Energy & Nature

Energy & the Wild

Where engineering meets nature, the clever, low-tech fixes that let clean power and wildlife share the same ground.

A small rufous-brown rusty bush lark perched on a bare branch in dry Sahel savanna scrubland

Energy & the Wild

A rusty bush lark, unseen for 94 years, has turned up alive in the Sahel of Chad

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A humpback whale breaching out of the open ocean with spray flying, its long flippers spread wide

Energy & the Wild

A humpback whale swam farther than any other on record, from Australia toward Brazil

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A bumblebee rolling a small ball beneath an artificial blue flower in a laboratory problem-solving experiment

Energy & the Wild

A bumblebee just solved a puzzle scientists built for big-brained animals, with no training at all

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A close-up of a tube-nosed bat with short tube-shaped nostrils sticking out from its face

Energy & the Wild

Scientists just named six new tube-nosed bats that were hiding in the Philippines all along

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A large group of Antarctic penguins at their breeding colony on rock and snow

Energy & the Wild

Antarctic penguins are rewriting their calendar faster than any animal with a backbone ever recorded

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A brown fanged frog on a wet rock beside a forest stream, small fang-like projections in its mouth

Energy & the Wild

A frog science has known for nearly two centuries just turned out to be a whole cluster of hidden species

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A diver tending rows of young corals on a coral restoration nursery frame in clear blue water

Energy & the Wild

Scientists are now breeding corals by the million and planting them on the reef, in a race against the heat

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A delicate glowing deep-sea jellyfish drifting in black water off Brazil

Energy & the Wild

A single expedition off Brazil found more than 30 new creatures in the ocean's dark middle, in a matter of days

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

A pale spiky spider on the underside of a leaf shaped to resemble a growth of fungus

Energy & the Wild

Scientists found a fungus-mimicking spider in the Amazon that copies the parasite which eats spiders alive

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 4, 2026

Bleached bare dead tree trunks of the coast's ghost forests standing in shallow marsh water under a grey sky

Energy & the Wild

Whole forests along the American coast are dying on their feet, turned to fields of bleached dead trees by salt water creeping inland

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The tall golden Kelso Dunes rising from the Mojave Desert floor under a clear blue sky, with distant mountains behind

Energy & the Wild

Slide down the right desert dune on a dry day and the whole mountain of sand hums a deep note you can feel through your feet

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

The Animas River in Colorado running bright mustard orange with toxic mine water after the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, green banks alongside

Energy & the Wild

A team sent to stop an old mine from leaking accidentally blew it open, and three million gallons of orange poison poured into a Western river

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

An aerial view of the shrinking Great Salt Lake in Utah, pale exposed lakebed and receding shoreline around bright saline water

Energy & the Wild

A great inland sea is disappearing next to a major city, and the lakebed it leaves behind is laced with arsenic that can blow back over two million people

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A shaft of sunlight falling through the glowing orange sandstone walls of Antelope Canyon, a narrow slot canyon in Arizona

Energy & the Wild

The most photographed slot canyon on Earth is a beautiful death trap, and the very floods that carved its glowing walls once killed eleven people under a clear blue sky

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Devils Tower rising alone above the Wyoming plains, its steep sides scored into tall vertical rock columns under a blue sky

Energy & the Wild

A giant tower of stone columns rises alone out of the Wyoming plains, and almost everything famous about it, including its ominous name, rests on a mistake and an unsolved mystery

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Horsetail Fall glowing bright orange like molten lava as the setting February sun lights it against the dark cliff of El Capitan in Yosemite

Energy & the Wild

For ninety years Yosemite created a glowing waterfall of fire every night by shoving burning embers off a cliff, and after it was banned, nature offered a real one in its place

By Bruno Teles · July 3, 2026

The restored Elwha River running clear through lush green temperate rainforest and mountains on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington

Energy & the Wild

For a century two dams strangled one of America's greatest salmon rivers, until the largest dam removal in the country's history tore them down and the fish came roaring back

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

A herd of Kaibab deer standing on a sparse, overgrazed high plateau of thin grass and scattered pines in Arizona at evening

Energy & the Wild

In the 1920s America shot every wolf and cougar to save the Kaibab deer, and the herd promptly exploded to 100,000 and then starved to death on its own ruined range

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 3, 2026

Floodwater from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 swallowing a Southern town, rooftops and trees rising from a brown inland sea

Energy & the Wild

In 1927 the Mississippi River smashed through its levees in 145 places, drowned an area the size of New England, and set in motion changes that reshaped American politics for a generation

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

Silver Asian carp leaping in a chaotic spray around a small motorboat on a Midwestern river

Energy & the Wild

A fish imported to clean American fish farms escaped, took over entire rivers, learned to hurl itself into passing boats, and is now held back from the Great Lakes only by a wall of electricity

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A towering black wall of dust from the 1935 Dust Bowl storm rolling over a small Great Plains farm town

Energy & the Wild

On a spring afternoon in 1935 a mountain of dust two miles tall rolled across the Great Plains, turned day to pitch black, and made people believe the world was ending

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

The New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 shaking a frontier settlement beside the Mississippi River as boats pitch on churning water

Energy & the Wild

In the winter of 1811 a string of colossal earthquakes tore through the middle of America, made the Mississippi River appear to run backwards, and rang church bells a thousand miles away

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A flock of green and yellow Carolina parakeet birds perched in a misty cypress swamp in the eastern United States

Energy & the Wild

America once had its own wild parrot, a gold-and-green bird that flocked in the millions across the eastern states, and within a few decades of the hat trade discovering it, every last one was gone

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

A dusky seaside sparrow perched on green cordgrass in a Florida salt marsh

Energy & the Wild

A tiny Florida songbird was quietly wiped out when the marshes beside the Kennedy Space Center were flooded and drained, and the very last one died in a pen at Walt Disney World

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A heath hen booming with inflated orange neck sacs on a grassy heath

Energy & the Wild

Americans fought to save the heath hen with one of the first wildlife refuges ever created, and still had to stand and watch as the whole species dwindled to a single bird named Booming Ben

