Humor has helped this professor connect with students and colleagues—and remain resilient during hard times

Glacier melt sustained water discharge from South America’s mountain basins during a recent severe drought, but summer runoff from glaciers could drop by 48% in future megadroughts, worsening water sc...

Aeolian dust deposition can deliver nutrients that fuel primary production in remote ocean regions. This Review considers how dust sources and nutrient composition, in addition to dust flux, have pote...

A quarter of a century after its publication, the biodiversity hotspot concept remains one of the most cited and influential frameworks in conservation science. But its real-world impact is poorly doc...

Rare earth elements (REEs) are critical metals for clean energy and high-tech applications, yet their supply faces environmental and geopolitical challenges. Phytomining, a green strategy using hyperaccumulator plants to extract metals from soil, offers potential for sustainable REE supply but remains underexplored. Here, we report the discovery of naturally formed nanoscale monazite in the fern Blechnum orientale, a REE hyperaccumulator plant. These REE minerals crystallize within extracellular tissues under ambient conditions, forming dendritic nanocrystals through biologically induced mineralization coupled with a non-equilibrium self-organization process. This represents the novel discovery of REE mineral crystals formed in living plants through a phytomineralization (i.e., plant-mediated mineralization) process. Our findings uncover a previously unrecognized, plant-mediated pathway for critical mineral formation in a supergene environment. This discovery not only sheds light on REE enrichment and sequestration during chemical and biological weathering but also opens new possibilities for the direct recovery of functional REE materials. This work substantiates the feasibility of phytomining and introduces an innovative, plant-based approach for sustainable REE resource development.

This global meta-analysis of freshwater stressor–response relationships reveals that the biodiversity loss of five riverine organism groups reflects elevated salinity, oxygen depletion and fine sedime...

Convective erosion and lateral transport of metasomatized continental keels may generate enriched mantle geochemical domains sampled by oceanic volcanism, according to a geodynamic modelling study.

Using population and ecological genomic approaches, the authors demonstrate the potential for interspecific introgression—the transfer of genetic material following hybridization—to reduce climate cha...

Decision by international court of justice hailed as a gamechanger for climate justice and accountability

After it was found most offsets did not represent real carbon reductions, the money dried up. But successful schemes such as Kasigau in Kenya now face a stark future

Climate change will decrease Arctic Sea ice and increase light, but effects on polar ecosystems remain unclear. Here, the authors predict that warming waters and prey loss will threaten cold-water fis...

High near-surface nitrogen-fixation rates that promoted the recent growth of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt were tied to greater upwelling of phosphorus from the equatorial Atlantic, according to c...

Low carbon dioxide levels during the last glacial period enhanced photorespiration in trees across North America, indicating a decline in land plant productivity, according to measurements of clumped ...

Request PDF | On Sep 26, 2025, Ana Cristina Vasquez and others published Seas the Opportunity: Events for Early Career Researchers at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026 in Glasgow | Find, read and cite a...

The origin of precipitation from oceanic or terrestrial moisture sources influences the stability of agricultural rainwater supply. Nearly half of global maize and wheat-growing regions receive a subs...

Researchers are raising concerns about the creation of a large-scale open-pit copper-molybdenum mine in Chile’s Valparaíso region, which they say will destroy the habitat of the recently recorded popu...

RIYADH: In the Neom Nature Reserve a team of dedicated Saudi Arabia conservationists are steadily redefining the future of biodiversity and ecological restoration in the Kingdom. These experts are saf...

Graphite is a vital component of lithium-ion batteries, but it is challenged by supply-chain vulnerabilities and sustainability issues. This Perspective explores innovative synthesis and recycling met...

Rare and extreme climate events have increasingly occurred in the Arctic since ~2000. This Review outlines the observed and projected changes in atmospheric, oceanic and cryospheric extremes and expla...

Analysis shows that Latin American researchers and women published less on fossil mammals from Latin America than Global North researchers and male counterparts. Papers with more Latin American author...

npj Climate and Atmospheric Science - Unequal spatio-temporal distribution of population-weighted pollution extremes through deep learning