Radioactive landscape too dangerous for human life now boasts some of the world's wildest horses, wolves and Eurasian lynx

The site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster has become a haven for large wild mammals living in the region, scientists say.

Photographer Pierpaolo Mittica has been documenting the passage of time at the disaster site as clean-up crews, tourists, and war, come and go in a landscape still teeming with radiation. "We are just at the beginning of the story of Chernobyl." A plume of ...

Olena Maruzhenko remembers her mother sobbing when Soviet police told them to evacuate their home in the village of Korogod in northern Ukraine. Just 12km away, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had exploded, sending a shaft of blue light into ...

CHERNOBYL, Ukrainian SSR (WCSC) — Sunday marks 40 years since the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the town of Pripyat in Ukraine. In 1986, an explosion and fire at the power plant released large quantities of radioactive particles into ...

As a blue coach pulls up outside Chernobyl nuclear-power plant, friendly stray dogs approach it. It has passed through multiple Ukrainian military checkpoints—necessary since Russian troops briefly occupied the plant on the first day of the invasion in 2022.

Today, biologists taking a closer look at the animals located inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ), which is about the size of Yosemite National Park, and investigating how decades of radiation exposure may have altered animals’ genomes—and even, possibly, sped up evolution.