SCIENCE

Bill Gates is emphatic: "I don't plant trees," he declared recently, wading into a debate about whether mass tree planting is really much use in fighting climate change.

Growing geopolitical fragmentation since the invasion of Ukraine has hit commodity markets, threatening to slow the transition to renewable energy as the world looks to combat climate change, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday.

The death toll at the government-run hospital in the Indian state of Maharashtra caused a massive uproar, with politicians demanding a full investigation.

The president of the upcoming COP28 climate talks told an Abu Dhabi oil conference on Monday that the fossil fuel industry would play an essential role in addressing the climate crisis.

Four environmental groups have taken legal action against French giant TotalEnergies on claims of "climaticide" over a controversial oil project in Tanzania and Uganda, their lawyers said Monday.

European lawmakers will on Monday grill former Dutch foreign minister Wopke Hoekstra on his bid for a top European Union climate post, in the face of criticism from green activists over his past ties to the oil industry.

Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Kariko's obsession with researching a substance called mRNA to fight disease once cost her a faculty position at a prestigious US university, which dismissed the idea as a dead end.

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines.

More than 1,000 people in Bangladesh have died of dengue fever since the start of the year, official figures showed, in the country's worst recorded outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease.

Narcolepsy, cancer or mRNA vaccine research could win the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday when a week of announcements kick off, but experts see no clear frontrunner for the Peace Prize.

Eight years after warning in a landmark thesis of the devastation of man-made climate change, Pope Francis is publishing an update Wednesday to take stock and offer ideas for action.

When scientists started pouring over data to assess Canada's fire season this year, they struggled to find the right superlatives.

When Indian entrepreneur Awais Ahmed founded his satellite startup in Bangalore in 2019, his country was still a year away from opening the space industry to the private sector.

The UK's Conservative Party begins its annual conference Sunday, bidding to kickstart a resurgence before a general election expected next year that it is currently on track to lose.

The Indonesian stadium where 135 people died last year in one of football's worst tragedies lies empty but intact, despite government pledges to demolish it and rebuild a safer site.

Austria, France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland announced their hottest Septembers on record on Friday, in a year expected to be the warmest in human history as climate change accelerates.

President Joe Biden's administration on Friday announced it would auction three new oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering a furious reaction from environmental groups who said the move would accelerate climate change.

Europe must invest more quickly and massively in its energy transition if it wants to remain a global industrial power, top policymakers warned on Friday.

The US government has begun to inform workers of an impending shutdown that could see millions of federal employees and military personnel sent home or working without pay, unless Congress reaches a last-ditch deal.

With a clean energy transition hungry for more minerals, representatives from dozens of countries and industry met in Paris on Thursday looking to shore up deliveries against supply chain snarls and geopolitical tensions.

Vietnam jailed a leading climate activist for three years for tax evasion Thursday, a sentence her family condemned as "unfair", as the communist state ramps up a crackdown on environmentalists.

A Vietnamese court on Thursday jailed a leading climate activist for tax evasion, the latest environmentalist put behind bars by the communist government.

US aviation regulators said Wednesday that Blue Origin must complete "21 corrective actions" before it can resume launches, closing a probe into an uncrewed crash last year that set back Jeff Bezos's space company.

Three decades ago, Brazilian researchers began studying a curious side effect from banana spider bites: the toxin left victims with priapism, a painful and persistent erection.

Next week's Nobel Prize announcements will celebrate a string of groundbreaking achievements, but with conflicts raging around the globe, experts solicited about possible Peace Prize winners are scratching their heads.

No matter the distance or the weather, Jane Christensen was determined to see the giant pandas before they left Washington.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Wednesday began hearing a case brought by six Portuguese youths against 32 nations for not doing enough to stop global warming, the latest bid to secure climate justice through the courts.

French oil and gas major TotalEnergies said Wednesday that it would boost fossil fuel production over the next five years, a reversal after years of reducing output.

The UN called for rapid decarbonization of the shipping industry on Wednesday, warning that the price tag could top $100 billion a year as the sector's emissions continue to swell.