News & More
Anything in deep freeze was supposed to be safe—for forever. Such as our toxic wastes. Such as the crop seeds we’ll need in case of a global catastrophe and food shortage. But we can’t count on the cold anymore.
News & More
On the tundra of Siberia, near the coldest city on Earth, there’s a place that local people have come to call a “gateway to the underworld” or a portal to hell. It’s a huge crater, and it has been growing for years. Currently, it measures a mile long and nearly 400 feet deep.
Nature & Wildlife
The woolly mammoth—an animal that went extinct 4,000 years ago—is currently being considered for legal protection under conservation trade rules. “How that can be?” you might well ask. The answer lies in a story that’s entwined with some very modern-day issues: climate change and the rampant poaching of today’s elephants.
Videos
Each spring, more than 500,000 sandhill cranes come together on a narrow stretch of the Platte River in central Nebraska, as they have for thousands of years.
Nature & Wildlife
On Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 13 countries that have wild tiger populations agreed to take part in a global census of the endangered big cats. The hope is that this count will then lead to improved policies to protect them in order to meet a goal of doubling their numbers by 2022—a plan known as Tx2.
Conservation
When National Geographic magazine came out with their cover story on de-extinction in April 2013, it set off quite a controversy. Now that we are on the scientific brink of being able to bring back long-gone species, proponents and critics are hotly debating whether we should.
Nature & Wildlife
Hear the phrase “global warming,” and you immediately picture your hometown with a hotter climate. You imagine a line of more southerly plants marching northward to where you live.
News & More
When early, intrepid European explorers first began trekking through the New World in the late 1400s, they were awed by the strikingly different cultures they encountered. But they also came to notice something else: remarkable physical similarities between the Asian peoples they had seen during their many travels and these new, soon-to-be-known-as “Native Americans.”
Travel Tips
We humans seem to have a great need to anthropomorphize; that is, we tend to want to ascribe human characteristics to inanimate objects, nonhuman animals and natural phenomena, such as the wind, rain or sun.
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.