By Bruno Teles · July 2, 2026

An American alligator resting in a dark southern swamp with its eyes and back above the still water

Energy & the Wild

Hunters nearly wiped the American alligator off the map for its leather, and then the same animal came roaring back so completely that there are now around five million of them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A large mottled brown northern snakehead fish with a long body and sharp teeth in shallow water

Energy & the Wild

A voracious air-breathing fish nicknamed the Frankenfish turned up in a Maryland pond in 2002, and no matter how much poison officials poured in, the northern snakehead kept coming back and spreading

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A 1940s banana plantation with workers carrying huge bunches of Gros Michel bananas

Energy & the Wild

The banana your grandparents ate was a different, tastier fruit that a fungus wiped out in the 1950s, and the fake banana flavor in candy is a ghost of that lost variety

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A guide with a lantern in a vast passage of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, the longest cave on Earth

Energy & the Wild

The longest cave on Earth runs for hundreds of miles under Kentucky, and much of what we know about Mammoth Cave was discovered by Stephen Bishop, an enslaved man who mapped its depths from memory

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An angler holding a huge Lahontan cutthroat trout at Pyramid Lake, Nevada

Energy & the Wild

A 60-pound trout that vanished from a Nevada lake was declared extinct for decades, until it turned up alive in a tiny desert creek and the Paiute brought the Lahontan cutthroat trout home

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The giant sequoia General Sherman, the largest tree on Earth, towering over tiny visitors in Sequoia National Park

Energy & the Wild

Firefighters wrapped the base of General Sherman, the largest tree on Earth, in aluminum foil in 2021 to save it from wildfire, because the giant sequoia that needs fire is now being killed by it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

A Southern landscape blanketed in kudzu, the vine that ate the South, draping trees and an old barn

Energy & the Wild

The US government paid Southern farmers to plant kudzu to save their soil, it became the vine that ate the South, and then scientists found the legend was far bigger than the plant

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

An ivory-billed woodpecker, the Lord God Bird, clinging to a tree in a Southern old-growth bottomland forest

Energy & the Wild

The ivory-billed woodpecker was declared gone in the 1940s, then a kayaker's 2005 sighting in an Arkansas swamp thrilled the world, and the US still cannot decide whether the Lord God Bird is truly extinct

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 2, 2026

The eerie tufa towers of Mono Lake, California rising from still water at sunrise with the Sierra Nevada behind

Energy & the Wild

A young biologist fell in love with the salt lake Los Angeles was quietly draining, and the fight David Gaines started to save California's Mono Lake was won six years after a snowstorm killed him

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A Greenland shark gliding slowly through the dark cold water of the Arctic Ocean

Energy & the Wild

A slow, nearly blind fish in the Arctic Ocean turned out to be the oldest animal with a backbone on Earth, and some Greenland sharks alive today were born before Isaac Newton

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Synchronous fireflies flashing in unison across a dark forest in the Great Smoky Mountains at night

Energy & the Wild

Scientists insisted no fireflies in the Americas could flash in unison, until a woman who grew up watching them in the Great Smoky Mountains proved the synchronous fireflies were real

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A soft-bodied velvet worm with many short stubby legs crawling on a damp mossy forest floor

Energy & the Wild

The velvet worm looks like a soft, harmless caterpillar with too many legs, but it hunts by firing two jets of slime that whip back and forth to net its prey

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

An Arctic tern with a black cap and red bill in flight against a bright sky over the sea

Energy & the Wild

Every year the Arctic tern flies from the top of the world to the bottom and back, the longest migration of any animal, chasing summer from pole to pole

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A spiny horned lizard with a crown of horns and sandy-brown skin on desert ground

Energy & the Wild

When a coyote gets too close, the horned lizard of the American desert does something almost unbelievable, it shoots a jet of its own foul blood straight from its eyes

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A small translucent green glass frog resting on a bright green leaf

Energy & the Wild

To turn itself nearly invisible while it sleeps, the glass frog performs a trick that should be deadly, it hides almost all of its red blood inside its own liver

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A tuatara, an olive-grey New Zealand reptile with a spiny crest, resting on a mossy rock

Energy & the Wild

The tuatara looks like an ordinary lizard, but it is really the last survivor of a reptile dynasty older than the dinosaurs, and it still wears a third eye on its head

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A white camellia-like flower with a golden center on a leafy branch, the flower of the Franklin tree

Energy & the Wild

The Franklin tree has not been seen growing wild since 1803, yet it still blooms in gardens around the world, because one colonial botanist carried its seeds home in time

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

An open Venus flytrap with vivid red inner lobes and spiky interlocking teeth

Energy & the Wild

The Venus flytrap has no brain, no nerves and no muscles, yet it can count the touches of an insect's legs and decide, in a fraction of a second, whether to snap shut

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A small iridescent blue butterfly resting on a dune flower, evoking the extinct Xerces blue butterfly

Energy & the Wild

A dazzling blue butterfly once lived only in the sand dunes of San Francisco, and the Xerces blue butterfly became the first insect in America that we know humans drove to extinction

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A Portuguese man o' war floating on the ocean surface with its translucent blue-and-pink gas float rising like a sail

Energy & the Wild

The Portuguese man o' war looks like a single drifting jellyfish, but it is really a colony of separate creatures, none of which could survive on its own

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A shiny black dung beetle rolling a large round ball of dung across dry savanna soil at dusk

Energy & the Wild

To roll its ball of dung away in a straight line, the humble dung beetle looks up at the night sky and steers by the light of the entire Milky Way

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A brown-and-white striped mimic octopus with long slender arms on an open sandy seabed in murky tropical water

Energy & the Wild

Most animals that mimic can only copy one thing, but the mimic octopus can impersonate a dozen different creatures, and it seems to pick which disguise to wear for each threat

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A pale translucent Antarctic icefish with a large mouth hovering near the dark seafloor in freezing water

Energy & the Wild

The Antarctic icefish is the only animal with a backbone that has no red blood at all, its veins run clear, and by every rule of biology it should not be alive

