When do mountain landslides occur? Mountain ranges are formed with sharp and steep ridges due to tectonics. When do they become unstable? Some of the steepest mountain slopes in the world got that way because of the interplay between terrain uplift associated with plate tectonics and powerful streams cutting into hillsides, leading to erosion in…

The Permian–Triassic extinction event, sometimes known as the Great Dying, was an extinction event that occurred 250 million years ago, forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. It was the Earth’s most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species…

The cowboys and Indians are still there but there’s more to America’s 48th state than reliving the glory days of the Wild West. Home to seven different ecosystems, it is leading the way in conservation and green tourism. Ruth Styles went to find out more.

A new study has dispelled the myth that the public are divided about climate change because they don’t understand the science behind it. And the Yale research published today reveals that if Americans knew more basic science and were more proficient in technical reasoning it would still result in a gap between public and scientific…

April and May are fairly quiet times for Maine lobstermen and women, with the height of the summer season still a couple of months away. This year, strange things are happening on the ocean floor. Many of the lobsters have prematurely shed their hard shells, and lobstermen are hauling large numbers of soft-shelled lobsters much…

Canada has been sending letters to government scientists notifying them that their jobs will be eliminated or affected by the closure of the country’s marine pollution program — but at least one isn’t going without making some noise. “It’s perplexing that we face the loss of this program, given the 25,000 chemicals on the market…

Volcanoes tend to be unpredictable. It would be nice to know when and why an eruption may occur. A forensic approach that links changes deep below a volcano to signals at the surface is described by scientists from the University of Bristol in a paper published today in Science. The research could ultimately help to…

Plastic bags are perhaps the largest source of waste from our modern consumer culture. Stores give them out without question for all products big and small. Later, they can be found littered on the sides of roads and highways, hanging from tree branches, floating in rivers and clogging up our landfills. Now, a new plastic…

In the wake of a surge in tiger poaching, the state government of Maharashtra, India will no longer consider the shooting of wildlife poachers by forest rangers a crime, reports the Associated Press.

Curry is a generic term primarily employed in Western culture to denote a wide variety of dishes originating in Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai or other Southeast Asian cuisines. Their common feature is the incorporation of more or less complex combinations of spices / herbs, usually (but not invariably) including fresh or dried hot…