How the Hoopa Valley Tribe Monitors a Rare Carnivore
Since 2005, the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s wildlife division has run one of the longest, most detailed assessments of fishers, small weasel-like mammals that are both culturally significant and rare. The...
View ArticleUniversities Are Failing the Next Generation of Scientists
Many science Ph.D. recipients don’t obtain tenure-track academic research positions, and may wind up working outside of science altogether. Until graduate schools acknowledge and properly confront the...
View ArticleThe Parable of the World’s Largest Bee
If it wasn’t the world’s largest bee and therefore a sort of holy grail for a team of researchers, the Wallace’s giant bee may have just been another nameless fatality, squeezed from its shrinking...
View ArticleHow Radar Is Helping Track Down Lost Indigenous Grave Sites
Ground penetrating radar is being used by Indigenous groups in Canada and the U.S. to identify possible unmarked graves of children at former residential schools. But the technology has its limits, and...
View ArticleUnder the Sea, a Hidden Climate Variable: Thawing Permafrost
Not only on land, permafrost is also thawing under the sea, emitting greenhouse gases and leaving behind massive seafloor sinkholes. As the Artic warms four times as fast as the rest of the planet,...
View ArticleEp. 59: Water Cremation Ignites Debate Over Dignified Death
This month: Alkaline hydrolysis is an end-of-life option that’s gaining popularity in Canada and the U.S. It’s marketed as a greener form of cremation — a way to still end up with ashes, but without...
View ArticleFacts Haven’t Spurred Us to Climate Action. Can Fiction?
What will it take to jolt the world into action against climate change? By dragging us to places that nonfiction can’t, the emerging genre of climate fiction is showing us what it will look and feel...
View ArticleBook Review: Elegy to a Rapidly Vanishing Lake
In “Troubling the Water,” Abby Seiff reveals how dams, overfishing, and climate change are threatening a vast Cambodian lake and the culture that depends on it. Likened to a heartbeat, Tonle Sap Lake...
View ArticleDecolonizing the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Sixty years after President Kennedy described space as a new frontier, scholars are calling for greater awareness of the connections between the search for life on other planets and the legacy of...
View ArticleClimate Collaborations in the Arctic Are Frozen Amid War
Russia’s war on Ukraine has forced the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental group of Arctic states and Indigenous peoples, to suspend their joint activities in protest of Russia’s unprovoked...
View ArticleThe Fractious Evolution of Pediatric Transgender Medicine
Pediatric transgender medicine was pioneered at a Dutch clinic where practitioners developed a protocol and published groundbreaking research. But as the number of teens seeking treatment has...
View ArticleThe Careless Display of Ill-Gotten Human Remains
For more than 200 years, London’s Hunterian Museum has shown off the monumental skeleton of Charles Byrne, whose corpse was taken against his wishes. It is just one of many museums displaying...
View ArticleInterview: Whitney Phillips on Making Sense of Misinformation
Whitney Phillips’ research has taken her to some of the internet’s darkest corners. As a media studies scholar, Phillips argues that it’s futile to treat virtual spaces in isolation, because the...
View ArticleDire Climate Warning Issued in New IPCC Report: ‘Now or Never’
The latest IPCC mitigation report, released last week, outlines economic and political choices society can make to affect the trajectory of climate change. The report found that “without immediate and...
View ArticleTo Curb Smuggling, Norway Has Been Killing Confiscated Wildlife
Norwegian authorities have seized and killed smuggled animals, raising questions about how the country handles endangered wildlife at its borders. The situation, experts say, extends far beyond Norway:...
View ArticleEnvironmentalists Target Mountains of Fertilizer Waste
Industry officials maintain that existing environmental standards for phosphogypsum are already strict enough. But environmental advocates disagree: More than a dozen groups filed a petition with the...
View ArticleBiden’s Plan to ‘End Cancer’ Borrows From an Old, Flawed Playbook
The President’s new research enterprise, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, is eerily reminiscent of the war on cancer that Richard Nixon declared in his 1971 State of the Union address....
View ArticleBook Review: An Urgent Plea for Mental Health Care Reform
In “Healing,” former director of the National Institute of Mental Health Thomas Insel argues for a more nuanced approach to fighting serious mental illness. After interviewing patients, their families,...
View ArticleWhy Researchers Want Broader Access to Social Media Data
Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tech companies took steps to reduce the circulation of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Will these efforts be effective? Researchers say that without better...
View ArticleDespite Scrutiny, High C-Section Rates Persist in the South
Cesarean sections can be necessary and even lifesaving, but public health experts have long contended that too many performed in the U.S. aren’t. Despite scrutiny, the overall C-section rate in 2020,...
View Article