Observations
East of Siberia: Goral on the Cliffs
They are highly secretive animals: stocky, goatlike creatures about the size of German shepherds
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Life, Unbounded
Maximum Alienness
What might make life hard to recognize as life?
Observations
Studying Climate Change in One of the Grandest Classrooms in the World
If I could, I’d bring politicians who doubt the reality of human-caused global change to spend a few days on the Juneau Icefield
Recent Posts
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Health care reform, one fainting spell at a time
When I wrote last week about Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Wisc.), an allergist-turned member of Congress who turned down the vaunted Federal employee health insurance plan and has his own plan for health care reform, I had no idea just how quickly he planned to work.
Who needs wind power when you can store energy in the air?
One of the projects here at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair that caught the attention of the staff back in the office was "the air battery." What was it, our technology editor wanted to know?
DuPont and Danisco fuel new ethanol venture
Chemical maker E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co. (more commonly known as DuPont) and Danish biotech firm Danisco, A/S, are pumping resources into ethanol, which they hope will meet an anticipated rapidly growing demand for the biofuel, a demand that critics say will raise food prices and cause even worse damage to the environment than gasoline.
Self-experimenters of the world, unite!?
In putting together our recent series on self-experimenters, I kept wondering whether one could harness the do-it-yourself ethos that drives people to experiment on themselves and channel it into something more rigorous.
Virus Outbreak Shakes China
Updated from a May 5 blog entry Chinese health-care officials are scrambling to contain the outbreak of a contagious and sometimes deadly intestinal virus--known as Enterovirus 71 (EV71)--that has already claimed the lives of at least 28 children and is likely to continue spreading.
Borderline NSFW song about relativistic plasma jets (plus trippy visuals!)
If Stephen Hawking mated with Jim Croce, their love spawn would surely have gotten around to writing "Superluminal Lover," a charming little ditty about supermassive black holes and the relativistic plasma jets spouting from them.
This week in graphene: teensy tiny transistors!
University of Manchester New results keep coming fast and furious from graphene, the single-atom-thick form of graphite. Resembling chicken wire in structure, graphene has captured researchers' attention over the past few years for its combination of exotic physics, attractive electronic properties and ease of preparation (see my slideshow on how to make your own graphene"”with Scotch tape).
Yes, the earth moved for me...
I slept through this morning's Midwest quake, but I sure felt this aftershock an hour ago: That's a seismograph in West Lafayette, IN. The online image gets updated every 10 minutes.
Your forest on drugs: America's cocaine habit destroys national parks
If you use cocaine and need a reason to quit—or one to avoid starting in the first place—think conservation. The national parks of Guatemala and other countries have become the preferred haven of drug traffickers who usurp protected areas and burn the forest to serve their own purposes and the demands of their customers, according to Roan McNab, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) country director for Guatemala.
Saving wildlife by killing it
In 2002 conservationists used helicopters to bomb Anacapa Island, off the coast of California, with the rodent-killing poison brodifacoum. They managed to wipe out their target—an invasive species of black rats that had been living on the island for more than a century—but they also knocked out a native population of deer mice and killed some rodent-eating raptors, like the peregrine falcon.
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A Blog About the Weird Wonderfulness of Life on Earth
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