The remains of a horned lizard killed by a shrike. Wandering around New York’s American Museum of Natural History one day in May, I noticed a bird called the fiscal shrike. The small stuffed specimen, black with dashes of white on its wings, was perched on a shrub in a diorama of Kenya’s Kedong Valley. […]
Roberta
The Ramsay family has lived at the Bamff estate, 1300 acres of heathery hills and woodlands in eastern Scotland, for nearly eight centuries. Today, environmentalists Paul and Louise Ramsay share the property with three families of beavers. The couple brought the animals to Bamff in 2002 as part of a controversial effort to reintroduce European […]
One night in May, I idly watched a scene from a rerun of an Animal Planet show called Mermaids: The Body Found. An affable-looking biomechanics researcher named Stephen Pearsall was recounting an analysis of a mysterious marine mammal carcass. In what appeared to be a dramatic re-enactment, the camera zoomed in on torn animal tissue, […]
CELESTE: How long this time? LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more. CELESTE: What if you miss it? LE GENTIL: The transit? I won’t. CELESTE: You missed the last one. Venus (the small dark dot) crosses the Sun. That […]
Around 2 AM on July 16, 2005, graduate students Benjamin Boussert, Giulia Adesso, and Jason Choy left a dance party in San Francisco and started driving home to Berkeley, where they were studying chemistry. Boussert spent his days experimenting with tiny crystals, while Adesso investigated the properties of nanoparticles and Choy used lasers to […]