Technology

The oldest recording in the Macaulay Library, made in 1929, is of a song sparrow. (Photo by Chuq Von Rospach / CC BY-ND-NC 2.0)

As of last week, all 150,000 of the nature audio recordings in Cornell’s Macaulay Library have been digitized and are now available online so anyone can listen to them. The library includes recordings of 75 percent of the bird species on the planet today.

President Obama days before the election as he toured the region hit by Hurricane Sandy. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

President Obama made the news for his silence on climate change for much of the 2012 presidential campaign. That changed in his inaugural address on Monday. In a move that heartened many environmentalists, he said that climate change is not a subject he can ignore in his second term.

In each issue of Audubon, the editors review a mix of narrative nonfiction titles, as well as art books and children’s books about nature. For ease, we’ve compiled the dozens of fantastic works we reviewed in 2012 in one place, and we’ve added a few additional books that we covered exclusively online.

Photo by Andrea Pokrzywinski / CC BY 2.0

AquaBounty, the company behind a fast-growing genetically engineered salmon, told the Associated Press last week that it will run out of money by January if it cannot raise more funds.

Firefighters may one day be able to scale tall buildings like Spiderman, thanks to a new adhesive called Geckskin that mimics the clingy surfaces of gecko feet.

Now that the days are getting shorter, our lights burn brightly later into the morning and earlier in the evening. There may be no better visual reminder of where humans live on the planet than a photograph of the earth at night. Cities shine, suburbs twinkle, and the few remaining locales that don’t glow with electricity look both desolate and peaceful. Despite our love of light, so-called light pollution can have detrimental effects to wildlife and humans. That’s why the National Park Service and the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit focused on preserving the night, protecting wildlife, and conserving electricity, have begun to identify dark sky reserves across the world.

Faces open to the sun, young sunflowers follow the golden orb across the sky catching as much light as possible. Now researchers have found out how to make solar panels do the same without using GPS devices or equipment to manually rotate them, making them more efficient and potentially driving down their cost.

Photo credit: Repoort / CC BY 2.0

The oceans are afloat with boats, buoys, and ships. But scientists are sending another kind of sea-craft afloat in the great blue: robots. A variety of ocean-going robotic devices are setting sail to help monitor sharks and rebuild coral reefs.

Footage from NASA’s Landsat satellites shows a unique overhead view of the infamous Mount St. Helens volcano. The time-lapse sequence documents the immense scale of destruction and the remarkable recovery in the three decades following the 1980 eruption. Collected by four different satellites, these images document the volcano and surrounding forest beginning just before the eruption. (Vegetation is shown as red in the first few images.)

Yellow corn. Photo: Dan Klimke / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Protesters of genetically modified food were outraged in early August when Wal-Mart Stores Inc. confirmed that the company plans to sell Monsanto’s genetically modified sweet corn as soon as the crop rolls in.