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 »
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 »
By Anders Halverson
John Muir, the pioneering wilderness advocate, liked to call California’s Sierra Nevada “the Range of Light,” and once you’ve experienced the luminous granite, sparkling waters, and brilliant sunlight of the high country, it’s hard to think of those mountains in any other way. Thousands of lakes punctuate the range, providing […] Read More »
The Monadnock Building in downtown Chicago, Illinois, was completed in 1894 and was once the largest office building in the world. With austere, 17-story façades ornamented mainly by columns of bay windows, it’s the sort of structure that led the poet Carl Sandburg to call Chicago “City of the Big Shoulders.”
It’s also a […] Read More »
By Richard Conniff
People who work in the natural world often get asked how on Earth they came to devote their lives to gastropods, or ground beetles, or whatever other species happens to have found its way into their hearts. What the questioners generally mean is that becoming a naturalist is a little enviable, […] Read More »
By John Carey
As a scientist working on breakthrough lighting technologies, Jeff Tsao is a firm believer in the magic of energy efficiency. After all, the numbers are compelling. Replace traditional bulbs with far more efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and, studies suggest, the U.S. could cut the electricity used by lighting by at least […] Read More »
By Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris
With e-readers like Apple’s new iPad and Amazon’s Kindle touting their vast libraries of digital titles, some bookworms are bound to wonder if tomes-on-paper will one day become quaint relics. But the question also arises, which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book?
To find […] Read More »
By Burkhard Bilger
Illustration by Dan Page
Two men walked into a bar called the Axe and Fiddle. It was a Thursday night in early August in the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and the house was full. The men ordered drinks and a vegetarian Reuben and made their way to the only seats […] Read More »
Martin Wikelski, the soft-spoken but relentless director of the ornithological station of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, spent decades gluing tracking tags to everything from dragonflies to fruit bats and then chasing after them in cars and planes. Now he dreams of using the International Space Station to track masses of migrants as they navigate the […] Read More »
Mark Post has never been tempted to taste the “fake” pork that he grows in his lab. As far as he knows, the only person who has swallowed a strip of the pale, limp muscle tissue is a Russian TV journalist who visited the lab this year to film its work. “He just took […] Read More »
By David Malakoff
Illustration by Philip Nagle
At about the size of a dime, Kugelann’s green clock beetle would never be mistaken for a giant. But in the world of European ground beetles, Poecilus kugelanni is no runt. Indeed, some Belgian biologists recently classified the gaudy, green-winged creature as a “big” beetle.
Big, […] Read More »
By Sarah DeWeerdt
Sometime in mid-2007, the world’s demographic scales tipped. Only a century earlier, urbanites represented just over 14 percent of humanity. But by 2007, a majority of the world’s people lived in cities, and more are on the way. Over the coming decades, cities will absorb all predicted global population growth and […] Read More »
The waters off Namibia once nurtured one of the world’s richest sardine fisheries, which attracted huge flocks of seabirds and predatory fish. By the 1970s, however, overfishing and climate and current shifts had transformed the vibrant ecosystem into a conservationist’s nightmare. Massive dead zones of oxygen-poor water formed. Swarms of microbes and voracious jellyfish […] Read More »
The other day, I half-jokingly told a Canadian friend who is a pastor that I needed to do penance for all the air travel I’m doing for work. He fired back an e-mail with a link to a new Web site that lets me calculate my carbon footprint and make a donation to offset […] Read More »
One sticky afternoon last summer, Richard Hofstetter, a beetle expert at Northern Arizona University, picked his way through yellow-green grass on the slopes of Humphreys Peak. Looking up the mountain, he could see the skeletal frames of dead trees amid evergreen forest. The ground was a mess of lifeless branches—about half the conifers were […] Read More »
