Around A.D. 79, Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia that concrete structures in harbors, exposed to the constant assault of the saltwater waves, become “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. While modern marine concrete structures crumble within decades, 2,000-year-old Roman piers and breakwaters endure to this day and are stronger now than when they were first constructed.

With preparations under way for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report, a key challenge for scientists remains to explain properly the 20- year slowdown in surface temperature rises and the failure of models to predict it.

The beleaguered honey bee is normally championed for its vital powers of pollination but a new study shows that we could soon be thanking them for inspiring more accurate color imaging in digital photography.

Scientists reveal the first detection of a molecule from Enceladus with a ground-based telescope, with implications for the search for life.

Today’s Madagascar is the land of lemurs, big-eyed creatures among the most huggable on the planet. But no one would want to hug the beast that once ruled this landscape.

New fossils reveal that 170 million years ago, a giant crocodile with serrated teeth like a Tyrannosaur Rex haunted Madagascar. Powerful jaws and sharp-edged teeth signal it was an uber-predator. Even the advanced meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods weren’t immune.

Non-partisan (and some sarcastic souls) have been asking the question: why doesn’t an honest scientist come forward to debunk the man-made greenhouse gas effect (you know, that BS that underpins climate alarm)? Well, believe it or not, he (and others) have.

If you’re one of those who feels it’s hotter this summer than last year, then you’re wrong. Probably it’s your mind that’s playing tricks on you because the heat and humidity are relatively the same this year compared to summer months past, forecasters said.

A venerable U.S./European oceanography satellite mission with NASA participation that has expanded our knowledge of global sea level change, ocean currents and climate phenomena like El Niño and La Niña will take on an additional role next month: improving maps of Earth’s sea floor.

I can understand when pop-scientists like Bill Nye spout scientific silliness. But complete nonsense coming from Stephen Hawking? Really?

In this video, Stephen Hawking claims that Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Accord could lead to the Earth being pushed past a tipping point, with Venus-like 250 deg. C temperatures and sulfuric acid rain.

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Climate experts promised us an ice-free Arctic in 2017, but with cold weather forecast over the Beaufort Sea in a week, and only 60 days left to the melt season, that might be rough.

Researchers call it one of the “last frontiers of human colonization”: very high elevations where the oxygen is sparse and the temperatures are icy. Now research out of the Andean highlands of South America suggests the humans who braved such conditions more than 7,000 years ago did so in an impressive manner—year-round.

LAST JULY 4TH, NASA’s Juno spacecraft slowed its record-breaking pace just enough to get caught in the pull of Jupiter‘s gravity. (The timing, according to NASA, was just a very patriotic coincidence.) Either way, Independence Day 2016 was the last time the Juno mission pumped its brakes. In the year since the 66-foot solar-powered craft has given scientists more and weirder Jupiter data than they ever thought possible.

Oi, AI – what do you think you’re looking at? Understanding why machine learning algorithms can be tricked into seeing things that aren’t there is becoming more important with the advent of things like driverless cars. Now we can glimpse inside the mind of a machine thanks to a test that reveals which parts of an image an AI is looking at.

The short polar melt season is almost half over and hasn’t actually begun yet.

Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of electricity generated than nuclear power plants, according to a Thursday report from the pro-nuclear group Environmental Progress (EP).

At one point in our history, the most impressive example of artificial intelligence was a computer that was really, really good at chess. Today, various pieces of software can do everything from a chat with us on Facebook Messenger to guiding the Mars rover Curiosity while its human engineers catch a nap. Now, a team of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University has developed an AI that can do something once thought impossible: read the human mind.