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Camera collar footage is unveiling the secret lives of Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus), South America’s only surviving ursid. A wild Andean bear in Peru was caught eating soil or clay, courting females and even cannibalizing a dead bear cub.

“It’s so hard to see an Andean bear,” says Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, a wildlife biologist at Amazon Conservation, a nongovernmental organization in Cusco, Peru. Scientists estimate there are fewer than 20,000 left in the wild. “And it’s even harder to see what they are doing.” Even though the bears are deep brown or black with bright spectacled faces and can weigh up to 340 pounds, they’re tricky to spot in the dense, steep forests of the Andes. More

If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and drought-fueled wildfires have devastated parts of the United States.

It’s a very bad time to put the brakes on the aggressive actions — including slashing U.S. carbon emissions and transitioning to greener, lower-carbon sources of energy — that scientists have repeatedly said are necessary to help keep the planet’s warming in check. There is simply no more time for denial or delay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned back in 2021 (SN: 8/9/21). More

Earth’s space junk may be wreaking havoc on the stratosphere.

The rapid surge in satellite megaconstellations is connecting much of the world to broadband internet. But each year, hundreds of those satellites die, burning up in the atmosphere as they fall. And each year, more and more satellites are being launched to replace them.

The dying satellites, it turns out, don’t just wink out into the ether. Each one leaves a bit of itself behind. More

As if hurricanes needed any more kick.

Human-caused climate change is boosting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes by a whole category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which rates hurricanes based on their peak sustained wind speed, researchers report November 20 in two new studies.

From 2019 to 2023, climate change enhanced the maximum wind speeds of hurricanes by an average of about 29 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour), or roughly the breadth of a Saffir-Simpson category, researchers report in Environmental Research: Climate. Climate change similarly increased the intensities of all hurricanes in 2024 by an average of about 29 kph (18 mph), escalating the risk of wind damage, a companion analysis from Climate Central shows. More

Off the coast of the Solomon Islands lurks a centuries-old being that is so immense, it can be seen from space.

Discovered in October by the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas team, it is the world’s largest standalone coral. Coming in at roughly 34 meters wide, 32 meters long and 6 meters tall, the behemoth coral is longer than the average blue whale. It also dwarfs the world’s next largest-known coral, a 22-meter-wide coral in American Samoa known as Big Momma. More

Nearly two dozen pesticides are associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer in the United States, researchers report November 4 in Cancer. Four of those, the study finds, are also linked to prostate cancer deaths.

The findings can’t say for certain that these pesticides caused prostate cancer, says John Leppert, a urologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. It’s unknown whether the people who were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Leppert’s data were exposed to the pesticides. More

People are flocking to nature’s doorstep, and into wildfire territory.

Homes constructed where human development meets undeveloped wildland are particularly vulnerable to wildfires and other natural hazards (SN: 11/9/23). Nonetheless, people are moving into the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, and rapidly expanding it. From 2000 to 2020, the global footprint of the WUI grew by about 35 percent, reaching a total area that’s roughly the size of Mexico, researchers report November 8 in Science Advances. More

Stand back, ordinary ocean-dwelling, oxygen-spewing organisms: There’s a new green, hulkish mutant in town.

And hefty UTEX 3222 — dubbed “Chonkus” by the researchers who found it — may have just the right combination of traits to help with some of humanity’s most pressing problems. In particular, Chonkus could help fight climate change, report microbiologist Max Schubert, formerly of the Wyss Institute at Harvard and now launching a start-up, and colleagues in a study published October 29 in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.  

Chonkus (right) settles quickly to the bottom of a water-filled test tube, compared with another strain of cyanobacteria (left). That quick accumulation of green sludge could make it more useful for sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide.Ted Chavkin

Chonkus was discovered in the shallow sunlit waters off the coast of Italy’s Vulcano Island, where volcanic gas-rich groundwater seeps into the sea. It’s an environment that Schubert and colleagues suspected to be fertile ground for finding photosynthesizing, carbon-consuming microbes. The waters collected from those seeps turned out to contain a spontaneous mutant strain of Synechococcus elongatus, a species of photosynthesizing bacteria that’s at the base of ocean food webs around the world (SN: 10/20/16; SN: 6/9/16).

S. elongatus is a favorite lab organism, because of how quickly it grows and how resistant it is to environmental stressors (SN: 6/14/17). And Chonkus, the new mutant, is like a superpowered version, the team found. When they cultured the strain in the laboratory, its individual cells were larger than those of other fast-growing cyanobacteria, and it built larger colonies. The mutant also contained more carbon than other strains of S. elongatus, apparently stored in white granules within its cells. The strain was also heavy: When placed into a test tube, the cyanobacteria rapidly sank to the bottom, forming a dense sludge. More