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 »
The God SpeciesBy Mark LynasNational Geographic, 2011
On or about October 31, 2011—for the first time in history—the world population topped 7 billion. According to Mark Lynas, it’s a human world, and everything else is just along for the ride. So what do we call this epoch? The Homogocene? The Anthropocene? For Lynas, […] Read More »
Gary Paul Nabhan of the University of Arizona in Tucson spent much of his career highlighting the need to preserve heirloom crops and culturally important native plants. Now he’s taken on the threat that modern food processing and cultural homogenization pose to the biodiversity of peperoni, pickles—and beer. In other words, Nabhan is calling […] Read More »
By Elin Kelsey
Consider this. You and I may not know each other, but we probably know some of the same people. At least we know someone who knows someone who knows someone we have in common. “It’s a small world,” we say when a new acquaintance turns out to be linked to us […] Read More »
Concerned about the Asian carp takeover? Just pulled a truckload of garlic mustard from your yard? Make the best of invasive species by bringing them into the kitchen. With the growth of the “eat ’em to beat ’em” movement comes a growing number of books and other resources for cooking invasive species.
The Lionfish Cookbook: […] Read More »
Conservation strategies that have worked well in temperate regions and in the developed world appear to be struggling in the tropics. Part of the failure, three researchers conclude in a new commentary, “is due to top–down conservation planning that has been conducted without taking local socioeconomic considerations into adequate account.” A bottom-up approach that stresses […] Read More »
Changing a dirty diaper isn’t a fun job. Eating a diaper is even less fun, but luckily there are fungi that can do just that.
Oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus, can devour 90 percent of a disposable diaper within two months, observed Alethia Vázquez-Morillas of the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City in the journal […] Read More »
By Adelheid Fischer
This spring I traveled with two of my professor friends from our home town of Phoenix to a vacation getaway in the Chiricahua Mountains of southern Arizona. There we did what most writers and academics do while on holiday: we spent part of each day reading and writing. Early one morning […] Read More »
Field Notes on Science & Nature
Michael Canfield, editor
Harvard University Press, 2011
In science, a journal article usually represents a process finished, an end of a sort. In this rich and beautiful volume, editor Michael Canfield lets us see the means to that end: the scribbles and sketches and half-formed ideas that, in […] Read More »
“The more you think you know, the more you think you’re right.” Now comes a study of sex, skin color, and political ideology that suggests this pretty much sums up how some white male conservatives in the U.S. respond to climate change.
“Even casual observers” of those arguing that climate change isn’t […] Read More »
The Baby Boom is about to give way to the Corpse Boom, as planners begin to ponder where we’ll bury the roughly 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The die-off will boost demand for burial space and pose a challenge to land-use planners, a new study concludes—but also create opportunities for innovative, […] Read More »
It’s a pattern seen throughout the developing world: Poor communities clustered around the edges of national parks. To some scholars, it’s a sign that parks are “poverty traps” that help keep people poor. A new long-term study from Uganda, however, disputes that idea.
“There is a lot of research looking at poverty in parks, but […] Read More »
“If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change,” the prominent biologist E.O. Wilson once wrote. “But if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months.” Despite their ubiquity and importance, however, conservationists face some hefty challenges in protecting creatures […] Read More »
Few people will admit to killing a protected species. But a clever questionnaire based on some sophisticated psychology can help ferret out how many farmers are killing threatened hyenas and leopards, suggests a new study from South Africa.
“Unfortunately in conservation and natural resource management, many of the behaviors of concern are sensitive because they […] Read More »
Nearly 2 billion people, or one-quarter of the world’s population, live in the basins of Asia’s ten largest rivers. Poverty, malnutrition and environmental problems are common. And nine of history’s ten deadliest natural disasters, including a 1931 Yellow River flood that took millions of lives, occurred in these regions. In light of these challenges, researchers […] Read More »
