How poop turns into forests | Ludmila Rattis

What can happy rats teach us about human joy? Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert describes how her team trained rats to drive tiny cars to earn treats — and noticed something surprising about how effort and anticipation affect the brain. The experiment opens new questions ab ...  Show more

When the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires destroyed his home and neighborhood, scientist Christian Busch encountered the opposite of serendipity: "zemblanity," or bad luck by design. Drawing on more than a decade of scientific research, he explores how people can navigate unpredictabil ...  Show more

It has taken him 40 years, but Omar Tello has turned a patch of exhausted farmland in Ecuador back into rainforest. One of his biggest challenges was repairing the soil. His land was so degraded he had to make enough new soil - from unwanted wood shavings and chicken manure - to ...  Show more

The Amazon rainforest is perhaps the world's greatest single environmental asset. For years the accepted wisdom has been that the remorseless tide of destruction there is unstoppable. Justin Rowlatt travels to Brazil to question this conventional account and finds that over the l ...  Show more

The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest but this crucial carbon sink is facing increased deforestation. Land clearing for mining or agriculture has increased under Brazil's president Jair Bolsanaro. But the world needs the Amazon jungle to keep absorbing carbon if more ambit ...  Show more

Australia is famous for its unique wildlife and landscapes. But Australia also has the highest mammal extinction rate in the world, and there are big declines in frogs, reptiles, and birds caused by introduced predators and land clearing. Some species are hanging on in small numb ...  Show more