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A towering titan arum corpse flower in full bloom, a tall pale spadix rising from a huge frilled deep crimson spathe

Energy & the Wild

The corpse flower is one of the biggest and rarest blooms on Earth, and it survives by heating itself up and stinking like a rotting body to lure in the flies

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A slender Boquila vine winding up a mossy tree in a temperate rainforest, its leaves blending in with the host tree's foliage

Energy & the Wild

The Boquila vine of Chile can reshape its own leaves to copy almost any plant it climbs, matching size, colour and even veins, and no one is sure how it does it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A vivid yellow slime mold spreading its branching web of veins across a damp decaying log on a forest floor

Energy & the Wild

A slime mold has no brain, no nerves and is not even an animal, yet it can solve a maze and design a transport network better than teams of human engineers

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Aerial view of thousands of fairy circles forming a honeycomb pattern of bare patches across the reddish Namib Desert grassland

Energy & the Wild

Across the Namib Desert, thousands of bare circles dot the grass in an eerily perfect honeycomb, and scientists have argued for decades over what makes the fairy circles form

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

The open Sargasso Sea with mats of golden-brown floating sargassum seaweed drifting on deep blue Atlantic water

Energy & the Wild

For over 2,000 years nobody could work out where eels come from, until scientists traced them to one weed-choked patch of the Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A single tall Judean date palm growing in an arid desert landscape near a rocky cliff in warm golden light

Energy & the Wild

The Judean date palm had been extinct for centuries, until scientists coaxed a single 2,000-year-old seed from an ancient desert fortress back into a living, fruit-bearing tree

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Dragon blood trees with thick trunks and umbrella-shaped canopies scattered across a rocky plateau on Socotra under a dramatic sky

Energy & the Wild

The island of Socotra looks so alien that visitors swear they have left Earth, but its strangest inhabitants, the blood-red dragon trees, are quietly dying out

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A band of shaggy wild horses standing on the windswept grassy dunes of Sable Island with the grey Atlantic behind them

Energy & the Wild

For centuries people believed the wild horses of Sable Island swam ashore from shipwrecks, but the truth is stranger, they are the living survivors of an 18th century expulsion

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Extreme close-up of a periodical cicada with striking red eyes and orange-veined transparent wings clinging to a green twig

Energy & the Wild

Every 13 or 17 years billions of periodical cicadas claw out of the ground across America all at once, scream for a few frantic weeks, mate, and vanish again for a generation

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A Florida panther, a tawny cougar, walking alert through Everglades sawgrass and palmetto in golden morning light

Energy & the Wild

Down to fewer than 30 inbred cats with kinked tails and failing hearts, the Florida panther was saved from extinction by an audacious act of mixing in the genes of Texas cougars

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

An enormous male northern elephant seal with a drooping snout rearing up and roaring on a California beach with surf behind

Energy & the Wild

Hunters shot the northern elephant seal down to perhaps 20 survivors on a single Mexican island by 1892, and from that tiny remnant the giant has clawed back to more than 200,000

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A lone red wolf with tawny-red fur and large ears standing alert in a misty North Carolina pine forest at golden hour

Energy & the Wild

America declared the red wolf extinct in the wild in 1980, then brought it back to one North Carolina refuge, where new wild pups just proved the fight is not over

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

Extreme close-up of a northern giant hornet, the world's largest hornet, showing its orange head and powerful mandibles on a leaf

Energy & the Wild

America spent five years terrified of the two-inch murder hornet, then a handful of scientists glued radio trackers to the insects with dental floss and quietly wiped it off the continent

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · July 1, 2026

A Tachi Yokut man stands at the edge of the returned Tulare Lake at golden dusk, tule reeds along the flooded shore

Energy & the Wild

California spent a century draining Tulare Lake to grow cotton, then the storms of 2023 brought the vanished lake roaring back to drown the farms that killed it

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

A huge glass convention building lit up at night beside a lake with small birds flying near the bright windows, a setting for bird collisions

Energy & the Wild

Nearly 1,000 migrating birds died in a single night against one Chicago building's glass

By Bruno Teles · July 1, 2026

Old lattice wind turbines covering the golden hills of Altamont Pass with a golden eagle soaring overhead

Energy & the Wild

America's first big wind farm became a death trap for golden eagles, and one biologist spent years counting the bodies

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

The Laki eruption of 1783, a long fissure of fire fountains across a barren Icelandic plain under a smoke-choked sky

Energy & the Wild

The Icelandic eruption that poisoned the skies over Europe

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

Shelves of seed samples in the Vavilov seed bank in besieged Leningrad

Energy & the Wild

The scientists who starved to death surrounded by food

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

Wojtek the bear, a large brown bear standing among Polish soldiers in a WWII army camp

Energy & the Wild

The orphaned cub who became a soldier in the Polish army

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A thorny devil lizard covered in conical spines standing on red Australian desert sand

Energy & the Wild

Meet the spiky lizard that drinks rainwater through its skin

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A field of tall thin flat mounds built by magnetic termites all aligned the same way across a northern Australian plain

Energy & the Wild

These termites build flat mounds all facing the same way, as natural air conditioning

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A honey badger standing alert on dry African ground with its black body and grey-white back stripe

Energy & the Wild

It fights cobras, survives their venom, and one of them broke out of every cage it was given

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A Welwitschia plant in the Namib desert, a low mass of long frayed strap-like leaves on bare gravel

Energy & the Wild

This desert plant grows just two leaves and lives for over a thousand years

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A frigatebird soaring with huge angular black wings and a forked tail against a bright tropical sky

Energy & the Wild

This seabird flies for two months without landing, and would drown if it touched the sea

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A dense cluster of giant tube worms with red plumes around a deep-sea hydrothermal vent in the dark

Energy & the Wild

These deep-sea worms have no mouth and no gut, and they feed on the planet's own poison

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A tiny peacock spider with its iridescent rainbow abdominal fan raised in display

