2023 Audacious Project grantee Wanjira Mathai is at the forefront of re-greening the planet. Through the forest restoration initiative Restore Local, she's working to help both Africa's people and its landscapes flourish. Learn more...

A hydrogen atom is traveling high within the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere. This particular atom first entered the exosphere millions of years ago, but today it overcomes Earth's gravitational pull and escapes, joining the...

What would it take to make global supply chains cleaner and greener? Bo Cerup-Simonsen -- who's helping decarbonize the maritime industry as CEO of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping -- discusses why tenacious...

Climate action is speeding up -- and we each have the power to push that transformation forward. As the head of the UNFCCC, the UN's entity supporting the global response to climate change, Simon Stiell points to clear social and...

We tend to think of evolution as a slow, gradual process playing out over millions of years. But evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton says nature is now changing at breakneck speed to keep up with the world humanity has built....

When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us...

If we're going to solve the climate crisis, we need to talk about supply chains, says biodiversity champion and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Nicole Rycroft. Her organization, Canopy, partners with key industry leaders to overhaul their...

Megafires, or fires that burn more than 100,000 acres, are becoming more frequent worldwide, wreaking havoc on landscapes and communities -- and fire experts say the problem is only going to get worse. George T. Whitesides is focused on...

You might think of x-rays as the go-to particle to see through solid objects. But there's a subatomic particle out there that can see through everything from volcanos to lead shielding in nuclear reactors. It's called a muon, and...

Bacteria are everywhere, including clouds, and the rain that falls from them. Not only can they survive the harsh environment and hitchhike across continents, they can share their genes, too. Including the ones that make them resistant...

If you see an acorn sprout under an oak tree, you're seeing that tree's grandchild. Here's why half of all higher plants are invisible, and why it works for them.

Ladybugs are red with black spots, right? Well, not always. There's a lot of genetic and evolutionary reasons that they can be different colors with wacky patterns.

Lots of geological forces need to come together for continents to form, but they all require one ingredient: water.

You may have heard of "abortion pills" - here's what these medications are and what they do (and don't do).

Volcanoes might seem like an unstoppable force of nature - but there is at least one OTHER force on Earth that seems to be able to keep them down.

There are two types of rain, and one of them is almost impossible to forecast.

We often use decibels, a measure of sound pressure, to describe how loud something is - but loudness is caused by how we perceive sounds, and the two often don't line up.

Most animals on earth are bioluminescent, but almost all of them live in the ocean - and scientists aren’t sure why.

Some plants can drink water from the air - and that has some weird effects on the forests where they live.

How do you count things you don't know about?

Two mushroom guilds with vastly different strategies are locked in competition for forest dominance.

The concept of warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals is outdated because there are actually tons of different animal thermoregulation strategies.

For thousands of years, water was thought to be an element. That is, until some of the greatest chemists in the world managed to crack it open.

Energy use can be confusing – I mean, how do you compare gasoline in your car to electricity piped to your house? That's why we made these things spud-tacularly simple.