When hunters spotted nearly 100 narwhals trapped in a tiny patch of ice-enclosed ocean off Greenland in the fall of 2009, the news attracted little notice. To narwhal specialists, however, it seemed a little strange. Although ice entrapments were known to routinely kill narwhals on their wintering grounds in the early spring, the Greenland […] Read More »
Projections indicate as many as 4 billion cars on the road by 2050—more than quadruple the number today. That’s a recipe for a lot of gridlock.
Today, car-sharing services such as Zipcar offer an early glimpse at one solution for easing traffic congestion. For example, each available shared vehicle in the U.S. replaced an […] Read More »
Finding sites for solar, wind, and biofuel projects can be a challenge. They need big chunks of land that aren’t used to grow food or support wildlife. That’s why some experts have urged using abandoned industrial sites. Now, researchers have another idea: airports.
“There are 44,010 airports in the world and 15,079 in the […] Read More »
Could wandering albatrosses and British plants be gone with the wind? Two recent studies take a close look at how climate shifts are influencing wind patterns—and how those changes could in turn affect organisms that depend on a fresh breeze.
In the Southern Ocean, wandering albatrosses have so far appeared to benefit from climate-driven […] Read More »
Ghost towns are a standard part of western U.S. lore. But a brand-new ghost town for the twenty-first century? That’s the strange vision for “The Center,” an Orwellian-sounding city slated to rise in the New Mexico desert in 2014.
The Center will house all you’d expect of a functioning metropolis—a dense downtown and sprawling […] Read More »
In the Field, Among the FeatheredBy Thomas R. DunlapOxford University Press, 2011
Birdwatching has always been something of an environmental gateway drug. And for most birders, the field guide is required paraphernalia. In this book, Dunlap, a history professor, scrupulously documents the bird guide’s evolution. He takes readers from Florence Merriam Bailey’s 1899 work, […] Read More »
For many and perhaps most people, climate change is an abstract concept—something that will happen in the future. Weather, on the other hand, is very real. It’s here and now, in your face, and sometimes in your basement. But lately, the long term and the short term seem to be colliding. No longer is […] Read More »
By Mark Hertsgaard
Stories that sound too good to be true usually are; an honest journalist learns that pretty early in his or her career. But every so often there is an exception. The exception I’m about to describe is from Africa, which makes it doubly welcome. For Africa is not only the continent […] Read More »
By Richard Conniff
Twenty years ago this past October, environmentalists around the world celebrated a landmark deal between a major drug company, Merck, and Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute, INBio. Until then, the standard practice had been for drug companies to collect biological specimens anywhere they wanted, ship them home to study, and (if […] Read More »
By John Carey
Small and slight, dressed in a slim gray suit, accused cat poisoner and wildlife biologist Dr. Nico Dauphiné stood in a Washington, D.C., courtroom in mid-December 2011. Earlier that year, a neighbor in Dauphiné’s Washington apartment building, suspecting that the biologist was tampering with the food left out for outdoor cats, […] Read More »
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 »
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Changing the BatteryFlamingos stand precariously on top of one of the world’s largest deposits of lithium—the very stuff that powers our mobile world
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Shrink to FitHumanity appears to be ushering in new age of minifauna, a kind of Lilliputian world full of runts and dwarves |
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Chasing RainbowsLured by a utopian visions, agencies dropped billions of trout into thousands of lakes. Now, they’re determined to undo the damage they caused. |
