If you look at our recent GPS trajectory, you might think our navigator is, well, under the influence. But actually, our course is a planned path between 3 specific spots: Da Base: Our home base for the past few days. Da Hole: A location slightly south of Da Base, where the satellites showed chlorophyll levels [...]

Fan Peng-Fei of China’s Dali University was worried the first time he entered the forest habitat of the critically endangered cao vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus). The isolated forest, skirting the China–Vietnam border, had been heavily degraded by years of agricultural development, firewood collection and charcoal production. What little forest remained provided poor habitat for the [...]

Wow, this is quite the week for snow leopards (Panthera uncia) with not one, not two, not three but four interesting stories coming out about these endangered big cats. Let’s start with the bad news. Climate change, as you might expect, could soon create trouble for snow leopards living in the Himalayas. According to a [...]

Optimistic visions of a human future in space seem to have given way to a confusing mix of possibilities, maybes, ifs, and buts. It’s not just the fault of governments and space agencies, basic physics is in part the culprit. Hoisting mass away from Earth is tremendously difficult, and thus far in fifty years we’ve [...]

Space: the beneficial frontier. That was the underlying theme of a panel called “The Future of Space,” which I moderated at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland. It was the first such session on space services in the formal part of the program at this meeting of leaders in policy and business—and [...]

Yesterday’s total solar eclipse, the last until 2015, was visible to precious few. The path of the total eclipse barely skimmed northern Australia and otherwise fell only on the South Pacific Ocean. A far greater number of sky-watchers were treated to a partial solar eclipse, in which the moon covers only a portion of the [...]

Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Hershkowitz, Israel’s minister of science and technology, to talk about his country’s capabilities and ambitions in space. We spoke about Israel’s homegrown platforms for launching satellites into space; the commercial, military and scientific applications of those satellites; and whether the country has plans to [...]