Reminder: There’s protein in that there bug. (And yes, I know that “bug” and “insect” aren’t one in the same, but please allow it.) Can you stomach this redux written long before my vegetarian days? Sure you can. — I eat meat. Most kinds. Beef, pork, chicken, bison, turkey.* Dark meat, white meat, legs, breasts. […]
Month: May 2018
This post originally appeared June 21, 2017 One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate […]
May 14-18, 2018 To start the week, Emma has some good news: butterflies are adapting more nimbly to the Anthropocene that some might have thought. This happy ending surprised the researchers. “Our mindset in 2014 was simply to reconfirm the extinction, and we were very surprised to find larvae,” they write. To be fair, ecologists […]
After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, […]
Six months ago, I did something foolish. I ran a five-mile race with little training. I figured five miles wasn’t going to kill me, and it didn’t. But after the race, I had a nagging ache in my ankle. So I took a break from running, and the ankle pain went away. I thought I […]
Our boy is back! Abstruse Goose was our go-to back-up for 100 years, then he unaccountably disappeared for another hundred. And now, with no explanation (and we don’t need one), he’s back amongst us and our hearts rejoice. This one you can figure out without knowing what Bayesian priors are. I know a little because […]
Few species are more frustrating to taxonomists than the North American caribou. Ranging from the Canadian Arctic to the Great Lakes, caribou vary enormously in size, color, antler shape, habitat, and behavior. Some aren’t much bigger than domestic dogs; others are almost big enough to rub shoulders with a moose. For more than two centuries, […]
The inhabitants of little world evolve very quickly, making them nimble in the Anthropocene. That’s good, because most things on Earth are little. It is because I have some faith in the richness of the little world’s genetic raw material and the blind, brute power of evolution that I am less worried about “invasive” plants […]