Energy & the Wild

This spider is smaller than a grain of rice, glows like a rainbow, and dances for its life

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A small mouse-like brown antechinus marsupial perched on a log in Australian bushland

Energy & the Wild

These tiny marsupials mate for hours on end until the stress literally kills every male

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A cuttlefish changing the color and pattern of its skin to blend into a coral reef

Energy & the Wild

It is colorblind, yet it is the greatest quick-change artist the ocean has ever produced

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A pale eel-like hagfish on the dark seafloor surrounded by clouds of white slime

Energy & the Wild

Bite this ancient fish and it drowns your gills in slime, then ties itself in a knot to escape

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A bowhead whale surfacing among Arctic sea ice, showing its huge bowed head

Energy & the Wild

Some of these Arctic whales were born before the lightbulb and are still alive today

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A pale eyeless olm cave salamander with feathery red external gills swimming in dark cave water

Energy & the Wild

People once thought it was a baby dragon, and it can go ten years without a meal

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A narwhal surfacing among Arctic sea ice with its long straight spiral tusk pointing forward

Energy & the Wild

Its horn was sold as a unicorn's for centuries, but it is really a tooth that can feel the ocean

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A southern cassowary with a glossy black body, bright blue and red neck and a tall casque, in rainforest

Energy & the Wild

It looks like a dinosaur, kicks like a weapon, and quietly plants an entire rainforest

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A dark deep-sea anglerfish with a glowing lure in front of its toothy mouth in black water

Energy & the Wild

It fishes with a living lantern, and its mate melts into its body forever

By Bruno Teles · June 30, 2026

A pangolin curled into a tight armoured ball of scales on a forest floor

Energy & the Wild

The pangolin's armour stops a lion, and that is exactly why poachers can carry it away

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A bright emerald-green leaf-shaped solar-powered sea slug resting on algae in shallow water

Energy & the Wild

This sea slug steals sunlight from algae and lives like a leaf for a year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 30, 2026

A huge coconut crab with thick armored claws gripping a coconut on a tropical island forest floor

Energy & the Wild

The biggest land crab on Earth climbs trees, cracks coconuts with a lion's grip, eats birds, and may have devoured Amelia Earhart

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A Guam brown tree snake coiled and climbing along electrical power lines on a utility pole in a tropical setting

Energy & the Wild

A single stowaway snake ate almost every bird on a Pacific island, then started knocking out the power, and there is still no way to get rid of it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A grey squirrel perched on the wires of an electrical substation transformer, a threat to the power grid

Energy & the Wild

Forget hackers: squirrels have knocked out the power grid more than 900 times, and once took down the NASDAQ

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A swarm of moon jellyfish clogging the steel cooling water intake screen of a coastal power plant

Energy & the Wild

A swarm of brainless jellyfish can shut down a billion-dollar nuclear reactor in hours, and warming seas are making it happen more often

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A large warty cane toad on red Australian soil, one of millions of invasive cane toads

Energy & the Wild

Australia released 102 toads in 1935 to save its sugar crop, they failed, and now 200 million poisonous descendants are conquering the country

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A cluster of hibernating bats on a cave ceiling, some showing the white fungus of white-nose syndrome

Energy & the Wild

A cold-loving fungus has killed millions of America's bats since 2006, and almost nobody noticed we were losing one of farming's most valuable workers

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A large Burmese python coiled in the sawgrass of the Florida Everglades

Energy & the Wild

Released pet snakes ate their way through 99% of the Everglades' mammals, and an army of hunters can barely dent them

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A close-up of a metallic blowfly, the kind targeted by screwworm eradication

Energy & the Wild

Scientists wiped a flesh-eating parasite off a continent not with poison but by breeding billions of flies and sterilising the males

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A vast murmuration of European starlings swirling against a dusk sky over North America

Energy & the Wild

One man released a few dozen starlings in Central Park in 1890, and today 200 million blanket North America, supposedly for the love of Shakespeare

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A Pyrenean ibex on a rocky ledge, the species at the centre of the Pyrenean ibex de-extinction

Energy & the Wild

Scientists cloned this extinct mountain goat back to life in 2003 and watched it die minutes later, the only animal ever to go extinct twice

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A herd of Pere David's deer, large marsh deer with backward-branching antlers, standing in wetland grass

Energy & the Wild

A Chinese deer went extinct at home and survived only because an English duke had quietly gathered the last few in his park, then it was shipped back a century later

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The world's largest solar farm on a high desert plateau, with sheep grazing between the rows of panels

Energy & the Wild

Inside the world's largest solar farm, where 20,000 sheep keep the grass down

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A large American bison bull standing on open Great Plains grassland under a wide sky

Energy & the Wild

Tens of millions of bison were shot down to barely a thousand in a single human lifetime, and the animal survives today only because a few unlikely people changed their minds

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A small black robin perched on a mossy branch on a windswept Chatham Island

Energy & the Wild

A whole bird species came down to five survivors and a single fertile female, and the fact that it exists at all today rests on that one bird, called Old Blue

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A quagga on African grassland, striped on the head and neck and fading to plain brown on the body

Energy & the Wild

A half-striped zebra was hunted into extinction and the last one died unnoticed in a zoo, and now South African breeders are conjuring it back from its own living cousins

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

The underwater steel legs of an offshore oil rig encrusted with mussels and anemones and surrounded by dense schools of fish

Energy & the Wild

Everyone assumed offshore oil rigs were marine dead zones, then a biologist dived under them and found some of the richest fish habitats on the planet

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

A freediver reaching toward a wild octopus in a sunlit kelp forest, the scene from My Octopus Teacher

Energy & the Wild

A burned-out filmmaker free-dived a freezing kelp forest every day for a year and built a friendship with a wild octopus, and the film of it won an Oscar

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

A husky sled dog team pulling a musher through a blizzard during the 1925 serum run, the world of Balto and Togo

Energy & the Wild

In 1925 a relay of sled dogs raced diphtheria serum 674 miles through Alaskan blizzards to save Nome, and the dog who did the least got the statue

