Discoveries

For more than a dozen years Ken Schmidt has been studying how animals eavesdrop on one another. The Texas Tech University professor said that one of his study subjects, the veery, changes its…

The scientific process is a long and complex trail that sometimes leads to dead-ends and conflicting results before clear conclusions can be drawn. Throw in a dose of climate change to muddy…

When the hemlock wooly adelgid, an invasive pest that sucks the life out of eastern hemlock trees, made its appearance in New England forests in the 1970s and 80s, many forestry experts…

Trees capture sunlight to produce chemical energy, and they may soon be teaming up with the sun to produce electricity, as well. A team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and…

For those concerned about climate change, renewable energy development is a nobrainer. And the breezy mountaintops of New England, far from human population centers, appear to be ideal…

Climate change is affecting a wide range of wildlife, from plants and bees to birds and trees. A new study led by biologists at Boston University adds butterflies to the list, finding that…

Soils throughout the world store more carbon, in the form of organic matter, than all of the vegetation and atmosphere combined. Microorganisms in the soil – bacteria, fungi, protozoa,…

A project to map the genes of spruce and pine trees has revealed that the genome of conifers has remained pretty much the same for more than 100 million years. This stability explains why…

The widespread decline of both wild and managed bee populations has raised alarms for more than a decade due to the importance of bees as pollinators of both agricultural crops and wild…

Inventories often report that forested lands across the U.S. and elsewhere are declining, but those studies simply look at the total deforested area. A new analysis of forests in the lower 48…

When a stand of trees is blown down in a storm, the typical practice is to salvage as many saleable trees as possible. But a 20- year study in the Harvard Forest found that if you are just…

A common species of moss (Ceratodon purpureus) that lives in weedy and forested habitats has been found to use an unusual strategy to reproduce: it produces a chemical scent to recruit tiny…

Skeletal tissues of living animals are constantly being renewed and replaced as wear and tear creates stresses and microfractures. In order to know how much bone needs replacing, the skeleton…

A new study led by a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that there are early indications that soils are recovering – at least in red spruce forests – from the…

American elms were once a favorite tree in urban landscapes across America, prized for their elegant shape. When Dutch elm disease found its way to the United States in the 1930s, it slowly…

Researchers from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are attaching high-speed cameras to pigeons to gain insight into how the birds navigate through dense forests…

A new study of eastern red-spotted newts, by a biologist at Bennington College in Vermont, suggests that these amphibians are able to adapt to dramatically different aquatic conditions.…

Those interested in observing the night sky are often frustrated by the glow of population centers and street lights that makes it difficult to see all but the brightest stars. But stargazers…

Acid rain has long been known to acidify the calcium-poor soils in parts of the Northeast, resulting in declines in sugar maple and other important tree species. New research by ecologists at…

When it rains, the cupped leaf of the pitcher plant becomes so slick that ants, spiders, and other prey attracted to its sweet aroma slide into the plant, where they drown and are dissolved…