As fires blanket growing swathes of the West, scientists are beginning to understand more about how their smoke affects the transmission and severity of COVID-19 and other illnesses, and how it differs from that of other types of air pollution.

The storm, which made landfall over the weekend as a Category 4 hurricane and has since weakened, forced the evacuation of multiple Louisiana campuses.

The Scientist spoke to marine biologist Tim Lynch, who dusted off 25-year-old data from his PhD to figure out why olive sea snakes approach divers so often. He says the animals, especially the males, likely confuse people for potential mates.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says some changes are already irreversible, and warns of even more dire ramifications if global carbon emissions aren’t reduced immediately.

A recent sampling from two California streams found nearly all juvenile salmon were infected with deadly parasites, and conditions are expected to worsen.

Microscopic creatures called epibionts that live on sea turtles’ shells can help researchers understand their secretive lives.

A population explosion that began late last year has yet to abate. Meanwhile, researchers are exploring novel approaches to combat the nonnative species.

After eight weeks of exposure to ecologically plausible levels of methamphetamines, the fish tended to prefer meth-laced water over water without the drug.

Six GPS-tracked wild cats wandered closer to Santa Cruz, California, and surrounding towns as human activity died down under shelter-in-place orders last March.

A New York Times investigation’s failure to amplify tuna DNA from Subway’s tuna salad sandwiches likely says more about the complexities of identifying processed fish than about the ingredients.

Lab-grown cells from the reef-building coral Acropora tenuis provide new opportunities to study bleaching, symbioses, and biomineralization.

Stable, long-term cell lines will enable scientists to study everything from coral bleaching to biomineralization, knowledge that may help protect corals from ongoing climate change.

Brood X’s emergence tunnels—numbering in the hundreds per square meter of soil—give researchers a special opportunity to study how such extreme soil aeration affects the ecosystem.

Turkish officials are scrambling to clean up a massive, gooey plankton bloom that’s sliming the country’s ports and could suffocate the area’s marine ecosystems.

Researchers find a widespread decline in dissolved oxygen levels in lakes, which is known to reshape ecosystems.

Projects aimed at collecting big data about the ocean’s tiniest life forms continue to expand our view of the seas.

The New Mexico State University soil microbiologist uses molecular tools to understand how fungi are adapting to a warming world and what that might mean for global nutrient cycles.

More and more people are traveling around the world to watch the luminous displays of fireflies, but tourism-related light pollution and habitat degradation threaten to snuff out the insects at some locations.  

New genomic analyses reveal that piscine orthoreovirus first came to the Pacific in 1989, around the same time that salmon farms in the area started importing Atlantic salmon eggs from Europe.