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

Wisdom the albatross, a Laysan albatross with a leg band, sitting on her nest on a sandy Pacific island

Energy & the Wild

Wisdom the albatross is at least 74 years old, has flown three million miles, outlived the scientist who banded her in 1956, and is still raising chicks

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 29, 2026

Old Tom the killer whale slapping his tail beside a small wooden whaleboat in a calm Australian bay at dawn

Energy & the Wild

For decades a wild killer whale named Old Tom herded whales into an Australian bay for human hunters, who repaid him under a strange pact called the Law of the Tongue, until one broken promise ended it

By Bruno Teles · June 29, 2026

The loneliest whale swimming alone through deep blue open ocean with sunlight filtering down from the surface

Energy & the Wild

A single whale has crossed the Pacific for decades singing at a pitch no other whale answers, the loneliest whale on Earth, yet the scientists who know it best doubt it is lonely at all

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A silver and black striped archerfish near the water surface, mouth at the surface, in a sunlit mangrove pool

Energy & the Wild

The archerfish hunts by spitting a precise jet of water to knock insects off leaves above the surface, solving the bending of light that should make the shot impossible

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A close-up of a star-nosed mole showing the ring of twenty-two pink fleshy appendages around its nose, dark fur and tiny eyes

Energy & the Wild

The star-nosed mole is nearly blind, but a ring of twenty-two fleshy tentacles lets it feel out and eat a meal in a tenth of a second, the fastest forager known

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A platypus with its duck-like bill, dense brown fur and webbed feet swimming at the surface of a calm river

Energy & the Wild

The platypus lays eggs, carries venom in its heels and hunts with its eyes shut by feeling the faint electricity of its prey through a bill packed with forty thousand sensors

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A close-up of a bombardier beetle on a leaf, its abdomen tip raised, ready to fire its defensive spray

Energy & the Wild

The bombardier beetle brews two chemicals into an explosive reaction and fires a boiling, stinging spray from its abdomen in machine-gun pulses, aimed almost anywhere

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A superb lyrebird standing on the forest floor with its long elegant lyre-shaped tail feathers visible

Energy & the Wild

The superb lyrebird can imitate chainsaws, camera shutters and the calls of twenty other birds so perfectly that even the birds it copies cannot tell the difference

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A diving bell spider inside a silvery bubble of air attached to underwater plants in a freshwater pond

Energy & the Wild

The diving bell spider lives its entire life underwater, breathing from a bubble of air it spins into a silk bell that works like a gill

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A vividly colored peacock mantis shrimp with bright green, red and blue body and large eyes on a coral reef

Energy & the Wild

The peacock mantis shrimp throws the fastest punch in nature, so fast it boils the water into a flash of light briefly hotter than the surface of the sun

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Clusters of honey-colored Armillaria mushrooms on a forest floor, the only visible sign of the humongous fungus

Energy & the Wild

The largest living thing on Earth is not a whale or a tree but a humongous fungus quietly spreading under an Oregon forest for thousands of years, killing it from below

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A wild bottlenose dolphin surfacing near fishermen with cast nets in the lagoon at Laguna, Brazil

Energy & the Wild

The Laguna dolphins of southern Brazil have hunted alongside human fishermen for more than a century, herding fish to the nets and reading a partnership taught on both sides

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

The Tree of Tenere, a lone acacia standing in an empty expanse of Sahara desert sand under a vast sky

Energy & the Wild

The Tree of Tenere stood alone in the Sahara for 300 years, the only tree for 400 kilometres and a lifeline for caravans, until a truck driver somehow managed to hit it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A zombie ant fungus stalk growing from the head of a dead carpenter ant clamped to a leaf in a rainforest

Energy & the Wild

A zombie ant fungus marches carpenter ants to a precise leaf to bite down and die, and the strangest part is that it never even touches the brain it seems to control

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Iberian orcas surfacing close to a small sailboat in the Strait of Gibraltar

Energy & the Wild

A pod of critically endangered Iberian orcas has spent five years ramming the rudders off sailboats in the Strait of Gibraltar, and the likeliest reason is that they find it fun

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A North Atlantic right whale surfacing in cold grey water beside floating lobster trap buoys

Energy & the Wild

A Cape Cod lobsterman pulled the rope out of the water to help save the 70 mothers left of the North Atlantic right whale, the rarest great whale in the Atlantic

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A male bowerbird at its decorated stick bower on the forest floor, the structure it builds to court mates

Energy & the Wild

A bird builds a decorated stage, sorts its treasures by colour, and arranges them to create an optical illusion, all to impress a mate who judges the artistry

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A close-up of a common vampire bat roosting, an animal that shares blood with hungry roostmates

Energy & the Wild

The vampire bat, a creature of horror films, turns out to be one of the most generous mammals alive, giving starving neighbours a life-saving meal and remembering who pays it back

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A prairie dog standing upright at its burrow with mouth open, giving the alarm call at the heart of prairie dog language

Energy & the Wild

A much-poisoned rodent of the American plains may have the most detailed animal language ever decoded, able to say not just danger but a tall human in a yellow shirt

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A honeybee on honeycomb surrounded by other bees, performing the waggle dance to share directions

Energy & the Wild

A honeybee tells its hivemates the exact compass bearing and distance to flowers by dancing in the dark, and one man spent 50 years learning to read it

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A small brown honeyguide bird calling from a branch with an African honey hunter in the savanna behind

Energy & the Wild

A wild African bird and a honey hunter call back and forth to each other, then team up to raid a beehive, a partnership no one taught either of them

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A live salmon flying out of the end of a salmon cannon tube above a river beside a concrete dam

Energy & the Wild

To get salmon over the dams that block them, engineers fire the live fish through a misted tube at 22 mph, using a machine first built to move apples

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A bar-tailed godwit flying alone high over an empty grey ocean, the small shorebird that crosses the Pacific nonstop

Energy & the Wild

A four-month-old bar-tailed godwit flew 13,556 km across the Pacific without once stopping to eat, drink or sleep

