Few places on Earth would be as miserable to live as the Sahara Desert, which occupies the northern third of Africa. It is a desolate place filled with nothing but sand. Winds whip that sand into huge ...

Think the Amazon rainforest and the Sahara Desert are worlds apart? Think again. Scientists have only recently discovered the ...

You may think of dust as an annoyance to be vacuumed and disposed of, but actually, on a grander scale, it is far more important than most people realise. Globally, dust plays a critical role in ...

Among the 2.5+ tons of cargo heading to the International Space Station Thursday evening are climate investigations including one that will map airborne dust and how it impacts temperatures. The Earth ...

They analyzed 22 global dust records in sediment cores, and found that since the Cenozoic era, dust deposition in major ocean ...

Arctic sea ice is disappearing fast, and scientists have turned to an unexpected cosmic clue—space dust—to uncover how ice has changed over tens of thousands of years. By tracking helium-3–bearing ...

The NASA spacecraft launches Thursday (July 14) on a SpaceX rocket. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A new NASA mission will watch ...

Trees growing atop granite in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains rely on nutrients from windborne dust more than on nutrients from the underlying bedrock. This surprising finding resulted from a ...

Many ecosystems on Earth are affected by pulses of activity: temperature swings between seasons, incoming and outgoing tides, ...

Arctic sea ice has declined by more than 42% since 1979, when regular satellite monitoring began. As the ice grows thinner and recedes, more water is exposed to sunlight. Ice reflects sunlight but ...

Jenny Lehmann is an assistant editor at Discover Magazine who writes articles on microbiology, psychology, neurology, and zoology, and oversees the Piece of Mind column of the print issue. View Full ...