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Scientists clone Southern Africa’s wild fruit trees as forests disappear
Plant geneticist Alice Muchugi recalls meeting a group of furious fruit sellers on the side of a dusty road not far from Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, in 2024. They told her that a group of men armed with chainsaws had felled some of the district’s most prolific fruit trees, robbing the women of a steady source […]
Earth life support systems are flashing red, warns 2026 Planetary Health Check
Human activities continue eroding the planet’s stability, resilience and life-support functions, the third edition of the Planetary Health Check released in September warns. The “scary” part of the 2026 report, says lead co-author Levke Caesar, is that the trends are largely going in the wrong direction. “We still have seven out of the nine planetary […]
A ‘devil-like’ flower from Thailand is new to science
Botanists in Thailand have identified a new-to-science species of “fairy lantern” — plants that live almost entirely buried under leaf litter, emerging aboveground only occasionally to flower. Researchers were surveying evergreen forests in the mountains of Thong Pha Phum National Park when they chanced upon a plant none of them had ever seen before, at […]
Drought and state neglect deepen health crisis for Peru’s recently contacted Matsés
A worsening convergence of drought driven by climate change, epidemic disease, and state neglect is creating a severe health emergency for the Indigenous Matsés people in the Peruvian Amazon. Mongabay staff writer Aimee Gabay traveled to Matsés territory to investigate the environmental threats to the region. Instead, she found Matsés communities suffering from severe outbreaks […]
Panama looks to science, fishers, and the law to protect its sharks and rays
PUERTO CAIMITO, Panama — It’s a late April morning and the Tabor, an industrial fishing boat, is sailing around Chepillo Island in Panama Bay. Under the eyes of the crew, Yehudi Rodríguez, a marine biologist specializing in sharks, and sailor Joel Cordoba free a large black devil ray from a purse seine net and launch […]
How burnt coconut helped discover new to science endemic species in Sri Lanka
COLOMBO — As dusk settled over the paddy fields at Puwakpitiya, a village on the northern edge of Knuckles Mountain Range locally known as Dumbara mountains in Central Sri Lanka, researchers began laying traps along the uneasy boundary between farmland and forest. They were targeting small terrestrial mammals moving through the landscape. On the ground, […]
Children’s health at risk in south Borneo as El Niño intensifies Indonesia wildfires
BANJARMASIN, Indonesia — Siti Sarah slept in fits and starts through August as the fires broke out around her village and surrounding peatlands. One fire on Aug. 18 at first seemed a safe distance away, but in a heartbeat the flames were within 100 meters (330 feet) of her home in Pengayuan, a village in […]
Indigenous fisherwoman finds ‘lost’ spinach pipefish, not seen by science in 40 years
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. On the final day of a two-week expedition, where researchers were searching for a “lost” species along Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River, Helen Asu arrived with two small, greenish-brown fish. She had caught them while fishing for prawns […]
New-to-science Amazon frog stands out for its slow ‘lazy’ song
Scientists recently described a new species of a tiny brown frog found in the Amazonian floodplain forests of Ecuador and northwestern Brazil. It looks nearly identical to related species but its slow, widely spaced out call sets it apart, researchers note in a study. “I’ve had to get into arguments because people said the frog […]
‘Plastic pollution hotspots’ spawn a public health crisis across Latin America
Since China banned the import of plastic waste in 2018, plastic pollution has been having a growing impact on the people and ecosystems of Latin America. As the region imports an increasing amount of the world’s used and discarded plastic, new research shows that waste infrastructure in many countries is already buckling under the strain […]
Indigenous knowledge helps reveal the ties between reefs and mangroves
In a recent scientific article in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management, alongside the list of scientist-authors were the Bardi Jawi and Oorany Rangers and the Bardi Jawi Traditional Owners. For the past decade, Bardi Jawi rangers and traditional owners have been working with the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) to study and protect […]
Drought is deepening a health crisis among Peru’s recently contacted Indigenous Matsés
REQUENA, Peru — Until a century ago, few Matsés had ever been in contact with a white person before. The Indigenous people lived in a remote area of the Amazon Rainforest, along the border of Peru and Brazil, in seminomadic forest settlements between the Javari, Yaquerana and Gálvez rivers. There, wild meat was abundant — […]
