Local advocacy groups argue the ambitious launch schedule could increase pollution, harm wildlife, and disrupt fishing.

Following inaction from the government, fishing communities and conservationists are taking it upon themselves to set up and monitor no-catch zones to combat species depletion caused by overfishing.

The executive action weakens environmental review and public input in favor of industrial-scale tree cutting—despite science showing it won’t stop wildfires.

Deep-sea mining could unleash clouds of debris that threaten a mysterious, vital ecosystem we barely understand.

Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum.

Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.

A limited resource

By ingesting billions of creations, chatbots learn to talk, and image synthesizers learn to draw. Along the way, the AI companies behind them treat our shared culture like an inexhaustible resource to be strip-mined, with little thought for the consequences.

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The carnivorous "bone collector" caterpillar is the only known species of its kind, researchers say, and its ancient lineage may soon die out.

Las Arenitas is an artificial oasis that recycles used water from the border city of Mexicali to regenerate ecosystems in the Colorado River delta.

The right to repair can reduce emissions and pollution. But for conservatives, it's "a freedom and liberty issue."

Six of the seven sea turtle species are threatened or endangered but that could soon change for the better.

Colossal Biosciences' feat of genetic engineering has people talking, but not every scientist is on board with its claim of having brought back the dire wolf.

The Philadelphia Zoo's Mommy is the oldest documented member of her species to become a first time mother.

Wildlife crossings help decrease the millions of vehicle collisions with large animals that occur every year in the US

Colossal's "dire wolves" are named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, all of which appear to be healthy so far.

The dumping of effluent and fertilizer into Florida waters caused a massive bloom of phytoplankton, killing off much of the dolphins' food supply.

The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats. According to the company’s founders, including Harvard and MIT professor George Church, these advances take Colossal a big step closer to their goal of using mammoths to combat climate change by restoring Arctic grassland ecosystems. Church also claims that Colossal’s woolly mammoth program will help protect endangered species like the Asian elephant, saying “we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

In other words, the scientific advances Colossal makes in their lab will result in positive changes from the tropics to the Arctic, from the soil to the atmosphere.

Colossal’s Jurassic Park-like ambitions have captured the imagination of the public and investors, bringing its latest valuation to $10 billion. And the company’s research does seem to be resulting in some technical advances. But I’d argue that the broader effort to de-extinct the mammoth is—as far as conservation efforts go—incredibly misguided. Ultimately, Colossal’s efforts won’t end up being about helping wild elephants or saving the climate. They’ll be about creating creatures for human spectacle, with insufficient attention to the costs and opportunity costs to human and animal life.

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Using environmental DNA analysis and traditional fishing techniques, researchers are seeking answers about the current population of axolotls in their natural habitat. The numbers are alarming.

Ancient sponges and corals were found on the exposed seafloor, in an area previously inaccessible to humans.

The Trump White House is ready to divvy up public lands for private profits.

Researchers reconstructed the history of an unusual 30-year-old bird nest based on the expiration dates printed on plastic waste in the structure.

Sweeping layoffs of federal employees have struck the program responsible for controlling the invasive sea lamprey that threatens fish across the Great Lakes, the earth’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

Among hundreds of US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) employees terminated this month were 12 members of the Great Lakes sea lamprey control program, based at field stations in Marquette and Ludington, Michigan.

These staffing cuts could have grave consequences for the lakes’ native fish population and the $5 billion fishery they comprise.

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