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Photos courtesy of Katie Gough, Centre for African Conservation Ecology
The behavior and physiology of elephants in Addo National Park, South Africa, have been shaped by a gargantuan fence surrounding their habitat. Inbreeding left most female elephants tuskless in the 90s, and confinement has led to lethal fights among males. Above, the […] Read More »
Courtesy of the British Antarctic Survey
Emperor penguins in and out of the water. Researchers now have a leg up tracking colonies in Antarctica. Satellite images show dark stains on the ice made by penguin fecal matter. Using these markings, scientists can locate bird populations and can record their movements. Read more>>
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Conservation Refugees
The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples
By Mark Dowie
MIT Press, 2009
Yosemite, one of the oldest and most-famous national parks in the U.S., was made into a wilderness area only after the extermination of native people who for centuries had lived in its valley. Conservation Refugees documents their […] Read More »
A review by Jeffrey Lockwood
The Medea Hypothesis
Peter Ward
Princeton University Press, 2009
The thesis of Peter Ward’s The Medea Hypothesis is simple and provocative: Life is self-destructive.
Alluding to Medea, the mythic Greek villainess who killed her children, Ward inverts James Lovelock’s famous Gaia hypothesis. Earth is not a stable, self-regulating organism […] Read More »
Most tigers have over 100 stripes, aligned in a unique pattern that can be as intricate—and as hard to identify—as human fingerprints. So it seems sensible that, in search of a better way to monitor tigers and the criminals who poach them, scientists have turned to technology normally used by police.
To keep track […] Read More »
Even if scientists find a way to soak up atmospheric CO2, there remains the problem of where to put the gas once it’s captured. Some researchers have proposed storing it underground, but there’s always the chance it could leak out and wreak havoc. Now, two geochemists have come up with an alternative that they […] Read More »
A one-meter-long octopus can squeeze its body through a hole just two centimeters wide. What’s more, its arms can stretch to twice their original length and can alternate between being soft and rigid, depending on the task at hand. Now, scientists are developing a robot that mimics this unique dexterity, with hopes it will […] Read More »
A truck with a furry coating might be an odd sight. But it’s not beyond the realm of imagination for a group of engineers at the University of Genoa, Italy, who say that fibers designed to imitate bird feathers could one day improve the efficiency of trucks, ships, and small unmanned planes.
The project […] Read More »
By Douglas Fox
A three-meter fence, anchored by sections of railroad track driven like stakes into the ground, cuts across South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province.
On one side sits Addo Park, a thriving slice of wilderness containing the largest elephant population in the region. These beasts, with their rare tuskless females, represent a gem […] Read More »
By Cynthia Mills
John Teem and Juan Gutierrez have a bizarre solution to an intractable problem: They want to eradicate invasive fish populations from the inside out by using transvestite fish.
In all fairness, “transvestite” isn’t their term of choice. They call these fish intersex. In some cases, they might look like normal females, […] Read More »
By Roberta Kwok
In the late 1990s, a set of alarming maps created a stir in the scientific community. Based on predictions by a team of Dutch and Australian researchers and initially published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the maps charted how global warming could increase the risk of malaria in seemingly unlikely […] Read More »
Aizen, M.A. and L.D. Harder. 2009. The global stock of domesticated honey bees is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. Current Biology 19(11):915-918.
Reports of bee colony losses in the U.S. and Europe have triggered fears of a worldwide “pollination crisis.” A new study in Current Biology suggests the decline might not be […] Read More »
Johnson, E. 2009. Charcoal versus LPG grilling: A carbon-footprint comparison. Environmental Impact Assessment Review DOI:10.1016/j.eiar.2009.02.004.
Who says science is no picnic? To assess the carbon footprint of barbecues, Eric Johnson rounded up eight volunteer grillers (including himself) and held the equivalent of 50 cookouts.
The researchers used both gas and charcoal grills and kept […] Read More »
Fretwell, P.T. and P.N. Trathan. 2009. Penguins from space: faecal stains reveal the location of emperor penguin colonies. Global Ecology and Biogeography DOI:10.1111/j.1466-8238.2009.00467.x.
Animals often mark their territory with the only thing they’ve got going for them: their poop. Now researchers are using this idea at a whole new level. They are tracking penguin […] Read More »
McMurray, S.E., and J.R. Pawlik. 2009. A novel technique for the reattachment of large coral reef sponges. Restoration Ecology 17(2)192-195.
Scientists have invented a better fixer-upper for damaged coral reefs. The method could aid local restoration efforts to rehabilitate these ecosystems in the aftermath of hurricanes or harmful human activities.
After such events, large […] Read More »
