Biodiversity

In my efforts to make the most original sciart gift guide I could muster earlier this month I overlooked some fantastic books that I want to plug today in case you’re doing any last minute shopping at bookstores.

Editor’s Note: “Along the Tiger’s Trail” is a  series about the efforts to monitor tigers and their prey in the Malenad landscape in southwestern India that harbors one of the world's largest population of wild tigers.

It's time to wind things down for Christmas, so what better way to do it than to write a short article about robins. And here I mean the `original' or `proper' robin - the European robin Erithacus rubecula - a Eurasian passerine that also occurs in northern Africa and is (conventionally) regarded as the only [...]

Two years ago, after an intense 13-year quest, scientists concluded that the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyura) had gone extinct in Taiwan.

We usually think about male and female mates getting along pretty well (that's `mate' in the biological sense, not your friendly British/ Australian friend).

A new study has revealed how marine pearlfish communicate with each other from the confines of their very safe and comfy homes inside oysters – they use the internal structure of the shell to amplify their strange, pulsing noises to the ocean outside.

One of the most commonly used metaphors for describing the solution for growing and diversifying America's scientific talent pool is the "STEM pipeline." Major policy reports have called on the U.S.

Bacteria propel themselves with corkscrew tails anchored in rotary motors. That may seem surprisingly mechanical for a microbe, but it is a system that has been wildly popular and conserved across billions of years of evolution.

And then there were five. The death by old age this past weekend of Angalifu, a 44-year-old northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) that lived at San Diego Zoo, reduces the world population of this critically endangered subspecies to just five, all of which live in captivity and none of which are breeding.

Few reptiles can breathe underwater. Australia is home to one of the exceptions, the white-throated snapping turtle (Elseya albagula), which can extract oxygen from water through its backside via a process called cloacal respiration.

"A land ethic," the great naturalist writer Aldo Leopold observed toward the end of his famous Sand County Almanac, "reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of land." This philosophy of care for the earth's ecosystems and species provides one of the [...]

It’s time again for me to offer up a few quirky gift ideas for the science enthusiasts in your life. I guarantee these will be the most original gifts under the tree!