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

Millions of monarch butterflies blanketing the fir trees of a Mexican forest where they overwinter

Energy & the Wild

For 38 years nobody knew where North America's monarch butterflies vanished each winter, and the answer is that no single butterfly even knows the way

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, with dark stripes across its back, standing in the Tasmanian bush

Energy & the Wild

The last Tasmanian tiger died in 1936, and a 10-billion-dollar company now says it can bring the species back, sort of

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

A small vaquita porpoise with dark eye rings surfacing in the blue-green Gulf of California

Energy & the Wild

Fewer than ten vaquitas are left on Earth, and they are dying not for themselves but for the black-market bladder of another fish

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

A wooden crate descending under a parachute over an Idaho mountain meadow during the 1948 beaver drop

Energy & the Wild

In 1948 Idaho dropped 76 beavers out of planes by parachute to rebuild its wetlands, and 75 of them landed and got straight to work

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Magawa, an African giant pouched rat in a harness, sniffing the red earth of a Cambodian field

Energy & the Wild

Magawa was a rat too light to set off a landmine, and he cleared 141,000 square metres of Cambodia before winning a medal for bravery

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 28, 2026

One of Colombia's cocaine hippos half-submerged in a green tropical river at dusk

Energy & the Wild

Pablo Escobar kept four hippos in his private zoo, and 30 years after his death they have become a 200-strong invasion Colombia cannot stop

By Bruno Teles · June 28, 2026

Manatees huddled together in the warm water discharge of a power plant on a cold winter morning

Energy & the Wild

Florida's endangered manatees survive winter only by huddling in a power plant's warm wastewater, and the clean-energy switch could leave them out in the cold

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 27, 2026

The Baker underwater nuclear test explosion at Bikini Atoll in 1946, an enormous white column of water and radioactive spray rising from the Pacific lagoon with navy warships visible below in the Marshall Islands

Wild

The US detonated 23 nuclear bombs on Bikini Atoll, told its 167 residents to leave for a few years, and 70 years later the islanders are still waiting to go home

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

Christmas Island red crabs carpeting a jungle road during their annual migration to the sea

Wild

Forty million Christmas Island red crabs close the island's roads every November to reach the sea, and when yellow crazy ants began killing them by the million, rangers spent a decade saving them with a parasitoid wasp

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

Chico Mendes, Amazon rubber tapper and conservationist who organized resistance to deforestation, standing among tall rainforest trees in Xapuri, Acre, Brazil, in the late 1980s

Wild

A cattle rancher shot Chico Mendes dead on his porch in Brazil's Amazon in 1988, and the murder backfired so completely that 35 million acres the killers wanted to clear are still forest today

By Bruno Teles · June 26, 2026

An electric eel in dark Amazon River water showing its elongated brown body with the electric organ running nearly the full length of its torso

Wild

Alexander von Humboldt watched electric eels leap from the water onto horses in Venezuela in 1800, biologists doubted the account for generations, and a Vanderbilt neuroscientist finally filmed it in his lab in 2016

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 26, 2026

Rusted fishing boats stranded in sandy desert near Moynaq Uzbekistan where the Aral Sea once reached, skeletal hulls in dust under pale blue sky

Wild

Moscow planned to turn the Kazakh steppe into a cotton empire, drained the world's fourth-largest lake in forty years and left an entire fishing fleet rusting in the desert

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A large adult female African elephant without tusks standing in golden savanna grassland in Mozambique, warm afternoon golden hour light, other elephants in background

Wild

A civil war that killed 90% of Gorongosa's elephants for their ivory forced evolution in real time, and the daughters of survivors are now being born without tusks at twice the normal rate

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A kakapo parrot with bright apple-green feathers and a large round facial disc looking directly at the camera, perched on a mossy branch in a New Zealand fern forest

Wild

New Zealand's heaviest parrot fell to 51 survivors in 1995, and the conservation team that saved it gave every bird a name, a radio transmitter, and an individual recovery plan

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A grey wolf standing alert in a misty European pine forest at dawn, thick fur, amber eyes, frost on the ground, old pine trees behind

Wild

Wolves vanished from western Europe for a century, then in 2012 they walked back from Germany without anyone's help and are now breeding in France, Belgium and the Netherlands

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A large silver European eel moving through shallow clear river water over mossy green stones in a European river, its long body catching the light

Wild

The European eel fed empires for 2,000 years and now 95% is gone from every river on the continent, and science still has never seen one breed

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A northern spotted owl perched on a moss-covered branch in an ancient Pacific Northwest old-growth forest, large dark eyes facing the camera

Wild

Scientists fought for three decades to save the northern spotted owl from chainsaws, then a bigger, bolder cousin arrived from the East and did what the loggers never could

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A huge haystack-like grass nest draped over the branches of a lone camelthorn tree in the golden Kalahari desert under a clear blue sky

Wild

These tiny birds build the largest nests on Earth, and the weight can bring a whole tree down

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A tall Wollemi pine with dark green fern-like foliage and knobbly brown bark standing in a misty sandstone canyon

Wild

A tree thought extinct for the age of dinosaurs was found alive in a secret canyon, and firefighters risked a hidden mission to save it

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A clear river flowing over a riverbed blazing bright red and pink with patches of yellow and green, surrounded by Colombian jungle

Wild

For a few months each year a Colombian river erupts into five colours, and a war kept the world from seeing it for decades

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A close-up of a colourful pistol shrimp on the seabed with one enormous oversized claw held ready

Wild

A shrimp the size of your finger snaps a claw so fast it fires a bubble hotter than the surface of the sun

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A pink wrinkled hairless naked mole-rat with large protruding front teeth and tiny eyes in an earthy burrow under soft light

Wild

The naked mole-rat, a wrinkled near-blind rodent that lives like an ant, almost never gets cancer and barely seems to age

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A vast flock of passenger pigeons filling the sky above a 19th century North American forest, the mass of birds darkening the sky from horizon to horizon, passenger pigeon extinction

Wild

At the start of the nineteenth century there were five billion passenger pigeons in North America, and when the last one died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914 it had happened within a single human lifetime

