Animals
The US Supreme court began hearing testimony on whether or not the Navy's use of sonar should be regulated by Environmental Laws. How important is this case?
The songbird has a friend in the beaver. According to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the busy beaver's signature dams provide critical habitat for a variety of migratory songbirds, particularly in the semi-arid interior of the West.
Tree – elk – wolf – tree. Sounds like a simple ecological system, right? In Yellowstone National Park, however, it's a balance that park rangers are doing their best to manage and maintain. Just as in any place, species depend upon one another to survive. And the reintroduction of wolves to the park has been a very controversial topic.
From majestic African elephants to tiny and often unappreciated rodents, mammals on Earth are in a state of crisis. One in four mammal species on Earth is being pushed to extinction, according to the Global Mammal Assessment, the most comprehensive assessment of the world's mammals.
The melodious singing of birds has been long appreciated by humans, and has often been thought to reflect a particularly positive emotional state of the singer. In a new study published in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on October 1, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have demonstrated that this can be true. When male birds sang to attract females, specific "reward" areas of their brain were strongly activated.
Engineers long have known that great ideas can be lifted from Mother Nature, but a new paper takes it to a cellular level. Applying modern engineering design tools to one of the basic units of life, they argue that artificial cells could be built that not only replicate the electrical behavior of electric eel cells but in fact improve on them.
The newest volume of Environmental Research has a special section focusing in the biological and ecological impacts of plastics... and the results aren't pretty.
Where can you see the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play? Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming! Last August, I was privileged to spend five days exploring the park. Now, I'll share what I learned about the wildlife in America's first national park – and last wild habitat for many of these animals.
a large land roaming lizard. hmm...
PETA inspires headlines yet again, asking Ben & Jerry's to replace the cow's milk in their ice cream with human breast milk.
Researchers at Queen's University Belfast have found that the main source of food for many fish - including cod - in the North Atlantic appears to adapt in order to survive climate change.
It appears that humans aren't the only ones with exceptionally good long-term memory. Crows not only remember individual faces over long periods of time and even seem to be able to communicate to other crows information about the people in question.
Why is your mate's rendition of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get it On" cute and sexy sometimes and so annoying at other times? A songbird study conducted by Emory University sheds new light on this question, showing that a change in hormone levels may alter the way we perceive social cues by altering a system of brain nuclei, common to all vertebrates, called the "social behavior network."
Tetrapods, the first four-legged land animals, are regarded as the first organisms that had fingers and toes. Now researchers at Uppsala University can show that this is wrong. Using medical x-rays, they found rudiments of fingers in the fins in fossil Panderichthys, the “transitional animal,” which indicates that rudimentary fingers developed considerably earlier than was previously thought.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine have identified a gene in Labrador retriever dogs highly associated with the syndrome of exercise-induced collapse (EIC).
