Locust swarms are serious. In a single day, a desert locust swarm (about 40 million bugs) can eat as much food as 35,000 people in a single day — and in the summer of 2020, billions of locusts were devouring crops across East Africa and the Middle East as part of an outbreak the size of which Read More...
Since 2014, a Danish artist by the name of Thomas Dambo has erected dozens of wooden, folklore-inspired trolls in greens-aces and parks around the world: a seated, bearded dude in Copenhagen’s hippie enclave of Christiana; sister and brother trolls “lost” in Florida’s Pinecrest Gardens; a Read More...
Blue whales, the largest animals on Earth, like to gather off the coast of San Francisco to feed on krill in the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. Right now, they are showing up in potentially record-breaking numbers. Just 30 miles offshore from San Francisco, 47 endangered blue Read More...
Though we can’t hear them, stars propagate some incredibly soothing soundscapes through the vacuum of space. And for the first time, music composed from the acoustic waves that blast out of these sublime celestial bodies has been made available online. The music is arranged by Brian Eno, the Read More...
Millions of species on Earth, from tiny microorganisms to the blue whale, all work together to maintain a stable biodiverse ecosystem everywhere on the planet. However, somewhere along the line, humans developed a humans-as-supreme, not life-as-supreme, attitude about our role in nature. In Read More...
People don’t like being told what to do. There’s even a word for it: reactance. “Psychological reactance is a negative emotional state that we feel when we’re not in control of our behavior,” says Jonah Berger, author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind. “Anytime we feel like Read More...
While it may feel unnatural for us to engage in social distancing, the sacrifices we've made have deep roots in the animal kingdom. From ants and bees to mice, monkeys, and apes, an array of social animals change their behavior to reduce the risk of spreading infections when one member of the Read More...
Conventional wisdom is that a calorie is a calorie, no matter when you eat it, and that weight gain is caused by eating more calories than you use. Nutritionists call this the calories in, calories out theory of weight control. But it might not be as simple as that. New research discovers that Read More...
Americans use more than 7 billion gallons of water a day on their lawns. Over half of that doesn't even help lawns. People overwater, which is bad for the grass. Some water just evaporates or runs into sewers, carrying pesticides with it. That's a pretty heavy environmental cost. "But people like Read More...
In June 2020, Barcelona’s Liceu Opera House emerged from its lockdown-induced siesta by throwing a concert to a rather unusual audience. The attendees did not need masks or gloves in the middle of the pandemic, nor did they be required to follow physical distancing rules. However, they did Read More...