Animals
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Forest service to explode frozen cows
Last fall, cows that were grazing on federal land in Colorado took refuge in a cabin, then froze to death or were trapped by cows' general inability to figure out how to exit thngs. Now their carcasses are thousand-pound blocks of frozen meat, and rangers aren't sure how to dislodge them.
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In Washington, prison inmates raise bees, frogs, and butterflies
When you think “prison,” you don’t usually think “idyllic bower of nature’s most rare and beautiful specimens.” But at the Washington State Department of Corrections, inmates can skip the license-plate making and spend their days cultivating endangered local animals, insects, and plants. Participants in the Sustainable Prisons Project raise Oregon spotted frogs, Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies, […]
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Forest Service employee traps and tortures wolf, doesn’t get fired
When wolves came off the endangered species list in western states like Idaho, wildlife advocates worried how the species would fare without protection. Ranchers aren’t known to be particularly fond of wolves, for starters. In March, a disturbing story confirmed some of advocates’ worst fears: A Forest Service employee had trapped and tortured a wolf […]
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Power source of the future: Snails
Sometimes it seems like researchers design experiments specifically to win an Ig Nobel prize. How else do you explain a paper titled "Implanted Biofuel Cell Operating in a Living Snail"?
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Denver zoo test-drives elephant-poop-powered vehicle
The Denver Zoo has to deal with a lot of waste. A good deal of that waste comes from visitors, but the zoo also produces hundreds of thousands of pounds of animal poo each year. Now, zoo engineers have found a positive use for it: They rigged up a poo-powered tuk-tuk. (A tuk-tuk is a […]
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Climate change threatens baby seals
You could probably intuit that climate change would threaten seal pups, being as how they’re vulnerable critters who require cold climates. But just in case you had doubts, new research has arrived to tell you that yup, Antarctic fur seal pups are screwed.
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Cloned baby goat is a super-adorable terrifying monster of science
The Kashmir region of south Asia is economically dependent on cashmere (the homophonic name is not a coincidence). But populations of pashmina goats, which produce the expensive wool, have been dwindling. So scientists at Sher-i-Kashmir University decided to hurry the process along, cloning a pashmina goat named Noori with little more than a microscope and crossed fingers.
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