“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is playing on the radio now in the Northern Hemisphere which begs the question, “What happened to the American chestnut?” Would you be surprised to hear there’s a ...

American chestnut trees — which produce nuts inside spikey pods — still grow in the wild, but are considered “functionally extinct” because they do not typically live to maturity due to a fungus ...

There’s an old holiday tradition in the U.S. that's become increasingly harder to celebrate: fire-roasted chestnuts. Thanks to an endemic fungus, about 4 billion American chestnut trees were killed ...

Although many Americans still associate the winter holidays with chestnuts, the tree that once produced them — the American chestnut — no longer does so, except in a few rare cases. During the first ...

NELSON COUNTY -- A much-mourned American legend still grows in the woodlands of the southern mountains. Quietly, on Appalachian hillsides millions of its progeny peek through the leaf litter. A few of ...

A startup called American Castanea has joined the quest to revive the American chestnut tree, the first step in its plan to give forests a genetic upgrade. Under a slice-of-heaven sky, 150 acres of ...

Federal regulatory approval for an experimental American chestnut tree made in Syracuse hit a snag recently when researchers discovered that they’ve been unwittingly experimenting with the wrong tree.

There's a new effort to replant functionally extinct trees that once populated the New York City area by the billions. Researchers are working to make the American Chestnut more resistant to the ...

“We called them gray ghosts,” the now 77-year-old retired forester says of the American chestnut tree scattered throughout his former North Carolina home and still towering over the forest floors.

The application of genetic engineering to food crops is controversial, and rightly so. Critics worry that changing genetics may have harmful, unanticipated effects on food safety and the environment.

Hannah Kliger joined the CBS News New York team as a reporter in May 2022, focusing her coverage in Brooklyn. A native New Yorker, Hannah has received several awards for her investigative journalism ...