A sea cucumber venture in Zanzibar seeks to balance business and conservation
PEMBA, Tanzania — Like many coastal communities across East Africa, the residents of Shamiani have grown accustomed to watching the sea yield less and less. Warming waters, degraded marine habitats and decades of fishing pressure have all taken a toll on the resources that once sustained local livelihoods, according to community members. On Tanzania’s Pemba […]
Culture, welfare and politics clash over Sri Lanka’s long-delayed animal welfare law
KANDY, Sri Lanka – The famous Kandy Esala Perahera procession is one of Sri Lanka’s most vibrant religious-cultural celebrations, which transforms the hill capital into a spectacle of color, music, dance and caparisoned elephants to honor the tooth relic of the Buddha. But as the country prepared for this year’s Esala Perahera, which started on […]
Art and science must come together for coral reef conservation, biologists argue
Art and science can work together to raise public awareness and propel conservation efforts needed to safeguard coral reef ecosystems, a group of coral scientists argues in a new research article published in Science Advances. Coral reefs are among Earth’s most threatened ecosystems amid climate change, coral bleaching and threats from mining. However, most people […]
Science|Business summer reads of 2026
As most people in the European research and innovation policy bubble are going on a well-deserved summer break, we have come up with a list of our favourite books, podcasts and essays from the past year that ask deeper questions about science, technology and politics.BooksPasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation, by Donald StokesIf you haven’t read Pasteur’s Quadrant yet, now is the time. In the EU and elsewhere, we’re living through a period of dwindling faith that curiosity-driven research automatically leads to economic growth and technological progress. Pasteur’s Quadrant, published in 1997 by the Princeton academic Donald Stokes, is the most influential critique of the standard “linear model” of R&D: the idea that new discoveries made in ivory-tower labs get neatly passed on for commercialisation by start-ups. In reality, Stokes argues, practical applications often inspire more theorical lines of inquiry. Of course, we have long known that things are more complex than the linear model, but even today, it’s still often assumed in Brussels discourse. The book is a useful corrective, and is being used now to argue for new types of scientific institutions. David MatthewsThe Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism, by Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis PattersonAre society’s problems solvable by technical expertise alone? “If only the benighted would listen,” say Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis Patterson, two professors at Rutgers Law School who got frustrated with how scientists and politicians handled public health communication during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the book, they argue that clichéd mantras about scientific evidence and expertise perpetrated by academics, journalists and politicians have harmed public trust in the very institutions they were trying to defend. Paradoxically, slogans such as “we believe in science,” “follow the science” and “defer to the experts” can fuel mistrust in science, experts and democratic institutions. The authors criticise “condescension” and “technocratic paternalism” in the public discourse and make the case for a more nuanced approach to scientific and expert policy advice that rests on humility, doubt, scepticism and open dialogue. “Most complex social questions in fact revolve around values, not the recitation of unambiguous facts,” they say. Florin ZubascuBreakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan WangIn this book, Dan Wang compares the structural differences between the US and Chinese industrial policies, but raises a very timely question for innovation policy wonks: how can advanced manufacturing know-how contribute to technology-intensive economic growth? Wang says technology has three components: the tools, the blueprints and patents, and the process knowledge. The third component represents the “proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated and requires years of implementation.” According to Wang, rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, policymakers should see them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Over the past decades, China has amassed “process knowledge” because capital flowed to complex fabrication facilities, while investors in the West have parked their money in capital-light businesses such as digital platforms or chip companies that focus on design. As it turns out, thanks to its oversized focus on manufacturing, China has gained remarkable advantages in the global technology race. Florin ZubascuBaltic: The Future of Europe, by Oliver MoodyWhat can Europe learn from the nine countries surrounding the Baltic