by Alison F. Takemura | Dec 31, 2015 | Posts
My phone buzzed in distress the evening of Nov. 10. UC Santa Cruz had just sent a text alert warning me and other students that someone had seen a mountain lion on campus. Stay indoors, it said. Luckily, I’d managed to pry myself from work at a computer lab an hour...
by Ramin Skibba | Dec 31, 2015 | Posts
[This is cross-posted from Bay Nature. Thanks to Alison Hawkes for editing assistance.] A gauzy marine layer regularly envelops California’s Central Coast, wafting waves of misty air over the landscape. Even during a crippling drought, all that water, albeit airborne,...
by Amy McDermott | Dec 31, 2015 | Posts
Mammals are thriving among the vestiges of nuclear disaster. It’s fraught work for the researchers who study them. Nature is taking back Chernobyl. Three decades after a flawed nuclear reactor spewed radioactive material over 200 towns and villages across the borders...
by Amy McDermott | Dec 30, 2015 | Posts
Darby Worth wants to be buried in her front yard. It’s illegal, so the 91-year-old Carmel Valley, California woman is fighting for the right to become compost after she dies. She has been mocked by her neighbors and caricatured by her community. And yet, she persists...
by Natalie Jacewicz | Dec 15, 2015 | Posts
As many of us sit down around the holidays with picky eaters, we may ask ourselves, “Why, oh why are children picky eaters?” There may be an evolutionary explanation. Click here to find out more at The Atlantic.
by Ramin Skibba | Dec 12, 2015 | Posts
[This was originally published as an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News. Thanks to Ed Clendaniel for help editing it.] Billionaires and their foundations are both enabling and shaping scientific endeavors in the 21st century, raising questions that we as a society...
by Emily Benson | Dec 11, 2015 | Posts
Ecologists trying to pin down the complex web of connections swirling around a particular species need to start with the basics, things like the size of the population, and whether or not its members are breeding successfully. Simple questions, but if a scientist’s...
by Emily Benson | Dec 6, 2015 | Posts
This story starts with poop. Bird poop. A solar panel shouldn’t be caked in white crust. It should be a dark flat shelf open to the sky, soaking up sunlight, resting near the streetlight it’s meant to power perched on the end of a wharf. But imagine you’re a seagull...
by Bethany Augliere | Dec 2, 2015 | Posts
It’s been described as a “swimming head,” and can weigh as much as an adult rhinoceros—and it also turns out to be one of the most fascinating fish in the sea With a final breath of air, I descend beneath the surface among swaying kelp and flying sea...
by Natalie Jacewicz | Nov 27, 2015 | Posts
At nine in the morning, an hour before the Monterey Bay Aquarium opens to the public, the curator of husbandry operations walks across a tiled tundra of empty exhibit halls. Watery displays drench the floors in blue-green light, and a groggy-eyed sculpture of a whale...
by Laurel Hamers | Nov 24, 2015 | Posts
(Or, how to create the perfect parasite-free butterfly garden.) Sometime in elementary school, an article in my local paper alerted me to the plight of the monarch butterflies. Milkweed is only food monarch caterpillars eat, the article said, and it’s...
by Erin E.A. Ross | Nov 10, 2015 | Posts
On November 9th, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife voted 4-2 to remove wolves from Oregon’s state endangered species list, while increasing penalties for killing wolves. This surprised many people, myself included. You see, until 2008, there were no wolves in...
