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 »
In the heart of Africa’s savanna lies a city that is a model of sustainable development. Its buttressed towers are built entirely from natural, biodegradable materials. Its inhabitants live and work in quarters that are air-conditioned and humidity-regulated without consuming a single watt of electricity. Water comes from wells that dip deep into the […] Read More »
Joe Mascaro, a PhD student in a T-shirt and floral-print shorts, is soaking up the diversity of the Hawaiian jungle. Above, a green canopy blocks out most of the sky. Aerial roots wend their way down past tropical trunks, tree ferns, and moss-covered prop roots to an understory of ferns and seedlings. The jungle […] Read More »
All those people driving Toyota Priuses aren’t necessarily acting out of concern for the planet, a new study suggests. Rather, consumers may buy environmentally friendly products in order to make themselves appear superior.
Being a green consumer doesn’t always make economic sense. After all, many green products are more expensive and lack some of […] 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. |
