Mangroves, which have declined by up to half over the last 50 years, are an important bulkhead against climate change, a study released on Sunday has shown for the first time.

US President Barack Obama said Saturday that a transition to cleaner energy will help create more American jobs as he promoted his new initiative designed to reduce US energy imports by a third.

The Dalai Lama said Saturday that India should be seriously concerned about the melting of glaciers in the Tibetan plateau as millions of Indians use water that comes from there.

In this July 15, 2008 file photo, a sign advocating buying fresh and local in the Shenandoah Valley is tacked on a bulletin board at the Shenandoah Valley Produce auction in Dayton, Va. A heightened consumer interest in produce grown nearby, which many assume to mean fresher food, fewer chemicals, and grown smaller farms, has led to popular use of the word on displays and menus. While good for many farmers, the trend can be misleading for consumers, as there is no one or regulated meaning for "local".

Scientists of earth, sea and sky, scholars of law, politics and philosophy: In three intense days cloistered behind Chicheley Hall's old brick walls, four dozen thinkers pondered the planet's fate as it grows warmer, weighed the idea of reflecting the sun to cool the atmosphere and debated the question of who would make the decision to interfere with nature to try to save the planet. The unknown risks of "geoengineering" - in this case, tweaking Earth's climate by dimming the skies - left many uneasy. "If we could experiment with the atmosphere and literally play God, it's very tempting to a scientist," said Kenyan earth scientist Richard Odingo. "But I worry."

Elias Konstantopoulus runs through an optics test with his "bionic" eye glasses during a session at the Lions Vision Research and Rehabilation Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Konstantopoulus is blind but working with Johns Hopkins University he has been implanted with a microchip and given a set of glasses that enable him to distinguish between light and dark.

People who suffer from irregular heartbeat could see their episodes cut in half if they do yoga regularly, according to a study released Saturday in the United States.

World population will reach 7 billion this year, prompting new concerns about whether the world will soon face a major population crisis.

For the first time, more college students are using smart phones than traditional feature phones, reports a new study from Ball State University.

Conservationists may need to change their approach to protecting animals and plants from extinction if they are to successfully shield key species and habitats from the effects of global climate change, according to a new review in the journal Science.

Populations of Fraser River sockeye salmon are so fine-tuned to their environment that any further environmental changes caused by climate change could lead to the disappearance of some populations, while others may be less affected, says a new study by University of British Columbia scientists.

Sebastian Thrun talks about Google's amazing driverless car - and his very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through city traffic with no one behind the wheel; dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go.

Bats in North America are under a two-pronged attack but they are not the only victim - so is the U.S. economy. Gary McCracken, head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, analyzed the economic impact of the loss of bats in North America in agriculture and found it to be in the $3.7 to $53 billion a year range.

In a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, Dr. Ulrike Burkhardt and Dr. Bernd Karcher from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Centre show that the contrails created by airplanes are contributing more to global warming that all the CO2 that has been caused by the entire 108 years of airplane flight.

As Japan grapples with an unprecedented triple disaster - earthquake, tsunami, nuclear crisis - the Web has spawned creativity and innovation online amid a collective desire to ease suffering.

A ground-breaking report released today highlights the wide range of health care needs affecting older women.

A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the United States has warned that the native fauna and unique ecology of the Southern Ocean, the vast body of water that surrounds the Antarctic continent, is under threat from human activity. Their study is published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

In a country where nearly 40 percent of households have no electricity, any new advancement that will help bring power to the world's second most populous nation, must be met with celebration and open arms.

Reducing the ability of certain bacteria to fix carbon dioxide can greatly increase their production of hydrogen gas that can be used as a biofuel. Researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, report their findings in the current issue of online journal mBio.

Scientists in the UK and US, including researchers at Arizona State University, have been awarded funding to improve the photosynthetic process as a means of producing renewable fuel.