Solar power keeps getting cheaper, but it still has a basic problem. The sun sets and output drops right when people get home and turn things on. What if your electric bill could be backed up by ...

Southern France just got a new reminder that fossils are not always buried deep underground. During a conservation dig in the Sainte-Victoire National Nature Reserve, teams working with the Natural ...

China has begun sending hundreds of new buses to Nicaragua in a deal meant to refresh the country’s public transportation system. The first confirmed shipment includes 180 vehicles, and officials say ...

If a volcano swells by a few inches, would anyone notice from the ground? At Taftan, a remote stratovolcano in southeastern Iran, the answer is usually no, unless you are watching from orbit. A new ...

Gravitational waves are famous for shaking the universe, yet barely nudging anything around us. We have detected them with some of the most sensitive machines ever built, but a new idea asks a ...

For a long time, “cleaning the ocean” sounded like a slogan, not a plan. Today, large machines are running in real waterways, scooping up trash with measurable results. The picture is more complicated ...

A dark stain creeping up a kitchen wall looks harmless at first. But is it just steam from last night’s pasta, or water sneaking in from behind the paint? Some architects and building specialists say ...

China is pushing ahead with the Pinglu Canal, a massive 83-mile (134-kilometer) waterway designed to let ships move from inland rivers to international sea routes. The project is meant to speed up ...

Most people grew up with a simple world map in school where Africa is one solid block of land. Now scientists say that picture is slowly going out of date. According to work highlighted by National ...

As global amphibian populations slide toward crisis, with roughly four in ten species now threatened with extinction, every patch of safe water starts to matter. On a small property near a trout ...

Have you ever thought about what a Stone Age status symbol looked like? On the forested western shore of Lake Onega, one of Europe’s largest freshwater lakes, archaeologists have uncovered a ...

Will humans still be around a thousand years from now? The late physicist Stephen Hawking had his doubts. “I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into ...