Sea? Alongside the familiar stories about Estonia's digital transformation, the book examines how the region has used technology, resilience, education, governance and long-term thinking to respond to geopolitical, economic and security challenges. Innovation policy wonks might find fresh perspectives on how innovation can strengthen defence, societal resilience and Europe's capacity to adapt in an uncertain world. Whether or not you agree with all of Oliver Moody's conclusions, the book is a useful guide to a region that is increasingly shaping European debates on security, competitiveness and technology. Goda NaujokaityteThe Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf This book chronicles the wild and adventurous life of natural science pioneer Alexander von Humboldt who at some point in the 19th century seems to have been just about the most famous person in the world. Through scientific expeditions to the Andes Mountains and to the depths of Siberia, von Humboldt contributed a host of discoveries and concepts. During his life he met and formed relationships with historical figures as different as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles Darwin. He is also claimed to be the person in the world with most things named after him, a list that includes an ocean current, a penguin and a region of the Moon. Still venerated in Germany, with numerous scientific institutions named after him, von Humboldt has slipped out of public consciousness in most of the rest of the world. For anyone not familiar with him, this book does a good job of describing his fascinating life. Ole EllekrogCareless People, by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsYou may have heard this referred to as the book Meta doesn’t want you to read. The 2025 memoir from Sarah Wynn-Williams, former director of global public policy at Meta, then just called Facebook, includes explosive claims about everything from a toxic workplace culture to how the company worked with advertisers to target vulnerable teens, and the lengths it was prepared to go to in order to break into China. It’s a fascinating insight into how and why the tech company gradually shifted its approach to policy, whether in the US, Europe or Asia. Meta has denied the allegations in the book, and last year won an emergency ruling to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting it. In response, the author is now suing her former employer. If that doesn’t make you want to read it. Martin GreenacrePodcastsThe Europeans: Europe’s anti-ElonThis podcast is a great choice for a light-hearted dose of European policy and culture news. Most of it has little to do with research, innovation and technology, but this particular podcast features an interview with Mastadon’s founder Eugen Rochko. He talks about his experience running an open-source, federated, European-made social media platform, and leaving it all behind. The conversation, which starts 14 minutes in, gently encourages us to reflect on what kind of technology we, as Europeans, want to make. Goda NaujokaityteSolarpunk and how we escape dystopiaNew technologies are very often taken from science fiction. Alberto Santos-Dumont, inventor the airship, was inspired as a child by the adventure stories of Jules Verne. OpenAI’s attempt to build a personal assistant with the voice of Scarlett Johansson was lifted from the 2013 film Her, completely ignoring the movie’s cautionary message. So if we want better tech, we need to imagine it first. Unfortunately, the state of current sci-fi is relentlessly dystopian, giving inventors precious few ideas or hope. However, a new genre, Solarpunk, which envisages a technologically advanced but ecologically harmonious future, is now taking off. The actual tech the genre imagines, such as permaculture, renewable energy or community repair workshops, while nice, isn’t all that inspiring or ambitious. But it’s a first step towards rescuing sci-fi from its pessimistic Blade Runner rut. David MatthewsEveryday AbundanceLaunched in June, Everyday Abundance is a podcast that tells the stories of the inventions we now take so for granted that we barely given them a second thought. For example, the washing machine, which liberated women from a lifetime “bent over washtubs and washboards.” Or modern dentistry, which ended the reality that “tooth pain was simply part of human life.” Historians of technology, Virginia Postrel and Charles C Mann are very much on the optimistic end of the spectrum when it comes to the capacity of invention to improve human life. Here, they set out their case: if it wasn’t for progress, you might be hunched over a washtub with toothache rather than reading these words. David Matthews‘We will not know what we lost’: Conservation fallout a year after USAID shutdownSince his return to the White House, Donald Trump has been on a mission to undermine science. He slashed jobs at federal agencies, terminated grants in some research areas, took unprecedented control over university affairs and, within hours of his inauguration, suspended the