Monthly Archive
 Courtesy of Obama Foodorama |
First she planted an organic garden on her lawn, then she hosted a farmers’ market at her house, and now she’s taking on the childhood obesity epidemic. As first lady, Michelle Obama could nurture the sustainable food movement and reap positive results for both kids’ health and the environment.
Red-tailed Hawk (Photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
Read about endangered whooping cranes taking flying lessons from a plane, the new hope for Fresh Kills landfill, the discovery of a large-billed reed warbler in Afghanistan—only the fourth time this species has been seen in more than 160 years—and more.
For previous editions, click here and here.
Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx, sporting their orange and white striped tails. Original artwork © Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing.
Yes, Jurassic Park’s sequels crashed and burned like an asteroid. But you gotta admit—the dinosaurs seemed realistic, right? Maybe then…but after a paper appearing yesterday in Nature, any special effects team bent on a new dino flick should consider throwing some feathers in here and there—with particular attention to their color.
After watching this video, I don’t think I’d ever play the card game Memory with a chimp if there were money riding on the outcome. Tetsuro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University, first trained young chimpanzees to touch numerals in order from 1 through 9. Then the primates were put to the test: After touching ‘1’ on a screen, the other numerals turned into white rectangles, and the chimps had to remember where the other numerals appeared and touch them in order. Matsuzawa and colleague Sana Inoue tasked human adults with the same trial. The result? “Young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection—better even than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus following the same procedure,” they reported in Current Biology. How do you like them, er, bananas?
Great gray owl
Every few years, great grey owls move—usually en masse—from their boreal breeding grounds, typically in search of food. The last great irruption (as these movements are called) happened five years ago, in 2004-2005. It was so large that it caught the attention of bird lovers, environmentalists, and the mainstream media.
As freelance writer Frances Backhouse writes, “Like many ghosts, they are notoriously hard to track down, even by dedicated seekers who are willing to venture into the boggy, mosquito- and black fly-ridden places that are the owls’ preferred nesting sites throughout most of their range. But now and then, in the dead of winter, they materialize in unexpected locations far from their usual breeding range, thrilling keen birders and casual observers alike.”
Follow Backhouse as she describes these mysterious creatures and their surprise visits, in “Ghost Chasers” from the January-February 2010 Audubon.
[Photo lizjones112, Flickr Creative Commons]
 Asiatic black bear Photo: Koalie on Flickr Creative Commons |
In Vietnam last week, 19 moon bears—also called Asiatic black bears, a species considered vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—were rescued from a farm where they were found in small metal cargo containers, with evidence suggesting that their gall bladders had been illegally “milked” to excrete bile used for medicinal purposes.
The 19-bear release was the largest rescue at one time in Vietnam, according to Animals Asia Foundation, which helped transport the bears.
