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As Florida continues assessing the damage wrought by Hurricane Ian, there’s one bit of good news: Ernest Hemingway’s Key West home has weathered the storm unscathed and, more importantly, so have the 59 cats that live there.
Dallas-based biotech company Colossal Biosciences says it is “combining the science of genetics [as they] endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat.” In other words, they want to resurrect the extinct wooly mammoth.
This week Sinogene Biotechnology of Beijing showed off its latest creation, a clone of a Canadian Arctic wolf born to a surrogate beagle mom. The cub, named Maya, was born (if that’s the right term) on June 10. The surrogate mom remains nameless. (Why?)
A gigantic and ancient stand of aspen known as Pando is at risk of fragmentation and decline, researchers say. Located in central Utah on the Fishlake National Forest, Pando’s size might be no match for the insects, disease, and grazing animals that have been nipping at the trees and slowing its regeneration.
It’s that time of year when residents of Iceland’s Westman Islands gather thousands of baby puffins and heave them off a cliff. The chicks not only survive the strange annual intervention, it’s crucial to their survival.
Alameda County has banned the rodeo spectacle of “wild cow milking,” in which lactating beef cows are separated from their calves, chased around an arena until roped and tackled into submission, then forcibly milked. The Mercury News calls this barbarism “one of the sport’s more popular local events.”
A grey seal emerged from the sea off the Massachusetts coast and flopped into the seaside town of Beverly. The seal took up residence in the inland Shoe Pond where local authorities failed repeatedly to capture the wayward mammal.
The world’s largest pelicans have survived many threats, but in Albania a planned airport construction could finally do them in. The Dalmatian pelican (Pelecanus crispus) is listed as ‘near threatened’ by the IUCN.
Researchers at the Universities of Hong Kong and Würzburg, Germany have addressed a question that no one asked, “How many ants are there on Earth?” The answer: 20 quadrillion. It’s difficult to grasp the enormity of such a number. The authors of the study that painstakingly added up the ants call it “20 thousand million millions, or in numerical form, 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 with 15 zeroes).” The researchers warn that figure is a “conservative” estimate.
Certain small mammal species – shrews, voles, stoats, weasels – shrink their brains and other organs in wintertime, a strategy that helps them conserve energy when food is scarce. Now the European mole (Talpa europaea) has been found to deploy this same weird adaptation.
Prime minister Narendra Modi himself opened the gate to release the new arrivals into their quarantined pen. “Cheetahs have returned to India after decades. There is new energy in India’s wildlife lovers,” the prime minister said. “I am sure that these cheetahs will teach us about our values.”
Three bottlenose dolphins swam to freedom last week after years of confinement and degradation for the amusement of tourists. The three males – Johnny, Rocky and Rambo – were released off the island of Bali in Indonesia.
Researchers observing the sex lives of the rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) have learned what we all suspected to be true: the best musicians get the girl. According to the study published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Animal Ecology, males that sing the most and with rhythm have the best reproductive success.
The long-running war over garbage in Southern Sydney in NSW, Australia has evolved into a battle of wits. On one side are the humans, who want to keep their street-side rubbish bins sealed until the garbage trucks arrive; on the other side are the cockatoos, who want the opposite.
The rise of the lithium-ion battery has been essential to the tech revolution, as it is a crucial component of smartphones, electrical vehicles, and every electronic gizmo in between. But lithium exacts a harsh price on the environment, from cradle to grave: mining trashes local environments at the point of extraction, a
The winner was the stuff of nightmares: a parasitic fungus erupting from the body of a fly. Evolutionary biologist Roberto García-Roa captured the moment when “spores of the so-called ‘Zombie’ fungus infect arthropods by infiltrating their exoskeleton and minds. … Here, they await death, at which point the fungus feeds on its host to produce fruiting bodies full of spores that will be jettisoned to infect more victims—a conquest shaped by thousands of years of evolution.”
"We get invited, we show up, and we let the dogs do their work." So says Bonnie Fear, crisis response coordinator for the Lutheran Church Charities K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry, which sent ten golden retrievers to Uvalde, Texas, site of a school shooting in May.
An enduring and endearing staple of nature shows is the monogamous penguin. The idea that these tuxedo-clad flightless birds mate for life without the occasional affaire de coeur is adorable, but is it true?
Turkmenistan’s Alabay - They really like the Central Asian shepherd dog, also known as the Alabay, in Turkmenistan. A new law recently took effect that restricts export of the beloved native breed and requires puppies to be registered in the government’s pedigree book.
Scientists at the far reaches of South America have identified a new bird species, the subantarctic rayadito. The little bird inhabits the Diego Ramírez Archipelago, 62 miles from southern Cape Horn and the southernmost point of the Americas. The discovery is reported in the journal Nature.
