Across the globe, billions of dollars are spent annually on repairing ecosystems damaged by people. Forests denuded by logging. Rivers polluted by industry. Grasslands converted to agriculture.

Native wildflowers were surprisingly resilient during California’s most recent drought, even more so than exotic grasses. But signs of their resilience were not evident with showy blooms aboveground. Rather, they were found mostly underground, hidden in the seed bank, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

Farmers around the world are turning to nature to help them reduce pesticide use, environmental impact and, subsequently, and in some cases, increasing yields.

Papped snaffling in the jungle, a striking set of photos reveal the secret lives of Amazonian crop-raiding animals.

Accurate numbers are the cat’s pyjamas when it comes to solving the current cat population crisis. But measuring the feline population has been difficult, until now.

In the future of wildlife tracking, sea otters have their own social network.

Whereas we might carry cell phones or tablets, each sea otter has a small, solar-powered tag clipped carefully to one of its flippers. When the sea otters gather to nap at the ocean’s surface, their tags boot up, and check in with one another. Who else did the sea otter interact with today, where, and when?

In a study published today in the journal Nature, astronomers from MIT and Arizona State University report that a table-sized radio antenna in a remote region of western Australia has picked up faint signals of hydrogen gas from the primordial universe.