An elephant never forgets: the old saying has some basis in scientific fact, at least when it comes to remembering an encounter with the business end of an angry honeybee. And that may be good news for farmers, say Lucy King and her colleagues at Save the Elephants in Nairobi, Kenya, who have devised […] Read More »
At the Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Washington, inmates are raising endangered Oregon spotted frogs for reintroduction into the wild. Compared with frogs raised in zoo programs, the frogs at Cedar Creek are significantly beefier and reach maturity faster. Maybe that’s because the prisoners, who are paid 42 cents per hour for their […] Read More »
Home sellers take note: That blue jay in your backyard could add $32,000 to your asking price. An innovative study of home sales in Lubbock, Texas, suggests that planners can use relatively simple bird counts to analyze the ecological and economic values of urban landscapes. And it finds that even a single extra species […] Read More »
A long-running debate over the benefits of trophy hunting for conservation is about to get a bit more heated. A new study of trophy-hunted cats concludes that—paradoxically—as protection increases for a threatened species, so does hunting. The find suggests trophy hunters are over-exploiting the rare cats just when their populations can least take the […] Read More »
Your nice, clean clothes may be having a surprising effect on ocean pollution. Household washing machines appear to be a major source of so-called “microplastic” pollution—bits of polyester and acrylic smaller than the head of a pin.
Microplastic debris “is accumulating in marine habitats,” Mark Anthony Browne and colleagues report in Environmental Science & […] Read More »
There’s a lot of “oomph” in a step: up to ten watts of power is lost as heat each time a foot hits the ground. Mobile devices such as phones and laptops use between one and 15 watts, so harnessing our “foot power” would make a notable difference for consumers. So far, however, attempts […] Read More »
Mass bird kills at television towers and skyscrapers have received extensive attention over the past few decades. But the kills are having little “discernible” impact on North American bird numbers, concludes a comprehensive tally.
Past studies have estimated that from 1 million to 50 million birds are killed annually at communication towers in North […] Read More »
And who says regulations don’t work? The number of sea turtles accidentally caught and killed in fishing gear in U.S. coastal waters has declined by an estimated 90 percent since 1990, according to an analysis of fisheries data.
Before rules to reduce such bycatch by fishing boats were set, more than 300,000 turtles became […] Read More »
Worms are turning the tables. The early bird may get the worm, but researchers say invasive European earthworms appear to be reducing densities of ground-dwelling songbirds in North American forests.
Historically, the forests of northern North America were worm-free—a legacy of the Ice Age, which ended some 20,000 years ago. Over the past few […] Read More »
Seemed like a cool idea: paint the world’s roofs white to reflect more sunlight, and it could help cool down both cities and the planet. A new study, however, finds it’s a lot more complicated—even as the research dispels climate-change deniers’ claims that urban “heat islands” are a major cause of apparent temperature increases. […] Read More »
When it comes to raising cattle, ranchers don’t like competition. In Africa, that has often meant eradicating or fencing out wild animals, such as zebras, that might eat the sweet grass their cattle need to get fat. New research, however, suggests that grazing by wild animals doesn’t necessarily harm—and sometimes can even benefit—cattle.
“There […] Read More »
Jon Christensen reviews Rambunctious Garden
Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World By Emma MarrisBloomsbury, 2011
Every so often a book comes along that seems perfectly timed to a pivotal moment in a field—when an old set of ideas is losing its grip and gives way to the new. Rambunctious Garden is that book […] Read More »
The God SpeciesBy Mark LynasNational Geographic, 2011
On or about October 31, 2011—for the first time in history—the world population topped 7 billion. According to Mark Lynas, it’s a human world, and everything else is just along for the ride. So what do we call this epoch? The Homogocene? The Anthropocene? For Lynas, […] Read More »
Andre Sharon, an engineer at Boston University and the Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation (CMI), has an idea that could launch a thousand ships. He wants to build a fleet of ships—mobile wave-energy harvesters, he calls them—to ply the ocean, fishing for energy.
Although ocean waves are abundant and constant, until now it’s been […] Read More »
Mary Edna Fraser uses the ancient technique of batik to illustrate landscapes around the world that are most vulnerable to climate change. Her recent work adorns Global Climate Change: A Primer by Orrin and Keith Pilkey.
Batik is a wax-resistant fabric-dyeing technique. Fraser pencils her designs onto silk, then applies multiple layers of wax […] Read More »
