Scientists are using the pine-forested slopes of a Mexican volcano as a test bed to see if trees could grow on a heated-up Mars, part of a vision of making the chilly and barren red planet habitable for humans one day. Planetary scientists at NASA and Mexican universities believe if they can warm Mars using heat-trapping gases, raise the air pressure and start photosynthesis, they could create an atmosphere that would support oxygen-breathing life forms. Getting trees growing would be a crucial step.

Scientists are using the pine-forested slopes of a Mexican volcano as a test bed to see if trees could grow on a heated-up Mars, part of a vision of making the chilly and barren red planet habitable for humans one day. Planetary scientists at NASA and Mexican universities believe if they can warm Mars using heat-trapping gases, raise the air pressure and start photosynthesis, they could create an atmosphere that would support oxygen-breathing life forms. Getting trees growing would be a crucial step.

Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. How best to carry out a fast-paced, decade by decade planetary facelift of Mars - a technique called "terraforming" - has been outlined by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution. Lowell presented his eye-opening Mars manifesto at Flight School, held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute, laying out a scientific plan to "experiment on a planet we're not living on."

Imagine strolling between vineyard rows thriving in the rusty red soils of Mars, or sipping that maiden Martian vintage. Since humans have advanced from rudimentary cave dwellers to explorers of space, Leonie Joubert considers whether the next fashionable terroir might, quite literally, be out of this world.

There’s a new mission to Mars. But we’re not talking about cute little robot rovers anymore. CBS News Correspondent Jerry Bowen reports on a plan to turn the Red Planet into a green one – one that could support life. "What we propose is to use greenhouse gases – the same ones that are currently on the earth causing climate change," said Margarita Marinova, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology.

Injecting synthetic "super" greenhouse gases into the Martian atmosphere could raise the planet's temperature enough to melt its polar ice caps and create conditions suitable for sustaining biological life. In fact, a team of researchers suggests that introducing global warming on the Red Planet may be the best approach for warming the planet's frozen landscape and turning it into a habitable world in the future.

At 18, Matthew Draper might just have an answer for which NASA and others have searched for years. "This is the answer to how we [could] live on Mars," he said of his science fair project, the result of two years of hard work, $44,000 worth of equipment donated by a national company, $2,000 from another company and $2,000 of his own money. The Eustis High School senior said this is the second year he has taken his project to the Lake County Science Fair.

For years scientists have been warning of an apocalyptic future facing the world. With the prospect of an earth made infertile from over-production and mass reliance on chemicals, coupled with an atmosphere polluted by greenhouse gases there seems little to celebrate. But belief is growing that an answer to some of the earth's problems are not only at hand, but under our feet. Specialists have just met in Perth to discuss the secrets of rock dust, a quarrying by-product that is at the heart of government-sponsored scientific trials and which, it is claimed, could revitalise barren soil and reverse climate change.

This spring two Russian satellites will be orbited with the task of blocking natural disasters and lighting certain spots on the Earth's surface. They will use the simple method of reflected light from thin-filmed space reflectors, writes Moskovsky Komsomolets. According to Aerospace Systems, thin-filmed reflectors are a kind of a sail made of modern materials that feel like a mixture of foil and cellophane. The most difficult task is to open the 25m sail in space. It is believed that the miracle sail will be able to correct weather, sending reflected light and warming the clouds to ensure good weather for a football match, for example.

The best way to make Mars habitable would be to inject synthetic greenhouse gases into its atmosphere, researchers said Thursday. The stuff could be shipped to Mars or manufactured there. Scientists and science-fiction authors have long pondered terraforming Mars, melting the vast stores of ice in its polar caps to create an environment suitable for humans. The topic is highly controversial.

The first survey in 1971 on the possibility of inadvertent human modification of climate stated that "Methane has no direct effects on the climate or the biosphere [and] it is considered to be of no importance". The gas did not even appear in the index of the major climatology book of the time (Lamb's Climate Past, Present and Future). Yet in the 2001 IPCC report, large parts of multiple chapters are dedicated to examining the sources, sinks, chemistry, history and potential future of this humble molecule. New papers are published every month relating paleo-climate changes to methane variability and discussing the possibility of significantly reducing future anthropogenic climate change by aggressively managing methane emissions. New hypotheses such as the "clathrate gun hypothesis" place methane variability at the centre of the debate on rapid climate change. What has fueled the rapid rise of methane from an obscure trace gas to a major factor in past, present and future climate change? As is usual in science, it is the conflation of multiple lines of evidence, that only when taken together do the connections and possible feedbacks seem obvious.

Artificial reality has taken on a whole new slant with developments in habitat and ecosystem creation by the Dubai-based Nakheel, which is creating its own customised islands for sale. Once the stuff of science fiction, terraforming is now an affordable reality as real estate can be designed and shaped to the most outrageous whim. Nakheel has gone so far as creating an artificial archipelago that replicates a scale model of the world with all major land masses, as well as replicas of lost cities from different parts of the ancient world that have to be seen to be believed. Surrounded by the Arabian Gulf and year round sunshine, the climate of Dubai is drawing in a record number of visitors and residents and the real estate market is booming.

An antioxidant, a type of compound that prevents certain types of damage to living cells, appears to allow some kinds of plants to thrive on metal-enriched soils that typically kill other plants, says a Purdue University scientist. This finding, published in the current issue of The Plant Cell, provides an important new insight for the development of plants that could be used to help clean polluted sites. The work also answers a fundamental question for researchers studying how certain types of plants tolerate levels of metals in their tissues that are toxic to most other plants.

In the next 100 years, Alaska will experience a massive loss of its historic tundra, as global warming allows these vast regions of cold, dry, lands to support forests and other vegetation that will dramatically alter native ecosystems, an Oregon State University researcher said Tuesday.

Mars Society founder, Robert Zubrin, talks about how to terraform the red planet. His engineer's eye reveals his robust plans for not just getting to a new home, but also how to build one from scratch.