Last weekend I heard a story I won’t soon forget. Bob Freer, who runs an animal rescue shelter in the Everglades, appeared on a rerun of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and he began to talk about Florida’s python problem. Of course, I knew Florida had a python problem. But there’s knowing, and then there’s…
10 – 14 December Turbulent week here at LWON HQ. We started with a crushing loss: our Ginny decamped to National Geographic. We wish her, obviously, every success and all the happiness there — and we’re so proud that she was poached by a place with such an impeccable pedigree. But wow, will we miss…
Climate change may not be forever, but it’ll be for a long, long time. Who—or what—will be around thousands or millions of years hence, when the consequences of our casually massive carbon emissions are still playing out? And do we owe them anything? According to philospher William Grove-Fanning, currently at the Environmental Studies Program at…
For your Sunday-reading pleasure, a few stories that the people of LWON loved this week. In no particular order: Ann: Who knew about radiation sickness, and when?, by Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data Some Manhattan Project physicists did know what radiation from atom bombs would do to people. Robert Oppenheimer wasn’t much interested. Bonus: Emma Marris has a really charming…
In 2000, the last Pyrenean ibex died. These were mountain goat-like mammals with fierce black horns that scampered around the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Some cells had been taken from that last animal, and in 2009 the world learned that scientists had been able to clone the creature: a Pyrenean ibex kid was…
Last week my little black dog wandered off into the sloping hillside behind our Colorado home. Fifteen years old, deaf and suffering from congestive heart failure, she appeared to have succumbed to some primordial call to return to the wilderness to die. She didn’t have far to go. My husband and I live in the…
My friend Taya and I were out at her parents’ country place, about twelve acres in the western foothills of the Cascades. I was maybe eight, visiting for the first time. Taya was taking me on a tour. We were struggling along, as short-legged people do through dense, early successional Northwest forest. She stopped and…
Our writers live in London, Yellowknife, New York, Portland ME, Salida CO, Mazama WA, Baltimore, off-grid in western Colorado, Seattle, Madison, Colorado Springs, the central California coast, Washington, D.C., and Cedaredge. In their day jobs, they write books, teach science writing, and roam widely over the earth to meet deadlines for Science, Nature, New Scientist,…