Taming the Great American Desert By johnforristerross Feature By advocating for agriculture in the arid West, Major John Wesley Powell challenged the way America viewed its right to develop the continent.
Here Be Tigers By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight If thousands of Australians claim to have seen the Tasmanian Tiger in the wild, then did it really go extinct in 1936?
Just Try It, You’ll Like It, It’s Good for You By Michelle Weber Highlight Remember when you could only buy milk that came from cows and goats, rather than nuts and seeds? We live in a post-dairy world now, and soy milk started it all.
Seeing the Modern World In the Disposable Plastic Straw By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight How our planet came to be filled with more disposable plastic straws than most of us will ever need.
Staten Island Wilderness, Going, Going, Gone? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight One of the last pieces of wilderness on Staten Island might get bulldozed.
On Saving the Cuban Crocodile from American Invasion By Krista Stevens Highlight “…female Cuban crocs, who might normally struggle to find a mate from their own small population, suddenly encounter exotic suitors of an appealing size and shenanigans ensue.”
Looking for a Greener Death By Michelle Weber Highlight Aquamation is more environmentally-friendly than cremation and has a growing number of supporters. So why is it mostly illegal?
You’re Putting My Brain Where, Exactly? By Michelle Weber Highlight When you donate your body to science, you don’t get a whole lot of say over what happens to your parts.
Lettuce Try to Grow Dwarf Tomatoes Next By Krista Stevens Highlight When we all eventually move to Mars, we’re going to need to know how to grow our own veggies. NASA’s working on the science of farming in space.
The Menace and the Promise of Autonomous Vehicles By Jacob Silverman Feature What does it mean to experiment with technology that we know will kill people, even if it could save lives?
The Myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Despite its unscientific methods, the Stanford Prison Experiment continues to influence the way we understand human behavior.
Could South Africa’s Drought Help Deconstruct the Divisions of Apartheid? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Cape Town’s drought has turned the once green city brown, but can it help unite the rich and poor and black and white?
Life Under (Water) Pressure By Michelle Weber Highlight Welcome to the dangerous, cramped world of the saturation diver, and the extraordinary strangeness of working 500 feet under the sea.
Small-Town New Hampshire’s Battle with Bears and Liberty By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Grafton, New Hampshire has a bear problem, but how much of the problem is the result of human behavior?
What Is the Hot Commodity, Exactly? By Michelle Weber Highlight You say seaweed, I say fish, let’s call the whole harvest off. Welcome to the most interesting article on legal tensions around seaweed harvesting in Maine you’ll read all week, and maybe ever.
Farming a Warming Planet By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Even if rising sea levels flood many coastal cities, California farmers plan to grow food for a living. So what will the future California grow?
Death By Tchotchke By Michelle Weber Highlight Plastic is everywhere: bottles, toys, cars, and, increasingly, in oceans and rivers so clogged with plastic that you can walk on them.
Can the Jaguars’ Unique Biology Help It Survive On Our Over-Populated Planet? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight By avoiding confrontations with humans, and using water and edge-lands, jaguars might be ideally suited to surviving the modern world.
The Death and Birth of the Los Angeles River By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight The authors describe the river as a “postindustrial terra incognita,” a place “of discarded things and marginalized people”. Can the city change that?
Does Outdoor Recreation Correlate With Environmental Values? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Being an outdoorsy person doesn’t make you a conservationist, sadly.
Wild At Heart By Longreads Feature They perform daring escapes from slaughterhouses, zoos, and laboratories. But animals on the run are only as free as we want them to be.
Will Big Pharma Help Save Some of the Oldest Marine Life on Earth? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight To save threatened shorebirds, one pharmaceutical biologist had to figure out how to save the crabs they depend on.
Great News Everyone, We’ll Never Have Shared Food Experiences Ever Again By Michelle Weber Highlight To every man and woman their own Dorito.
Why Beyoncé Placed HBCU’s at the Center of American Life By Danielle Jackson Commentary The singer’s latest performance helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.
Little Sunfish: The Robot That Could By Krista Stevens Highlight How the best robot, “Little Sunfish,” helped Japanese scientists understand the scope of the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Want Your Husband to Stay True? Kill a Hummingbird and Roll it in Oil and Honey By Krista Stevens Highlight People are capturing and killing hummingbirds for cockamamie love potions, and Mexico doesn’t seem to care.
Who Needs Jurassic Park When We Have Liaoning, China By Michelle Weber Highlight Liaoning’s wealth of fossils is helping paleontologists better understand dinosaurs’ relationship to birds — and making China a paleontology hot spot, for better or worse.
I Have a Half Mind to Donate My Brain to Science By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Dara Bramson’s grandmother decided to donate her brain to science, so Bramson visited the donation center to learn how iot all works.
The Strike: Chemicals, Cancer, and the Fight for Health Care By Ian Frisch Feature Workers at Momentive Performance Materials had given their lives to the chemical plant. The strike was supposed to save what little they had left.
Chasing the Man Who Caught the Storm: An Interview With Brantley Hargrove By Jonny Auping Feature “If you’ve had the luck of actually seeing a tornado, man, that’s like nicotine. It gets under your skin.”
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