By Marlene Cimons Spring has been coming earlier, prompting plants to sprout and turn green sooner than ever before. This is because carbon pollution has been heating up the planet, making winters shorter and springs warmer. Until now, scientists believed this premature blooming might not be all bad, as thriving plants might help slow climate change by…
By Marlene Cimons An individual tree has roots and, of course, it doesn’t move. But trees, as a species, do move over time. They migrate in response to environmental challenges, especially climate change. Surprisingly, they don’t all go to the Poles, where it is cooler. As it turns out, more of them head west, where…
Are answers to diseases hidden in the leaves and bark of trees such as maples? Researchers are finding out. (Photograph: University of Rhode Island) In the 1992 film Medicine Man, biochemist Robert Campbell, played by actor Sean Connery, searches for new drugs in the Amazon’s vast rainforests. There Campbell finds a cure for cancer not in…
Barro Colorado is a 4,000-acre island in the middle of the Panama Canal. Nearly six times the size of New York’s Central Park, the island is at the heart of a wildlife sanctuary that straddles surrounding peninsulas jutting into the famous waterway. The island is home to a wonderfully intact tropical forest with thousands of…
Barro Colorado is a 4,000-acre island in the middle of the Panama Canal. Nearly six times the size of New York’s Central Park, the island is at the heart of a wildlife sanctuary that straddles surrounding peninsulas jutting into the famous waterway. The island is home to a wonderfully intact tropical forest with thousands of…