By Eric Roston
October-December 2009 (Vol. 10, No. 4)
Ginkgo biloba embraces the sacred and the mundane like little else in our experience. Its most-ancient recognizable relatives are embedded in fossils
more than 270 million years old. Ginkgo’s survival into modernity was not merely a matter of luck. It needed an arsenal of molecular […] Read More »
by William L. Chameides
When we think of sea level, we tend to envision the water level in a bathtub—flat and uniform everywhere. In turn, we assume rising sea level is just like water in a tub with the spigot on, rising evenly along the coasts just as it does along the porcelain walls.
But […] Read More »
Editor’s Note: An icon of the environmental and counterculture movements of the 1960s, Stewart Brand created and edited The Whole Earth Catalog (1968–1985). Since then, he has cofounded the Global Business Network, The Long Now Foundation, and the All Species Foundation. Here, we offer you a small taste of
his latest book, Whole Earth […] Read More »
Elephants on the Edge
What Animals Teach Us about Humanity
By G.A. Bradshaw
Yale University Press, 2009
The plight of wild elephants—subject to poaching, culling, and habitat destruction—takes on a new dimension in view of the emotional trauma they suffer. When herds are broken up or destroyed, the remaining animals often suffer from the […] Read More »
Cougars aren’t the only species that need adult supervision to keep them in line. When the California Condor Recovery Program began releasing the first captivity-bred condors in 1992, the young birds ripped apart cabins, tore windshield wipers off cars, and pestered humans for food. “They are naturally curious birds, but they didn’t have a […] Read More »
When Bron the cougar got old enough to live on his own, he faced the same threat as all male cougars: His father essentially told him to find his own turf—or else. Rather than risk getting killed by his territorial dad, Bron (a nickname given by the researchers who tracked him) set out […] Read More »
How is it that scientists could deny the reality of fish? Yet, absurd as it sounds, that is exactly what the scientists known as “cladists,” from the Greek klados (“branch”), did in the early 1980s. Their goal was Darwin’s: to order the living world strictly according to evolutionary relatedness. That is, they resolved […] Read More »
If it were a reality show, they might call it “The Ultimate Head Count.” But while forecasting global population might never make for compelling cable, the problem has fascinated scholars for more than 300 years. And it seems they’re getting better at calculating credible numbers.
Even before Thomas Malthus warned in 1798 that […] Read More »
A Sampling of Forecasts for World Population in 2000 In 1695, one demographer predicted global population would reach about 500 million by the year 2000. Although forecasts have gotten more accurate over time, predicting population remains tricky due to complicated variables ranging from consumption rates to technological innovation.
Source: Caselli G., J. Vallin, and […] Read More »
A bold new project calls for transforming vast swaths of the Sahara into a CO2-absorbing forest. Spearheaded by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the plan would start by building desalination plants on the coastlines surrounding the desert. Aqueducts would carry freshwater inland to feed plantations of eucalyptus […] Read More »
In a deft act of ecological ju-jitsu, Illi-nois researchers are testing a system that could stop one of the world’s most dominant invasive species: Asian carp.
The fish are wreaking environmental havoc across the American Midwest, in part by gobbling up plankton at the base of the food chain. To halt the invasion, wildlife […] Read More »
After the September 11, 2001, attacks, Todd DeSantis and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory started developing a device to detect airborne pathogens released by terrorists. The technology was designed to take a quick census of microbes, allowing officials to raise an alarm if dangerous bacteria appeared. Now, the same technology could be […] Read More »
When water evaporates from a tree leaf, it triggers a chain reaction that can pull other water molecules all the way up the trunk of a 90-meter-tall redwood. Each molecule attracts the one behind it, creating a continuous stream from the roots to the leaves.
Now Michel Maharbiz, a researcher at the University of […] Read More »
You’ll have to forgive prairie dogs if they feel like sitting ducks. For starters, the burrowing rodents face an epidemic of sylvatic plague, a disease sparked by the same bacteria as the “black death” that ravaged Europe in the middle ages. What’s more, the researchers behind a new vaccine don’t have the prairie dogs’ […] Read More »
Vertical farming has generated plenty of buzz as a way for cities to eat sustainably, but little practical progress has been made—until now. Valcent Products Inc. has developed a vertical farming system for commercial use and is testing it on some tough customers: primates and other animals in the U.K.’s Paignton Zoo.
Dubbed “VertiCrop” […] Read More »
