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People love to prognosticate about how the world will power itself in the future. But only one person can be right. Here's some of the possible ways the next 50 years might turn out.

Fifty-six million years ago, enough carbon leaked into the atmosphere to alter the climate and acidify the ocean. The same thing is happening now, much faster.

Attempting to fix our planet might be easier than adapting to an uncertain future In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated.

Deep in South Africa's gold mines water can be found in rock fractures, hosting bacteria that off the stone itself and form biofilms on the hard surfaces. Now new samples pulled from these sunless pools show that nematodes--roundworms of varying size that are essentially tubes with a digestive tract and thrive everywhere on the planet--likely graze on these bacterial films, surviving more than a kilometer underground.

More than 75 percent of the planet's flowering plants depend on pollinators (mostly insects) in order to reproduce.

[audio of blue whale song] That's the song of the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet . It's been sped up five [OR: 30] times faster so that our ears can hear it. In reality, these infrasound songs were captured in 2009, off the coast of… Long Island

Yet another scientific body has jumped in to the so-called Climategate fray to dispute that the leaked documents offer any reason to doubt that human activity is warming the planet. [More]

Vestergaard Frandsen makes an ingenious water filter that's too expensive for the people who need it. They figured out how to give it away and still make money. Swiss-based Vestergaard Frandsen --makers of mosquito nets and the LifeStraw --has figured out a solution to turning a profit while saving the world

It's ubiquitous. It's universal. And it's understood—not! Water's choices in a given situation often defy scientific predictions.

Modern humans have, up until this point, done a pretty horrible job of cutting down on the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmopshere to stave off climate change. As we inch ever closer to the tipping point where reducing emissions won't make a difference, some scientists are suggesting that we try to "geoengineer" the planet to counteract our emissions with everything from algae-lined buildings and forests of synthetic trees to ships that spray climate-altering clouds into the sky. These are ideas fit for a big-budget Hollywood movie (and they may even work).

In this installment of "The Big Thirst," the author and Fast Company writer explains why one oft-used statistic about the scarcity of water is misleading. Fact: We hear all the time that "only" 2% of the water on Earth is fresh and available for human use--only 1% if you exclude glaciers and polar ice caps.

This video is no April's fool joke: Earth really is shaped like a potato. However, the shape that you see here is, um, slightly exaggerated to highlight its irregularities.

A NASA spacecraft has captured the first-ever image of Mercury taken from orbit around the planet.

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Aircraft condensation trails criss-crossing the sky may be warming the planet on a normal day more than the carbon dioxide emitted by all planes since the Wright Brothers' first flight in 1903, a study said on Tuesday.

The sun strikes every square meter of our planet with more than 1,360 watts of power. Half of that energy is absorbed by the atmosphere or reflected back into space.