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A small iridescent neon-blue Devils Hole pupfish hovering over a pale limestone shelf in clear sunlit turquoise water

Wild

The world's rarest fish survives in one desert pool the size of two dining tables, and saving the Devils Hole pupfish rewrote American water law

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A herd of six Arabian oryx walking in single file across a wide flat sandy Arabian desert at golden hour, white coats glowing warm, long straight horns silhouetted

Wild

Hunters wiped the Arabian oryx from its last wild territory in 1972, nine survivors sat in a Phoenix zoo, and those nine became the founders of a living species

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A mountain gorilla mother sitting in lush green Virunga forest vegetation with her young infant clinging to her chest, soft morning light filtering through the rainforest canopy

Wild

Mountain gorillas fell to 250 animals in 1981, the woman who gave her life defending them was murdered four years later, and the species still crossed one thousand

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A woman scuba diver in vintage gear swimming calmly alongside a large reef shark in clear blue water

Wild

When the world saw sharks only as mindless monsters, a young woman dived in among them, proved they were intelligent, and became famous as the Shark Lady

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Welsh ornithologist Carl Jones holding a spotted Mauritius kestrel on his gloved hand in front of native forest in Mauritius

Wild

The island of the dodo once had just four Mauritius kestrels left in the wild, and a Welsh ornithologist spent 45 years turning them into 350

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A small brown wood frog frozen and frosted among icy leaf litter in a winter forest, ice crystals on its skin

Wild

Every winter a small North American frog lets itself freeze almost solid, its heart stops for weeks, and then in spring it simply thaws out and hops away as if nothing happened

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Thousands of bright red crabs swarming across a forest road with a crab bridge arching overhead during the red crab migration

Wild

Once a year tens of millions of red crabs pour out of the forest on a remote Australian island and march to the sea, so engineers built them bridges and tunnels over the roads

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

The tree lobster, a large glossy black Lord Howe Island stick insect, on a green branch

Wild

A giant insect the size of a hand was wiped out by rats and thought extinct for 80 years, until climbers found a few survivors on a single bush on a sea cliff

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A great humpback whale swimming through sunlit blue ocean surrounded by a drifting cloud of plankton

Wild

Whaling stripped the oceans of millions of great whales, and scientists now realise we also tore out one of the planet's most powerful natural machines for pulling carbon from the sky

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

Rural Kenyan women planting tree seedlings together on a green hillside in the Green Belt Movement

Wild

A Kenyan scientist told rural women the cure for their empty wells and barren soil was to plant trees, and Wangari Maathai's idea grew into a movement that won a Nobel Peace Prize

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A living coelacanth, a steel-blue prehistoric fish, in the dark deep sea

Wild

A fish that science was sure had died out with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was hauled out of the sea alive in 1938, and a young museum curator saved it

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

The blue fire glowing at night in the crater of Kawah Ijen volcano in Java

Wild

At a volcano in Java called Kawah Ijen, tourists come to watch an eerie blue fire burn at night while miners haul 90 kilo loads of raw sulfur out of the crater

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

Game rangers in a small boat guiding a swimming antelope across a flooded African valley during Operation Noah

Wild

When a new dam began drowning the Zambezi valley, a game ranger took to the water in small boats and spent six years ferrying thousands of trapped animals to safety

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A wild Przewalski's horse standing in front of an abandoned overgrown Soviet building in the Chernobyl exclusion zone

Energy & Nature

Forty years after the world's worst nuclear disaster emptied the land of people, the Chernobyl exclusion zone has filled up with wolves, bears and wild horses, as if nature hit a reset button

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

An Indian vulture, a white-rumped scavenger with a bald grey head, perched on a bare branch against a hazy sky

Energy & Nature

Indian vultures were everywhere until a cheap cattle painkiller wiped out almost all 50 million of them, and losing the silent clean-up crew was tied to half a million human deaths

By Bruno Teles · June 25, 2026

A misty forest with a glowing fungal network linking tree roots underground

Energy & Nature

One scientist showed that trees secretly feed and warn each other through an underground fungal network, and now others say the evidence for this wood wide web is far thinner than the beautiful story

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A wild jaguar walking through golden marshland at dawn in Argentina's Iberá wetlands

Energy & Nature

A couple who got rich at The North Face and Patagonia gave their wild land away, and a jaguar reintroduction has big cats hunting Argentina's Iberá again after 70 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A kakapo, the world's only flightless parrot, a plump moss-green bird with an owl-like face, on a mossy forest floor at night in New Zealand

Energy & Nature

New Zealand almost lost its kakapo when only 51 were left in 1995, now the flightless parrot has hatched over 100 chicks in its biggest breeding season on record

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A Karuk tribal fire practitioner holding a drip torch in a Northern California forest, smoke drifting through ponderosa pines in warm afternoon light

Energy & Nature

A hundred years ago California banned indigenous burning and the forests turned to tinderboxes, and now the Karuk and Yurok are the ones being asked to bring fire back

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

Dense green Costa Rican rainforest covering steep misty mountains, with mist rising between the trees in the morning light

Energy & Nature

Costa Rica chopped down most of its forest to raise cattle, then did something almost no country has managed and paid its farmers to grow the jungle back until it covered half the country again

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

An African smallholder farmer standing at the edge of his maize field beside a beehive fence of wooden hives strung on wires, with a wild elephant in the savannah behind him at golden hour

Energy & Nature

African farmers kept losing whole harvests to elephants overnight, until a biologist found the six-tonne giants flee from honey bees and ringed the fields with beehive fences

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A small brilliant blue Spix's macaw perched on a dry twisted branch in the sparse Caatinga scrubland of northeast Brazil at golden afternoon light

Energy & Nature

The blue macaw that inspired Rio went extinct in the wild in 2000, made it back with the first wild chicks in 24 years, then a bureaucratic fight and a lethal virus arrived

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribal elder standing on the narrow road of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, with open Gulf water visible on both sides and weathered houses behind him

