The other night I was in the midst of writing about the Ice Age when I strayed to the internet. Up came the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography that went this year to New York Times photographers Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev, Tyler Hicks and Daniel Etter for their coverage of the European refugee crises. Fresh from writing a […]
Eco
Stephen Kress has studied Atlantic puffins for more than forty years, so you might think that he knows everything there is to know about them. He’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t. Until very recently, in fact, neither he nor anyone else even knew where the little rascals were most of the time. Puffins used to be […]
Behold, the majestic white cliffs. They form ghostly canyons that stretch into forbidding fog. Swallows build mud-daub nests on their walls. Falcons dive from their precipices to eat the swallows. Some say people have vanished here without trace, back during the first days of exploration. Limestone? you ask. The incised and sculpted leavings of an […]
The legend begins thus: In 1967 — or maybe it was ’66 — a pet store truck overturned in Long Island, sending a few dozen finger-length Italian wall lizards scampering into the bushes of Garden City. There Podarcis siculus thrived, slurping up arthropods along rock walls and sidewalks, dodging beaks and claws and tires. Over the decades, […]
A few weeks ago, I introduced the readers of LWON to my favorite ant scientist, Brian Fisher. We learned that, while he may not look like much at first glance, Fisher is more badass than you will ever be, even if you become a Krav Maga master and invent an actual light saber. But amazing […]
Last Saturday, in the Preah Vihear forest reserve in northern Cambodia, forest ranger Sieng Darong and police officer Sab Yoh confiscated some chainsaws from an illegal logging site. For them, it was routine work. Both had patrolled Cambodian forests for years, and were familiar with the country’s epidemic of illegal logging and wildlife poaching. That night, they […]
Many years ago, before I was a science writer, but after I tried being a scientist, I spent some time in the outdoor industry. It’s a weird phrase, I know, but it covers anything related to activities like skiing, backpacking, kayaking and generally avoiding getting a real job. We did a lot of guiding and working at summer camps while […]
The electronics of the future could be made of a material you leave in your toilet. If you’re up on your electronics of the future, you’ll recall that they were supposed to be made of graphene. Remember graphene? It was supposed to be better than silicon, because it lets electrons go really fast. That’s great, […]
