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Terra Daily

Earth science, climate impacts, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and the broad environmental changes shaping life on a changing planet.

When money grew on trees: The Aztecs and Maya used cacao beans — the raw ingredient of chocolate — as everyday currency: a single tomato might cost one bean, a hen turkey around a hundred. The beans were valuable enough that people were caught counterfeiting them, moulding fakes out of dough, wax or clay and colouring them to pass as the real, chocolatey thing

By Mal James · Jul 25, 2026

Finland has more saunas than passenger cars: roughly 3.3 million saunas for a population of about 5.5 million people, a tradition so central that UNESCO recognises Finnish sauna culture as heritage

By Mal James · Jul 25, 2026

Flora and Fauna

Over its whole short life a single honeybee makes only about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey, so the honey in one jar represents the entire life's work of hundreds of bees

By Mal James · Jul 25, 2026

The Great Pyramid we see today is a stripped-down skeleton: it was once sheathed in polished white limestone that made it gleam blindingly in the sun, until the casing was quarried away over the centuries to help build medieval Cairo

By Mal James · Jul 25, 2026

Three-toed sloths only poop about once a week, and to do it they climb all the way down from the safety of the treetops to the forest floor — one of the most dangerous things a sloth ever does — before hauling themselves back up

By Mal James · Jul 24, 2026

Having become one of the longest-lived nations on Earth, South Korea now also has the world's lowest birth rate, so its population is beginning to shrink even as its people live longer than almost anyone

By Mal James · Jul 24, 2026

Climate Science

In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 24, 2026

Climate Science

How did a peninsula stripped almost bare by war and firewood cutting in 1953 grow back into a country roughly two-thirds covered in forest within a single lifetime?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 23, 2026

Climate Science

Pando, a single quaking aspen in Utah, covers 106 acres as roughly 47,000 genetically identical stems sharing one root system, making it one organism that has been quietly cloning itself for an estimated 14,000 years.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 23, 2026

Climate Science

Behavioural researchers found that running on habit carried measurably less stress than making conscious choices — which is why the brain quietly converts more and more of a life into automatic routine, one domain at a time

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 23, 2026

Climate Science

Tardigrades survived 10 days of open space in a 2007 European Space Agency experiment, exposed to raw solar radiation and a vacuum that would rupture human lungs, and some of them came home and laid viable eggs.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 22, 2026

We assume loneliness comes from having no one around, but UCLA researchers found people can feel most isolated inside crowded social lives—when every relationship stays warm on the surface and reaches nothing underneath

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 21, 2026

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