Green salamanders have always been a bit weird. The only eastern member of the genus Aneides, a group of arboreal salamanders found on the West Coast, they’re long and flat, with googly eyes and tree frog toes. Found in the moist fissures of rock shelves from Northern Mississippi to Southern Pennsylvania, they’re the…
As a decade-long vegetarian, I support just about any initiatives that might reduce Americans’ reliance on animal products. And while I come at my choice primarily from an animal welfare position, I also recognize that the impact of livestock, and red meat in particular, is taking a toll on our environment.
On World Animal Day, October 4, the Trump administration declined to list the Pacific walrus as endangered. In its determination, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that while the walruses “will experience a future reduction in availability of sea ice” they are unable to reliably predict the magnitude of the…
Air travel is awful, and it’s only going to get worse in the future. But it’s not just that airlines are going to keep jacking up fees, canceling your flights at the last minute, and passing out bags of sand-flavored pretzels that exacerbate your dehydration-fueled headache. Rising global temperatures could make…
What if an animal extinct for nearly 100 years could suddenly be brought back to life with the click of a camera? That is what Greg Booth and his father George Booth hoped to do when they set up 14 trail cameras in a semi-remote area of Tasmania, where the younger Booth claims to have come face to face with the…
Moss, in case you were not already aware, is a pretty freaking amazing plant. It does not have roots, allowing it to grow in unlikely places like bits of rock at the top of a glacier or on lifeless, barren fields of lava. It provides a habitat for an entire community of microscopic critters. Its leaves are only one…
The Trump administration may be doing everything in its power quell the tide of renewable energy, but the world is ready to ride the wave. According to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a combination of falling prices, rising investments and stronger government support outside the U.S. have sent…
Undersea laboratories feel more like a science fiction trope than a real thing, but the world is home to one such fantastical structure, a marine science laboratory called Aquarius located 3.5 miles off Key Largo, an island in the Florida Keys, and 62 feet underwater. It was badly damaged by Hurricane Irma, but in the…
Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, as Donald Trump heads to a devastated Puerto Rico whose residents he claimed “want everything to be done for them,” there is still very little cell phone service, only 5 percent of the electrical grid is back up, roads and bridges are destroyed, and over half the island lacks running…
Alina Saenz’s house on the outskirts of San Juan glows warmly in the pitch black nights that have plagued Puerto Rico in the two weeks since Category 4 Hurricane Maria devastated the island. The imperceptible hum of the refrigerator, fans to circulate the humid tropical air and nightly news on the television were all…
Pigeons are a statue-shitting urban nuisance with the brash confidence of a local and the sidewalk-clogging unhurried stroll of a tourist, and a Parisian politician has an unlikely scheme to run them off: bring in some birds of prey and let them pick the pigeons off like a pigeon would peck bits of baguette off the…
In recent decades, many shark populations have been decimated by overfishing. Often this is the result of those looking to make a buck off the gruesome process of shark finning—which involves bringing a shark on board a boat, slicing off its fins, and tossing it back into the sea and to certain death. But according to…
When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands as a Category 4 storm this past month, it immediately brought devastation from winds, flooding, and storm surge to many Americans. The entire island lost electricity. While there’s been some recovery to the power grid and shorter gas lines, the next…
I’ve always been convinced that my grandmother has a direct line to God. But on the evening of Sept. 5, I prayed she would be wrong about her most recent revelation.
When Hurricane Irma plowed into Florida’s southwestern coast as a powerful Category 4 storm last month, it tore up seagrass beds, stripped mangrove forests of their leaves, and overall, left what looked like a trail of ecological apocalypse in its wake. But it’s now been a few weeks since the storm, and as scientists…
Following a pattern of everything being terrible in 2017, two volcanoes are primed to erupt along the western edge of the Ring of Fire.
A new and unexpected source of radioactive material left over from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has been found up to 60 miles away along coastlines near the beleaguered plant. The discovery shows that damaged nuclear reactors are capable of spreading radiation far from the meltdown site, and in some surprising…
About half a mile off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, there’s a small island that’s home to approximately 1,500 rhesus monkeys and exactly zero humans. These monkeys have weathered a number of hurricanes since first being introduced generations ago from India, as part of a research project in 1938. But according to…
When a trillion ton iceberg snapped off the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf in July, the entire world spent a few days geeking out over stunning satellite imagery of Earth’s frozen continent. But those who’ve stuck with the Delaware-sized iceberg, now called A68, on its slow journey into the Weddell Sea, know…
PITTSBURGH — America’s storied “Steel City” is on the forefront of an energy revolution, transitioning from its long reliance on fossil fuels to renewables and energy efficient homes. In June, Mayor Bill Peduto joined an alliance of over 100 cities committing to solar and wind power. The announcement came only hours…
