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A woman had to be rescued by police and firefighters after she became stuck inside a giant banyan tree in Key West. According to the Key West Police Facebook page, Officer Scott Standerwick and Fire Rescue helped the local woman after she somehow got stuck in the tree. Police also posted a photo of the woman with part of her legs and body sticking out of the tree with officers nearby. "Protect and serve!" the Facebook post proclaimed.

KEY WEST, Fla., - Police in Key West helped to rescue a woman who had become stuck in a giant banyan tree. Officer Scott Standerwick worked alongside firefighters to rescue the woman, who happened to be a Key West local, from the tree. "They popped her out like a cork," a Key West Police Department spokesperson told ABC 10. The woman had reportedly been trying to climb the tree before she became stuck.

SEATTLE - Police and firefighters spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday morning trying to coax down a man who climbed to the top of downtown Seattle's iconic 80-foot-tall Sequoia tree and has refused to come down. Crews brought a ladder truck to the scene, at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Stewart Street, after receiving reports of a man stuck in the upper branches of the tall tree, just after 11:30 a.m. Tuesday. The fire truck's ladder was extended to within a few feet of the man, then negotiators climbed up and tried to speak with him. So far he...

A Chicago-area driver, whom police suspect was drunk (you’ll never guess HOW), crashed into a tree and wedged it into her engine bay. But instead of stopping like a normal human being might have, the trunk driver inexplicably just kept on going. The Roselle Police Department posted two pictures on its Facebook page depicting a car with a 15-foot tree sticking out of its grille. The car had been driving in suburban Chicago late at night on the 23rd of January when another driver spotted it and called the cops. An officer did eventually spot the car, possibly from a...

Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated. The new sapling was sprouted from a 2,000-year-old date palm excavated in Masada, the site of a cliff-side fortress in Israel where ancient Jews are said to have killed themselves to avoid capture by Roman invaders. Dubbed the "Methuselah Tree" after the oldest person in the Bible, the new plant has been growing steadily, and after 26 months, the tree was nearly four feet (1.2 meters) tall.

I want one!

In New York City, even sidewalk space is coveted real estate. Street vendors sometimes spend a fortune or languish for years on waiting lists to acquire one of the permits that allow them to sell goods in tightly regulated locations. But once a year, there's an exception, laid out in an artfully worded city ordinance: During the month of December, anyone may sell "coniferous trees" just about anywhere - no license required. It's a rare tree-for-all. Peddlers flock in from across North America. Big trucks carrying huge loads of trees arrive in the dead of night. Stands selling coniferous trees...

It came down to the addition of a single word for the a tree lighting ceremony, but that word carried enough significance for borough Councilwoman Charlene Storey to resign. Minutes after the council voted 4-2 Thursday night to change the name of the ceremony from A Tree Lighting to A Christmas Tree Lighting, the councilwoman-at-large, left the meeting. She later submitted her letter of resignation with the municipal clerk's office. "I cannot in good conscience continue to be part of a council that is exclusionary or to work with a Mayor who is such," Storey said in her letter. When...

A British tree thought to be up to 5,000 years old has started to change sex, a "rare and unusual" phenomenon not fully understood by scientists, a botanist said Monday. The Fortingall Yew, in Perthshire, central Scotland has for hundreds of years been recorded as male, but has recently begun sprouting berries, suggesting that at least part of the tree is changing gender. "It's a rare occurence ... rare and unusual and not fully understood," said Max Coleman of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, who spotted the berries. "It's thought that there's a shift in the balance of hormone-like compounds that...

The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well...

Every so often you will see articles warning that some species is going extinct. And usually it's not really a species -- you never hear about "leopards" going extinct, usually it's "purple dotted left handed bisexual Nepalese leopards" or some subvariety.  We are assured they are going extinct because fewer have been seen recently. But the Earth is so big, how can we really be sure that some subspecies is going extinct just because we see fewer of them? After all, only three percent of the land mass of the Earth is urbanized. Animals could easily be hidden in...

It seems that scientists were a little off in calculating the number of trees on the planet. You remember trees: they turn CO2 into oxygen and water. In fact, if you buy a “carbon credit,” you are paying to plant trees to buy an indulgence for your private jet travel -- just like Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposedly do. Well, all those calculations of doom over purported CO2-caused global warming may be a little more unsettled. The Wall Street Journal reports:

There are just over three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation. Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was around 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees...

The global map of tree density at the square-kilometer pixel scale. Credit: Crowther, et al A new Yale-led study estimates that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization, the study estimates. Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level. Their results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive...

Hope you like increasing prices, everyone! #ForTheMiddleClass https://twitter.com/WSJPolitics/status/627796768328183808 … It’s not like Americans weren’t warned. All in the name of fighting “climate change,” of course. Has that ever really been a barrier for this administration?

A township view 200 years in the making has changed, after a historic tree town officials thought was protected by municipal ordinance was lawfully cut down by a developer. The swamp white oak tree at 29 Ocean Street had been designated a "bicentennial tree" in Millburn – one that town officials believed to be at least 200 years old. It was one of 23 trees designated as such in the town's 2014 Environmental Resource Inventory Report. The township had an ordinance prohibiting the removal of the historical trees, and named trees to the protected list via resolutions. "I looked at...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Road crews spent hours cutting a delivery truck out of a tree Wednesday afternoon. The truck came down next to the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 near the Old St. Augustine Road exit near Baptist Medical Center South.

et out the cigars—Methuselah, a Judean date palm tree that was grown from a 2,000 year old seed, has become a papa plant. Elaine Solowey, of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel, recently broke the good news to National Geographic: “He is over three meters [ten feet] tall, he's got a few offshoots, he has flowers, and his pollen is good," she says. "We pollinated a female with his pollen, a wild [modern] female, and yeah, he can make dates." Methuselah sprouted back in 2005, when agriculture expert Solowey germinated his antique seed. It had...

... The book’s title is Mr. Harari’s reminder that, long ago, the world held half a dozen species of human, of which only Homo sapiens—thee and me—today survives. The trajectory of our species, Mr. Harari says, can be traced as a succession of three revolutions: the cognitive revolution (when we got smart), the agricultural revolution (when we got nature to do what we wanted), and the scientific revolution (when we got dangerously powerful). Humanity, Mr. Harari predicts, will see one more epochal event. We will vanish within a few centuries, either because we’ve gained such godlike powers as to become...