US Agency for International Development. While its initial focus was to administer health and food aid around the world, it had since expanded to conservation projects. The result? Some of these projects were stopped abruptly. In this Mongabay podcast, environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis tells the story of the EcoGuard conservation programme in Liberia, whose local patrols had helped protect rainforests, monitor endangered wildlife and track illegal threats. From one day to the next, these were left without salaries. Luckily, she notes, the initiative was able to get emergency funding from international NGOs, but its future remains “incredibly uncertain.” Juliette PortalaEssaysThe Mars Delusion, by Henry WismayerWhy is humankind so fixated on establishing a colony on Mars? asks London-based writer Henry Wismayer. From space evangelists promoting Martian settlement as an insurance policy, to billionaire Jeff Bezos, who said humans should settle on Mars “because it’s cool,” the mission is not running short of advocates. However, in this essay, Wismayer reminds us that some critics expect any future Mars pioneer to end up “irradiated, sick, mad and dead.” Scientists have already looked into the possible effects of prolonged exposure to Martian gravity, and it’s not pretty: muscle shrinking, bones weakening, changes to the central nervous system and other biological modifications to make us all reconsider the journey. “Some researchers have forecast that the future settler, after generations of evolutionary conditioning, will look less like an Übermensch and more like ET,” Wismayer writes. Juliette Portala
Heat stress is rising globally, raising health concerns for billions: Study
Climate change is causing frequent, well-studied, extreme heat events. Less well understood is the additional heat stress experienced by billions of people as a result of those extreme heat events. However, a new study published in Nature Climate Change aims to change that. The study analyzed more than 70 years of climate data stored in […]
Health fears linger in a Brazilian neighborhood built over oil waste
SÃO SEBASTIÃO, Brazil — In front of the house where she has lived for decades, Cosma da Silva points to nearby homes in her Itatinga neighborhood and lists a string of cancer cases. “There’s a woman with cancer over there. Another one lives in that building. And yet another one there [points at the place]. People […]
Extreme heat is eroding health, productivity and incomes of Dhaka’s informal workers
DHAKA — On June 28, as the afternoon sun beat down on Bangladesh capital Dhaka’s sprawling Tejgaon neighborhood, Samiha Begum gathered her two school-aged children and headed for the shade of Hatirjheel Lake. Their narrow one-room home in a nearby slum had become unbearable. She said, “The room starts heating up as soon as the […]
WHO evacuated health workers from Ebola treatment center due to armed clashes
On July 15, gunfire erupted between armed groups near an Ebola Treatment Center (ETC) in Nyankunde (or Nyakunde), located 45 kilometers (28 miles) southwest of Bunia in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Following the fighting, medical personnel from the World Health Organization (WHO), Africa CDC and the NGO Samaritan’s Purse evacuated from Nyankunde, […]
How birders in Chad ‘found’ the rusty lark, a bird lost to science for nearly a century
The morning of Feb. 2, 2026, started like many others for Pierre Defos du Rau and Julien Birard: It was hot and sunny with a gentle breeze, ideal birding weather. The two French ornithologists, who have been birding since their teens and have traveled the world in search of birds, were at Abou Telfane Game […]
Listen to whales to improve connection, care & ocean health (commentary)
Seventy years ago, Le Monde du Silence, a film by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle, depicted the ocean as silent. Today, we know that the ocean is filled with the melodies of millions of vocalizing sea creatures, from the crisp snapping of shrimps to the complex singing and speaking of whales. In fact, the first […]
How an activist network built pressure without political power
When Rainforest Action Network began in 1985, it had little of what usually makes an organization powerful. It had no large budget, no legal department, no reliable access to politicians, and no formal way to force global corporations or development banks to change. It had Randy Hayes, a wide activist network, a way to connect […]
Taiwan’s tallest tree found with help of citizen science
Deep in Taiwan’s misty mountains, researchers have confirmed the tallest tree in the country: a thousand-year-old fir tree higher than a 20-story building, which they’ve named “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.” Climbers scaled the tree and dropped a measuring tape from the top to the forest floor during the Lunar New Year holiday […]
New book offers tips to translate climate science into political gains
