Scientific American

Leeches Spill Guts about Elusive Mammals

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:02:08 EST

Want to suss out the existence of a shy mammal in a tropical jungle? Just check a bloodsucking leech.

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Big Kill, Not Big Chill, Finished Off Giant Kangaroos

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:31:00 EST

Around 40,000 years ago, the giant kangaroo disappeared from Australia. So did Diprotodon ( rhinoceros-size wombats ) and Palorchestes ( tapirlike marsupials ) as well as supersize birds, reptiles and some 50 other so-called megafauna--big animals. And now a record of fungal spores pulled from the swamp at Lynch's Crater in the northeastern corner of the continent reveals humans as the culprit. [More]

New Family of Limbless Amphibians Discovered in India

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:50:00 EST

From Nature magazine.

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Museum Menagerie: Historical Photos of the Construction of Early Wildlife Exhibits [Slide Show]

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 02:00:00 EST

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Scientists Manipulate and Erase Memories (preview)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Joël Coutu knelt on the cold cement floor of the pet supply store he managed in Montreal, his wrists bound behind him with telephone wire. He could feel the barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of his neck. “You’re lying!” the gunman screamed. “And I am going to blow your head off.”

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The Smart Way to Play God with Earth's Limited Land

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:31:00 EST

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Mark Lynas's book , The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans .

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DNA in a Cup of Water Reveals Lake Denizens

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:03:08 EST

To monitor the biodiversity of a freshwater habitat, you could camp out by the water and count the rare wildlife. Or you could just scoop up a cup of water. A new Dutch study has found that the DNA traces in a small sample of a body of water can reveal the species that live in it. The work is in the journal Molecular Ecology . [Philip Francis Thomsen et al., " Monitoring endangered freshwater biodiversity using environmental DNA "]

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Human Population Reaches 7 Billion--How Did This Happen and Can It Go On?

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:30:00 EST

On October 31, 2011, a particularly special person will be born--the seven billionth human alive, according to United Nations demographers. He or she could be delivered by a starving mother in the growing wastelands of Somalia, a failed-state gripped by famine and war. The best odds are that the child will be born in India, which has the highest rate of births per minute in the world. She may even be an American girl, heiress to a complex legacy that is in no small part responsible for the fact that, for better or worse, people are shaping the destiny of the planet that engendered humanity.

Regardless, the seven billionth person raises the question: How much is too much ? "Can Earth support seven billion or nine billion or 10 billion people in a good life for a long time?" asked demographer Joel Cohen of Columbia University's Earth Institute at its human population event on October 17. "The addition of four billion people in five decades has no precedent. That is an exceptional event and will probably never be repeated within human history."

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A Scientific Argument for Intervening in Nature

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:01:00 EST

Jessica Hellmann, an ecologist at Notre Dame University in Indiana, is in the midst of exactly the kind of painstaking study that can help guide those who want to move species . Hellmann works, among other places, on Vancouver Island, studying a kind of oak savanna ecosystem that most people associate with California. The star players of these savannas are called Garry oaks or Oregon white oaks, large trees often gnarled into unique shapes. Under their canopies grow mossy meadows of wildflowers, including buttercups and star- shaped blue camas. For Canadians, this kind of ecosystem is a beloved break from the evergreens that otherwise dominate the landscape. And according to the nonprofit Garry Oak Ecosystems Recovery Team, "approximately 100 species of plants, mammals, reptiles, birds, butterflies and other insects are officially listed as 'at risk' in these ecosystems" in Canada. The range of these Garry oak savannas hugs the Pacific coast from central California to just about halfway up Vancouver Island. These savannas are quite rare in Canada and threatened by land development. Hellmann thinks that British Columbians might be interested in establishing such ecosystems farther north on the island or even on the province's mainland as the climate warms. So one set of questions that her study is asking bears directly on whether such a move would work.

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Can We Feed the World and Sustain the Planet? (preview)

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:00:00 EST

Right now about one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. the world’s farmers grow enough food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were, many cannot afford it, because prices are escalating.

But another challenge looms.

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Carl Zimmer on Evolution in the Big City

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 22:20:08 EST

The annual Scientific American September single-topic issue is all about cities. And award-winning author Carl Zimmer recently penned a piece on evolution research in the urban environment for The New York Times . In part 1 of this interview, he talks about urban evolution.

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Biospheric Bartering: Debtor Nations Pay the Bills and Conserve Their Resources

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:00:00 EST

Dear EarthTalk : As I understand it, “debt-for-nature swaps” are arrangements by which countries can erase debt by preserving land. Are any being done today? --Bill Hunt, Topeka, Kans.

The debt-for-nature swap concept, whereby a portion of a developing nation’s foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for local investments in environmental conservation measures, dates back to the mid-1980s when Thomas Lovejoy of the non-profit World Wildlife Fund (WWF) first proposed it as a way to deal with the problems of developing nations’ indebtedness and the negative consequences for their natural resources and diverse environments.

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July 2011 Advances: Additional resources

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 11:00:00 EST

The Advances section of Scientific American 's July issue chronicles tree-saving tortoises, the largest spider fossil ever discovered, an update on the hunt for dark matter, and many other developments. For those interested in learning more about the news described in the section, a list of selected further reading follows below.

"Tortoises to the Rescue," page 16 [More]

Time to Stop Worrying about Invasive Species?

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:57:08 EST

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. And you shouldn’t judge a species by its place of origin. So say ecologists in a commentary in the journal Nature . [Mark Davis et al, Don't judge species on their origins ] They argue that conservationists should assess organisms based on their impact on the local environment, rather than simply whether they’re native. [More]

The Tasmanian Devil's Cancer: Could Contagious Tumors Affect Humans? (preview)

Mon, 23 May 2011 07:30:00 EST

Love bites on the neck of the young female Tasmanian devil in my lap tell me she has recently had a sexual encounter. They also indicate something ominous: she might well be dead before she can raise her first litter of pups.

I (Jones) am sitting on the ground holding a devil that I trapped in Freycinet National Park on the eastern coast of Tasmania--a wild jewel of an island to the south of the mainland of Australia. It was here, in 2001, that I first witnessed a hideous disease that causes large, festering tumors on the face of these marsupials, impairing feeding and routinely killing them within six months of infection. Today the Freycinet population has almost disappeared--a reflection of what is happening across most of the animal’s range. First detected in 1996, up in the northeastern corner of the island, the cancer--now known to be contagious--has reduced devil populations across Tasmania by up to 95 percent, pushing the species, which lives only on this island, to the edge of extinction.

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