Mason Inman - science journalist

Threatened with encroaching seas, dwindling water supplies and fiercer storms, Bangladesh is already suffering the ill effects of rising global greenhouse gas emissions.

Mason Inman reports on how the region is coping with climate change.

Innovative counseling programs in developing countries are repairing the psyches of civil war survivors and depressed mothers alike.

It had been four years since 13-year-old Mohamed Abdul escaped civil war in Somalia, but he still had nightmares and flashbacks. When he was nine years old, a crowd fleeing a street shooting trampled him, putting him in the hos­pital for two weeks.

19 December 2008, for National Geographic News

The East Siberian Sea is bubbling with methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being released from underwater reserves, according to a recent expedition by a Russian team.

This could be a sign that global warming is thawing underwater permafrost, which is releasing methane that has been locked away for many thousands of years.

After our fossil fuel blow-out, how long will the CO₂ hangover last? And what about the global fever that comes along with it?

These sound like simple questions, but the answers are complex — and not well understood or appreciated outside a small group of climate scientists.

7 October 2008, for National Geographic News

Three researchers from the U.S. and Japan will share the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for their contributions to work that helps explain why the universe exists.

Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago won half the 10-million-Swedish-kronor (1.4-million-U.S.-dollar) prize for being the first to predict spontaneous symmetry breaking.

2 October 2008, for Technology Review

Researchers have engineered aluminum-tolerant crops.

Much of the world's cropland contains aluminum that stunts crops. But a new study has found a way to make plants grow tall in spite of the metal's toxic effects. The discovery, by plant biologists at the University of California, Riverside, suggests that genetic engineering could boost yields from fields that today are not ideal for growing crops.

17 September 2008, for National Geographic News

The Arctic Ocean's sea ice has shrunk to its second smallest area on record, close to 2007's record-shattering low, scientists report.

The ice is in a "death spiral" and may disappear in the summers within a couple of decades, according to Mark Serreze, an Arctic climate expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

10 September 2008, for National Geographic News

The world's largest atom smasher's first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.

The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.

4 September 2008, for National Geographic News

Sea levels will rise a bit higher—but not catastrophically high—in the coming century, according to a new study.

The oceans will likely rise between 2.5 and 6.5 feet (0.8 and 2 meters) by 2100, researchers say.

2 September 2008, for National Geographic News

The planet is hotter now than it has been for nearly the past 2,000 years, researchers report.

The new study is led by Michael Mann, a climatologist who helped develop the famous 1998 "hockey stick" graph—a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past thousand years showing a sharp uptick beginning around 1900.