Half the world’s population could be facing a food crisis by the end of the century due to global warming. That’s the grim assessment of scientists who looked at projections of global warming’s impact on the average temperatures during the growing season.

Image courtesy of PNAS/Gabrielle Gentile

One-hundred fifty years after Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species—the book that laid out his theory of natural selection as a means of evolution—scientists are hailing the evolutionary significance of a creature that Darwin missed during his time in the Galápagos Islands: the pink iguana.

It’s the fifth anniversary of NASA’s rover mission to Mars, but “Spirit” and “Opportunity” were only supposed to last three months. As the twin rovers emerge intact from yet another Martian winter, lead scientist Steve Squyres reflects on the incredible milestone, and the future.

Is getting more exercise among your New Year’s resolutions? What about some training for your brain? Researchers have put people through a series of brain exercises—a brain boot camp—and found that, just like exercise for your body, exercise for your brain pays off.

When we bring a tree into the living room for the holidays we know it will lose needles. But, this season millions of trees still in the forest are losing needles, leaves – and their lives — at the hands of beetles. With the help of global warming, the tiny pests are doing the kind of damage to forests you might think only fires could do.

A robot lizard that does pushups! No, it’s not the latest must-have toy this Christmas. It’s a research tool for studying “lizard-speak” in the wild.

Anyone who’s spent much time online has encountered websites that require you to solve distorted word puzzles to “prove you’re human.” You may find them annoying but now that effort may not be going to waste. Turns out you and millions of others could be transcribing old books and newspapers little by little, every day.

Researchers have a new understanding of why a compound in red wine appears to retard aging in the same way as a very low-calorie diet. An increase in the levels of genes called sirtuin genes protects against aging by similar mechanisms in both very simple organisms like yeast, and in mammals.

Good news about our brains—turns out our visual memory is bigger and better than previously thought. The study authors even offer a tip to help improve your memory, and keep you from losing your keys.

Rather than give you the same tomfoolery as other sites this Thanksgiving, we thought it would be worth re-posting a story we did at the start of the Turkey Genome Mapping Project. Gobble gobble.