|
|
Polar bears are classified as marine mammals, like a seal or a walrus, which might come as a surprise given that they’re usually pictured on land. But polar bears spend a lot of their time in the waters of the Arctic, fishing or swimming among the sea ice. They may look awkward in the water, [...]
Human beings are doing unprecedented things to the Earth, which is sort of impressive when you realize that the planet has existed for more than 4.5 billion years. But that’s what happens when 7 billion people produce and consume more and more stuff, emitting enormous amounts of gases like carbon dioxide and generally making of [...]
We are the products of our environment — and that goes for egrets and elephants as much as human beings. The history of all life on this planet has been one of change and adaptation. The environment changes, and life adapts. That’s evolution in a nutshell. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that as the [...]
In the days before Amazon Prime, your Christmas gift-giving options were somewhat more limited. So it that the three wise men in the Biblical account brought local gifts to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem: gold, frankincense and myrhh, each a proper offering for a king—if, perhaps, not all that useful for an infant. (Maybe someone [...]
No one knows what will follow the apparent death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The Hermit Kingdom remains a black box to experts—especially Americans—and while early reports suggest that Kim’s third son Kim Jong-un will succeed his father, we can’t tell how long he’ll remain in power, or whether the onetime Swiss boarding [...]
Earth history is different from ordinary history: it’s much harder to nail down specific dates when everything happened millions of years ago and over huge, slow timescales. But it can be done, as shown by paleontologists who have pinpointed the exact date of the largest mass extinction to ever occur on earth. The end-Permian mass [...]
The people of Soay Island, off the west coast of Scotland, have notice something strange. Over the years, their sheep have begun to shrink, as I wrote in 2009: Why? In short, because of climate change. Generally, the sheep’s life cycle goes like this: they fatten up on grass during the fertile, sunny summer; then [...]
Jellyfish: they’re the worst. From the dollar bill-sized jellies that wash up along the New Jersey shore to the deadly box jelly—the most toxic creature on the planet—no one likes jellyfish. And the bad news is that they may be taking over: as we pull fish from the sea, the jellyfish are left to flourish. [...]
Regardless of what Rick Perry and the rest of Republican presidential candidate field believe (except for you, Jon Huntsman), climate change is real and it’s happening. The questions for the 98% of climate researchers who accept the consensus on man-made global warming is how fast the climate is changing, and what impact it will have on [...]
The new film The Rise of the Planet of the Apes—a title with way too many prepositions—asks us to accept an absurd premise: James Franco as a genius neuroscientist. Oh, and it also expects us to accept the possibility that apes could become super-smart, enabling them to overthrow humanity as the dominant species on the planet, leading [...]
