As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the woods. Every summer my parents would pack my four siblings and me into the back of our turquoise Ford Windstar and we’d set off for adventure in whatever western wilderness destination we’d chosen that year. Smokey Bear was always there to greet us as…
A dangerous outsider recently washed onto Southern California’s shores. The visitor, likely exhausted from tossing to and fro in frigid waters, was a stranger to our land. It inspired confusion and caution in those who found it. Who was this strange alien? It was a yellow-bellied sea snake, Hydrophis platurus, delivered far from the warmer…
Conventional collars show scientists where in the forest a wolf is, but new technology also tells you what the animal is doing hour by hour For years, researchers have been able to track where wolves roam using GPS technology—but that’s about it. Without direct observation, scientists have had no way of knowing exactly what these elusive predators are up to…
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 earlier, and like a…
[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, is all around us. What if you could capture it? It’s an idea that’s been…
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 of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, trees grow through abandoned houses, owls hoot from rafters,…
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 in the name of nature. Worth may seem extreme on the spectrum…
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.
[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 need to consider more seriously. I have spoken to many astronomers, who…
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 quarry is elusive or cryptic, it can take more than the powers…
