Travel Tips
I still vividly recall the dream, even though I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old when I had it. I was flying, low—without a plane, mind you—over Alaska. I soared above waving fields of purple flowers and gurgling, ribbon-like, blue rivers.
Nature & Wildlife
Like all traipsers through woods and walkers of rivers, I have a few, favorite “secret places.” I could go on and on about their beauty, about what makes them so different from any other location on Earth, about the feelings they elicit from deep down in my core.
Videos
When National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen jumped in the waters off Antarctica to photograph a leopard seal, he never expected her to play the perfect host—and offer him a snack. The huge seal began to bring him food: live penguins. When he didn’t partake, she brought him different fare—weak and dead ones.
News & More
When Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, stepped into her twin-engine plane in Miami on June 1, 1937, they were embarking on an adventure of a grand sort. The two hoped to fly around the world, following the Equator.
Nature & Wildlife
There are many Native American stories regarding the stunning red, orange and white hoodoos in Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park. The Paiute Indians call the park Unka-timpe-wa-wince-pockich—which means “red rocks standing like men in a bowl-shaped canyon.”
News & More
Two very old whales are telling us a fascinating story. They are fossils—a male and a pregnant female—that were discovered in Pakistan in 2000 and 2004. Researchers say that these 47.5-million-year-old cetaceans are beginning to reveal that, without a doubt, our modern whales originated from terrestrial ancestors.
Conservation
When it comes to environmental and wildlife issues, it seems that the more alarming the statistics are, the more likely it is that they will command our attention and move us into action.
News & More
If you’re a fan of forensic TV programs—such as Bones, Dexter, Fringe or one of the several CSI series—you can’t help but be familiar with the many ways DNA testing may be put to use: to gather evidence at crime scenes, determine family relationships or prove the recent whereabouts of a missing person, among others.
Conservation
Instead of waking to falling snow as many of us did on New Year’s Day 2011, people in Beebe, Arkansas, rose to find thousands of birds—grackles, starlings and red-winged blackbirds—falling from the sky, dead. An aerial photo revealed that the carcasses fell within a one-mile stretch of Beebe.
Videos
About 14,000 years ago in what today is the country of Israel, hunter-gatherers buried a body with its hand holding a pup. It’s not known whether the animal was a dog or a wolf. But it is believed to be one of the earliest pieces of evidence regarding the dog’s domestication.
Conservation
“I’ll never, ever go on a field trip again,” wailed the little boy ahead of me. It was in the afternoon on one of those golden fall days in Wisconsin when the trees splash brilliant oranges and yellows over the landscape.
Nature & Wildlife
As the Arctic continues to warm, it comes as no surprise that cold-adapted species, such as polar bears, are moving north in an effort to survive, while those that favor more moderate temperatures are expanding into regions that have now become hospitable habitats for them.
