Finally! Some relief from the unrelenting decay in Arctic sea ice.
Well, no. I was hoping to be able to report that. But I can't. The National Snow and Ice Data Center's most recent update shows the extent of Arctic sea ice in March dropping to a record low for the month. And that marks the sixth month in a row of record-setting lows.
On March 7, the extent of Arctic sea ice seems to have reached its maximum extent for the year, after an entire winter of frigid temperatures. But here ...read more
Izaak Walton League Celebrates Citizen Science Month With Project To Document Streams Across America
By Danielle Donkersloot, Izaak Walton League Clean Water Program Director
Every American has the right to know whether the streams running through their backyards and neighborhood parks are safe. But there is an alarming lack of up-to-date information about water quality across the country. The Izaak Walton League’s “Stream Selfie” project will help bridge that information ...read more
Well, well, well... looks like it's time for yet another shake-up in the dinosaur story, this time courtesy of one of the animals' early relatives, Teleocrater rhadinus. The first description of the animal, published today, reveals the conventional chronology of how dinosaurs bodies evolved might be just a wee bit off, give or take several million years.
With reverberations from a proposed massive rewrite of the dinosaur family tree still echoing, here comes a species new to science but v ...read more
Over the past 7,000 years, as mighty civilizations rose and crumbled, another saga was playing out in the southern reaches of the world.
Just off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, a colony of gentoo penguins have long made tiny Ardley Island their home. At times, the colony rose to a mighty power, holding absolute dominion over the mile-long strip of land their forefathers swam, waddled and slid their way to some time around 5,700 B.C. But, nature deals harshly with hubris ...read more
If you're a cat owner, then you probably have a pretty good sense of whether your cat is happy, angry, or frustrated. But do cats, like humans, actually have common "facial expressions" that accompany these emotions? People have actually been studying questions like this for decades (and even back to Charles Darwin), but not always in a scientifically rigorous manner. Enter these scientists, who set out to create a "facial coding system" for cats, which they term "CatFACS" (fortunately not r ...read more