At a time when climate politics in the United States and globally remain deeply polarized, Will Hackman, a climate advocate and political operative, argues that the climate movement needs a new language — one rooted less in doom, guilt and abstract planetary crisis, and more in people’s everyday lives, health, safety, costs and communities. In […]
New book offers tips to translate climate science into political gains
At a time when climate politics in the United States and globally remain deeply polarized, Will Hackman, a climate advocate and political operative, argues that the climate movement needs a new language — one rooted less in doom, guilt and abstract planetary crisis, and more in people’s everyday lives, health, safety, costs and communities. In […]
Nan Schaffer, veterinarian who helped unlock the science of rhino reproduction, has died, aged 72
“One of the great tragedies of the 21st century,” Nan Schaffer once said, “will be humanity’s homogeneity.” The remark was less a warning than a diagnosis. In a world where landscapes were being simplified and species reduced to remnants, she concerned herself with what would be lost when difference itself began to disappear. For species […]
Why forest conservation is also public health
In a lowland forest in southeastern Madagascar, what was missing proved as telling as what was found. Researchers trapping small mammals in the Manombo Special Reserve caught tuft-tailed rats in the intact interior forest. In the nearby littoral forest, despite repeated efforts, they found none. The traps held black rats instead. The observation appears in […]
Indigenous knowledge confirms what scientists observe: Large birds are disappearing
Many Indigenous peoples and local communities live in close contact with nature and learn to identify the wildlife around them from an early age. New research published in the International Journal of Conservation draws on that knowledge to better understand a scientifically documented trend: large bird populations are shrinking. Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, an ethnobotanist with the […]
The Wild League aims to turn sports mascots into conservation champions
Lions, tigers and bears aren’t just among the world’s most iconic wildlife. They’re also among the most popular mascots in professional sports. A new study published in BioScience finds that across 50 countries and 10 team sports, 727 professional organizations use wild animals in their names, logos or fan nicknames. The most frequently represented species […]
Bringing storytelling to science: John Cannon’s approach to reporting on nature
For John Cannon, reporting on nature begins with a story grounded in the truth. “Evidence-based reporting [is] at the heart of what we do at Mongabay,” he says. “I believe it’s perhaps the most profound way we can contribute to making things better.” With a biology degree from Ohio State University and a graduate degree […]
Conservation’s unfinished business
Conservation often presents itself as a technical enterprise: how much land to protect, which species to prioritize, what policies deliver results. A recent paper in Nature argues that this framing misses something fundamental. Many of the field’s most persistent failures, the authors contend, cannot be understood without confronting how race, power, and historical exclusion continue […]
From sea slugs to sunflowers, California Academy of Sciences described 72 new species in 2025
Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences kept busy throughout 2025. Along with collaborators from across the globe, they described 72 new-to-science species from six continents — creatures living in unexplored ocean depths, in plain sight on the Galápagos Islands, and in a U.S. national park. The species include a bird, two worms, two lizards, […]
On Indonesia’s longest river, a Borneo community passes crucial public health milestone
SEKADAU, Indonesia — Children’s laughter skimmed over water the color of mud as mothers wrung laundry over banks where the Sekadau joins the Kapuas, the longest river in Indonesia. Local testimony along the Kapuas River, which flows 1,143 kilometers (710 miles) east to west from Borneo’s Müller Mountains out into the Natuna Sea, suggests this […]
Jay M. Savage, witness to disappearing frogs and builder of tropical science
In the late 1980s, something began to go wrong in places that were supposed to be safe. Protected cloud forests, buffered from chainsaws and bulldozers, started losing animals that had persisted through far rougher times. Amphibians—often abundant, often overlooked—were vanishing in patterns that did not fit the usual explanations. Field biologists, trained to distrust drama, […]
Indigenous knowledge and science join forces to save the choro mussel in Chile
Huellelhue means “place for swimming” in Mapudungun. It’s also the name of one of the rivers that flow through the Lafken Mapu Lahual Multiple-Use Conservation Area, established in 2005 in southern Chile’s Los Lagos region. The name of this area is more than just a grouping of words, says Eduardo Vargas, president of the Nirehue […]