Environment
Urban ecology doesn't have enough humans in it
When you read the word "nature," what do you think of?Maybe you imagine a dark wood with sunlight reaching a mottled floor of foliage, thrushes singing and chipmunks hopping.
Stories by Hannah Waters
Ecology
DMS(P): the amazing story of a pervasive indicator molecule in the marine food web
In honor of Chemistry Day here on the Scientific American blog network, I've dug out partially rewritten a post on ecological chemistry from the Culturing Science archives.
Ecology
Collapsed cod fishery shows signs of life
Perhaps our species’s greatest misconception about the sea was that it is inexhaustible. The idea seems rather silly now, in a world where most people are familiar with the word “overfishing.” But men once gazed into the deep and imagined that it teemed with life so plentiful that we could take and take without ever running out.Now we know that you can take too much...
Ecology
Don't forget the parasites! Reevaluating the pyramid of numbers
Just like astrophysicists seek underlying patterns in space/time, ecologists seek similar patterns in life on earth. And there's one they thought they had pegged: the pyramid of numbers.The first known pyramidal of numbers was drawn by Charles Elton in 1927 to explain the flow of energy through ecosystems...
Health
Trials Bolster Case for Preemptive Use of HIV Drugs to Reduce Transmission Rates
Cross-posted from Nature Medicine ' s Spoonful of Medicine blog
Results from two trials released today provide the first evidence that taking antiretroviral drugs can prevent HIV infection among heterosexual men and women...
The Sciences
The conservation school of hard-knocks, or how I chose hope over futility
Hardly four years ago, I started my first job in science. After an 8-hour drive up the east coast, my brother escorted me into a small, single-floored building facing a woody patch above a salt marsh, the headquarters of Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge...
Welcome to Culturing Science, a science blog written from a bird's eye view
Hi there! I'm Hannah and I am excited and honored to write, share and learn here on the Scientific American blog network. I couldn't be more pleased with the brilliance and diversity of my fellow bloggers and am humbled to be among them...
Biology
Now in 3-D: The shape of krill and fish schools
Watching videos of fish feeding frenzies is a very emotional experience for me. You know the videos I'm talking about (personal favorites here, 0:55 in, and here).