Energy & Nature

The tribe that came to this Louisiana island to escape forced removal in the 1830s is being moved again, and the $48 million the US gave them to relocate built homes that leak

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

White storks on a large stick nest atop a gnarled old oak above wild scrubby English meadow at golden light

Energy & Nature

A couple gave up on their failing Sussex farm and let it run wild, and twenty years on white storks are nesting over England for the first time in 600 years

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A scientist in a greenhouse holding a small chestnut seedling at eye level, examining it in warm afternoon light

Energy & Nature

Bill Powell spent 33 years engineering a modified chestnut to rescue a species killed across 3.5 billion trees and died the month his most powerful ally walked away

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A California condor with its huge dark wingspan soaring above ancient redwood forest canopy in Northern California

Energy & Nature

Critics said capturing every last California condor in 1987 was a death sentence; the bird named At Last I Fly proved them wrong by nesting on Yurok land in 2026

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

Tall mesh fog nets on a misty arid mountain ridge in Morocco catching water from the cloud

Energy & Nature

In one of the driest corners of Morocco, where women once walked four hours a day for water, a charity hung giant nets on a mountain to catch drinking water straight out of the fog

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A cheetah standing alert in tall dry golden grassland in India scanning the horizon

Energy & Nature

India lost its last cheetahs in the 1950s, so it flew big cats in from Africa, and for the first time in about 75 years cheetah cubs are being born on Indian soil

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 25, 2026

A green sponge city park with ponds and wetlands soaking up rainwater in front of a city skyline

Energy & Nature

A boy who nearly drowned in a flooded creek grew up to teach China's cities to drink the rain instead of fighting it, then died chasing that idea across the world

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A wide misty river winding through steep green native forest hills in New Zealand at dawn

Energy & Nature

After a 140-year fight, a Māori people in New Zealand won their river the legal rights of a human being, and now two guardians speak in court as the river itself

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A kayak paddle dipping into dark night water that glows electric blue with bioluminescence

Energy & Nature

The brightest bioluminescent bay on Earth went dark after Hurricane Maria, and Vieques feared its blue glow was gone for good, until the water lit up again brighter than before

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A small fishing boat back on the blue water of the restored North Aral Sea with a low desert shoreline behind it

Energy & Nature

Soviet planners drained the world's fourth-largest lake until ships sat rusting in the desert, but a single dam has brought the North Aral Sea and its fishermen back from the dead

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A humpback whale lunging out of the water with its mouth open among a flock of seabirds, with the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty in the hazy background

Energy & Nature

A century after they vanished, humpback whales are feeding again within sight of the Statue of Liberty, up from three sightings off New York in 2011 to more than 300 a year

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A lone man standing inside a dense green forest he planted on a former river sandbar beside the wide Brahmaputra in Assam

Energy & Nature

Jadav Payeng spent 40 years turning a bare sandbar in Assam into a jungle of tigers and rhinos, then fire tore through 5,000 saplings of his newest forest days after Christmas

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A single saiga antelope with its distinctive large drooping trunk-like nose and pale tan fur standing on the open grassy steppe of Kazakhstan

Energy & Nature

A strange ice-age antelope that once collapsed to 48,000 animals, and lost 200,000 more in a single three-week die-off, has roared back to nearly 3 million and off the critically endangered list

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A wild Iberian lynx with tufted ears and spotted tawny fur standing alert in sunlit Mediterranean scrubland in southern Spain

Energy & Nature

The Iberian lynx was the world's most endangered cat, down to about 62 adults two decades ago, and after a 20-year rescue it has bounced back past 2,000 and off the endangered list

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

An aerial view of a green belt of young trees cutting across dry semi-desert land in the African Sahel

Energy & Nature

To hold back the Sahara, Africa is growing a wall of trees 8,000 kilometres long across 11 countries, and the strange twist is that it only started working once people stopped trying to build a literal wall

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A sea otter floating on its back at the surface of calm blue ocean water among strands of golden kelp

Energy & Nature

Sea otters were hunted almost to extinction, and bringing them back turned out to be the key to saving entire underwater forests, because without them sea urchins eat the kelp until nothing is left

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A colossal single coral colony the size of a building rising from the seafloor in clear blue water with a tiny scuba diver beside it

Energy & Nature

Divers in the Solomon Islands thought they had found a shipwreck, but it was the largest coral on Earth, a single 300-year-old creature of nearly a billion polyps so big it can be seen from space

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

A tall conical tower of ice in a barren Himalayan desert valley with snow-capped peaks behind

Energy & Nature

In a frozen Himalayan desert where the glaciers are melting too early to water the crops, one engineer stopped waiting and started building his own, growing 30 metre towers of ice that store winter water until spring

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A wide river running free through a green forested canyon at sunrise where a dam once stood

Energy & Nature

Engineers pulled four dams off the Klamath River in the largest dam removal in US history, and within ten days salmon were swimming into habitat that had been blocked to them for over a century

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 24, 2026

Aerial view of a vast vegetated wildlife crossing planted to look like a hill spanning ten lanes of the 101 Freeway near Los Angeles

Energy & Nature

Los Angeles is finishing the world's largest wildlife crossing, a 114 million dollar bridge disguised as a hillside over 10 lanes of freeway, built so the mountain lions the road trapped and inbred can finally cross

By Bruno Teles · June 24, 2026

A coastal wind turbine with one blade painted black

Energy & Nature

Painting just one of a wind turbine's three blades black cut bird collision deaths by an average of 71.9 percent in a field experiment at a Norwegian wind farm

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

Solar panels mounted over a wide irrigation canal in California

Energy & Nature

California just switched on the first US solar panels built over irrigation canals, and covering all 4,000 miles could save 63 billion gallons of water a year

By Bruno Teles · June 23, 2026

A chain of stone oyster-reef breakwaters off a residential coast

Energy & Nature

New York just finished a 111 million dollar living seawall off Staten Island, a 2,400 foot chain of eight stone reefs built to grow oysters and break storm waves

By Maria Heloisa Barbosa Borges · June 23, 2026