Biodiversity

Genetic engineering could restore the once profuse North American bird after a century or more of extinction

You know what’s awesome? Seeing a bunch of young people at work on changing the world to make it a better place for all. Today, I hosted a Google Science Fair Hangout On Air on Sustainability in Swaziland, and I got to have that privilege.

Today I'd like to focus on passerine birds again, and this time on a group that I don't think I've ever blogged about before: the certhioids.

Book scorpions are the best/worst thing to happen to books, because book scorpions! But also book scorpions... Properly known as pseudoscorpions, these tiny, tiny creatures have a fondness for old books, because old books also happen to contain delicious booklice and dust mites.

A love of the jaguar helped inspire one of the world's leading proponents for saving big cats

In the fall of 2005, I and a couple hundred other new students at Columbia University's journalism school walked into a lecture hall for a series of welcome speeches, and two things happened that impressed me.

Margaret Lowman, who also goes by the nickname “Canopy Meg,” is chief of science and sustainability at the California Academy of Sciences.

Entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, has been advocated for reasons ranging from their potential role in food security to their nutritional and environmental benefits.

Two or more dead elephants in one place means one thing: poaching by professional killers. Another tip-off is the lack of a face, as poachers hack off the tusks to be sold for ivory.

News out of Harvard suggests that not only will climate change affect how food is grown, but it will also lower the nutrition levels of what is grown—wheat, corn and rice in particular.

People who lack the gardening bug often regard flowers like fashion models: pretty but boring. Jens Petersen, the man who gave us the groundbreaking photographs of fungi in “The Kingdom of Fungi”, which I reviewed here in March, has a new book of photographs (still available only in Danish, unfortunately, and called Blomsterliv — “Flower [...]

High-speed cameras reveal when these pesky insects become self-organizing