French beekeepers, Russia Today tells us, were mystified when their hives started producing rainbow-colored honey – but were even more concerned when they found out the not-so-sweet reason why:

The bees around the town of Ribeauville in the Alsace region have been carrying an unidentified colored substance back to their hives since August. The keepers have done a bit of [...]

Guardian takes a look underwater, and what it sees (and, more importantly, what scientists are seeing) really doesn’t look good:

The decline of the reefs has been rapid: in the 1970s, more than 50% showed live coral cover, compared with 8% in the newly completed survey. The scientists who carried it out warned there was no sign of the [...]

File this Washington Post story under “unintended consequences,” maybe. Researchers in Yellowstone Park are noting that as wolf populations are rebounding, the number of trees is growing too:

The return of gray wolves has dramatically altered the landscape in portions of Yellowstone National Park, as new trees take root in areas where the predators have curbed the size of [...]

PhysOrg hops on the in-vitro meat bandwagon with a study that concludes lab-grown meat will lower greenhouse gas emissions by 96 percent:

The analysis, carried out by scientists from Oxford University and the University of Amsterdam, also estimates that cultured meat would require 7-45% less energy to produce than the same volume of pork, sheep or beef. It would [...]

I know I already kinda wrote a song about this (and isopods), but still – the Mother Nature Network has joined the voices marveling over the fact that the closer we look at Antarctica, the more full of life it becomes:

Antarctica’s remote South Georgia Island boasts 90 percent of the world’s fur seals, half of the [...]

Nature reports on a hidden side of wetlands conservation, with the discovery that those snorkel-rooted mangrove trees – which are getting pretty scarce most places – are really good at sucking back greenhouse gases:

Cutting down mangrove forests, which occupy less than 1% of tropical forest area, could therefore contribute up to 10% of global carbon emissions from deforestation.

…

J. [...]

The death of the dinosaurs was just a drop in the bucket compared to some of the real mass extinction events out there. And PhysOrg thinks we may be at the beginning of a really big one:

“The modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities,” said H. Richard Lane, program director [...]

New Scientist offers hope that our amphibian friends might not all die horribly after all:

“It’s happening across a number of species,” says Michael Mahony at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, who completed a 20-year study of frogs along the Great Dividing Range in Australia for the Earthwatch Institute. Between 1990 and 1998 the populations of several [...]

The world’s lakes are coming to a boil, reports National Geographic. Only a minute difference in global climate is already causing some major changes in big bodies of water:

In the last 25 years, the world’s largest lakes have been steadily warming, confirms the new study, some by as much as 4°F (2.2°C). In some cases that is seven times [...]