Smithsonian scientists are working on a lunar vault that will cryopreserve animal cells from Earth’s most endangered species.

The Seed Vault is an underground facility, opened in 2008, that houses more than 930,000 samples of seeds from around the world. It serves as a global backup for individual countries’ seed banks. To ...

Humanity’s last hope to feed our future may lie dormant in a once-abandoned Arctic coal mine on a remote island in Norway. The “doomsday seed vault,” as it’s colloquially known, was built a decade ago ...

Today, seed banks around the world are doing much of the work of saving crop varieties that could be essential resources under future growing conditions. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway ...

Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet and cassava. In the past, farmers grew tens of ...

In the seven years since the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened, hundreds of thousands of seed samples have gone into its icy tombs. And not one has come out—until now. This week the International ...

In hopes of bolstering our defenses in the event of a major food crisis, researchers sent tens of thousands of seeds from different types of rice last week to a "doomsday vault" in the archipelago ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... By Adrian Higgins, The Washington Post The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is not exactly at the North Pole, but it’s nearer to it than just about anywhere else, ...

HELSINKI — Nearly 10 years after a “doomsday” seed vault opened on an Arctic island, some 50,000 new samples from seed collections around the world have been deposited in the world’s largest ...

The seed bank designed to preserve the world’s crops and plants in the event of global disaster isn’t prepared to withstand the greatest global disaster facing our planet: global warming. Melting ...