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Corey Filiaggi is describing the busy and collegial environment at the Berman Zebrafish Laboratory, where she’s spent the past three years working towards a master’s degree in Pathology. And it’s true that, only hours after a midnight return from the North Atlantic Zebrafish Research Symposium in Maine, the motley mix of undergraduate and graduate students and lab technicians milling about give off the vibe of a very science-focused village.

The world’s open grasslands and the beneficial fires that sustain them have shrunk rapidly over the past two decades, thanks to a massive increase in agriculture, according to a new study led by University of California, Irvine and NASA researchers published today in Science.

Analyzing 1998 to 2015 data from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, the international team found that the total area of Earth’s surface torched by flames had fallen by nearly 25 percent, or 452,000 square miles (1.2 million square kilometers). Decreases were greatest in Central America and South America, across the Eurasian steppe and in northern Africa, home to fast-disappearing lions, rhinoceroses and other iconic species that live on these fire-forged savannas.

Scientists recently reconstructed the skin of endangered green turtles, marking the first time that skin of a non-mammal was successfully engineered in a laboratory, according to a recently published U.S. Geological Survey study. In turn, the scientists were able to grow a tumor-associated virus to better understand certain tumor diseases.

A group of scientists from several research centres and international universities led by Manuel Martínez García, from the University of Alicante Research Group in Molecular Microbian Ecology has discovered forty-four of the most abundant new viruses in all the Earth's oceans. The finding has been achieved thanks to the application of cutting-edge techniques that mix flow cytometry and genomics and molecular biology techniques. The findings will appear today, 23 June 2017, in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Climate scientists agree that this century is getting much warmer and that such warming will likely bring economic pain to the U.S., but economists aren't sure how much. Now, a team of scientists and economists, writing in the upcoming issue of the journal Science, says it can at least tell which parts of the country are likely to suffer the most.