Buying locally is romantic. It feels good to support local economies, and reducing the carbon footprint of our food shopping habits is a noble goal. But now, new research is adding a wrinkle. David Coley from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom is lead author on a new study showing that, on average, lower carbon [...]
Ten potentially new species, most of them frogs, have been reported living in a mountainous area near Colombia’s border with Panama, a remote diversity hotspot the discoverers are now calling a “Noah’s Ark.” Herpetologists from Conservation International in Colombia and ornithologists from the Ecotrópico Foundation led the discovery expedition into the Tacarcuna area of the Darien, with [...]
 I silenced my Inner Rational Scientist here, and went for the cute factor. How could I resist? There actually is some science. It appears killer whale calves born to older mothers may be in better … um, flippers.
I wish I remembered which science conference that was. There was a small presentation room, with a handful of speakers who projected their slides onto a big screen, as usual. But hardly anyone was in the audience; the sessions in rooms down the hall were much more crowded. The title, something about quantifying nature’s value [...]