Ah, Halloween, the only time of the year when parents give their kids license to hoard and consume vast quantities of candy. On this special night, every child's worst nightmare has nothing to do with the ghoulish pageantry of the holiday, and everything to do with that mysterious stranger who plops raisins and apples inside your sweet receptacle, thereby soiling your keep. But that stranger might be on to something, and there's a lot more to this story than the...

As this animation of recently released NASA photos shows, São Paulo's worst drought in more than 80 years has taken a toll on the Brazilian state's water supply. The animation shows the Jaguari Reservoir on Aug. 16, 2013 and then again just under a year later on Aug. 3, 2014, during the drought. The Jaguari Reservoir is just one of four lakes that comprise the Cantareira watershed, which supplies around 45 percent of Sao Paulo state's more than 40 million...

In the latest study to look at the possible connection between the precipitous decline of Arctic sea ice and extreme weather over the Northern Hemisphere, researchers found that cold winters over Europe and Asia were twice as likely thanks to sea ice decline in a particular part of the Arctic. The proposed connection between the precipitous decline of Arctic sea ice and extreme weather over North America, Europe and Asia has garnered a lot of public attention in recent years,...

When Hurricane Gonzalo made landfall on the island of Bermuda as a Category 2 storm, it knocked out power to nearly the entire island, ripped roofs off buildings, downed trees and severely damaged an important shipyard. But the powerful hurricane also kicked up sediment from Bermuda and its coral reefs, a lot of it. The animation above, which strings together two recently released NASA photos, shows just that. The first image shows Bermuda on relatively cloud-free October 2, 2014, still...

Scientists are still trying to figure out what happened to all of the 172 million gallons of crude oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico after BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded 41 miles off the Louisiana coast more than four years ago. A large portion of that oil floated to the surface and washed ashore along the Gulf Coast, but an estimated 2 million barrels' worth never got that far. According to Grist, scientists suspected those 2 million...

For the last seven years-plus New York City's parks department in tandem with the private non-profit the New York Restoration Project (NYRP) have worked toward planting 1 million trees in the city's five boroughs by 2017. And they've made great progress, with more than 900,000 trees (and counting) planted across the city's planters, parks and other spaces a year and a half ahead of schedule. But in that time, Shubhendu Sharma could've grown an urban jungle, literally. Sharma runs thestartup...

(NASA Earth Observatory) The West, notorious for its large, mercurial wildfires, often dominates headlines during wildfire season. And for good reason, according to the Insurance Information Institute, the top 10 most wildfire prone states, based off data from the National Interagency Fire Center, are all located in the West. So far this year there have been multiple, massive blazes like California's King Fire, which grew to more than 97,000 acres -- larger than Las Vegas, Atlanta and Philadelphia -- and...

(Stock) Everything about Canada seems to scream nature. Canadahas one of the lowest population densities in the world, and a vast area north of the highly-populated zone along the U.S./Canada border is mostly unspoilt wilderness. The country's flag, emblazoned with a giant red maple leaf, symbolically hat tips Mother Nature. Even a snippet of the country's national anthem goes so far to call for the preservation of Canada's "glorious" land: "Oh, Canada...keep our land glorious and free!" And yet, Canada,...

A team of NOAA divers has just returned from a month-long mission to pull up marine garbage from the ocean floor around Hawaii's Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the world's biggest marine conservation areas. A marine debris free diver carefully cuts a large mass of fishing net that was found at Pearl and Hermes Atoll. (NOAA) What they found was "shocking," said Mark Manuel, the mission's chief scientist and operations manager for the...

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, left, and Chairman of the IPCC Rajendra K. Pachauri present a comprehensive report by the UN climate panel, summarizing the three interim reports previously released on climate changes, Sunday Nov. 2. 2014, at Tivoli Congress Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. (AP Photo/POLFOTO, Jens Dresling) Climate change is here and human caused and the time to act is now, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday. The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on...

The Green Bridge passes over full water levels at a section of Lake Oroville near the Bidwell Marina on July 20, 2011, in Oroville, California. (Paul Hames/California Department of Water Resources/Getty Images) Book it: This year will go down as the hottest in California’s history. With just two months left in the year, there’s a better than 99 percent chance that 2014 will be the warmest year on record for California, according to National Weather Service meteorologists. The state has...

The Green Bridge passes over full water levels at a section of Lake Oroville near the Bidwell Marina on July 20, 2011, in Oroville, California. (Paul Hames/California Department of Water Resources/Getty Images) With all the images of the drought-plagued, dried-up waterways of California (see above), and a growing population and economy, it's easy to assume that the U.S. would actually use more water now, than say, 40 years ago. But, according to a United States Geological Survey (USGS) report, the...