Feb 14, 2024 | Salon.com
Scientists have thoroughly demonstrated that we are overheating our planet by emitting greenhouse gases, with the vast majority of this (89%) coming from fossil fuels. As this process of climate change worsens, humans will continue to endure extreme weather events including intensified storms, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires and floods....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 13, 2024 | Salon.com
An elderly man died on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula in the first confirmed death caused by Alaskapox virus (AKPV), according to recent reports. While experts have not yet reached a determination about how the man contracted the infectious disease, some speculate that he may have contracted it from a stray cat....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 9, 2024 | Salon.com
Frogs have a unique distinction among all living land vertebrates. There are over 6,000 living species of frogs known to scientists, as well as countless extinct species — and yet they all contain roughly the same skeletal body plan. While this is convenient in terms of helping experts classify frogs, it also makes it difficult to understand the biology of skin, inner organs and other soft tissues of extinct frog species....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 8, 2024 | Salon.com
The Moon has a long, chaotic geological history almost as old as Earth itself. Every crater, rock and speck of dust on the Moon tells a story, but because it’s not exactly close to our planet, this history is a little harder to study than say, the Grand Canyon.
Astronomers theorize that Moon craters were formed from celestial objects like asteroids and comets crashing into its surface....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 6, 2024 | Salon.com
The community of elephants that call Africa’s Greater Virunga Landscape (GVL) home once thrived there. During multiple surveys of in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists found that specific locations within the GVL, like the Queen Elizabeth Protected Area and Virguna National Park, had anywhere from 1,300 to 4,000 individuals.
But starting in the 1990s, the elephants’ numbers began to precipitously drop thanks to human activity like land use, political conflict and poaching....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 5, 2024 | Salon.com
From the coast to its central provinces, more than 120 people are dead and many others are missing due to a rash of wildfires raging throughout Chile. The beleaguered South American country appears to have suffered a death toll of at 122 at the time of this writing, with thousands more left homeless....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 2, 2024 | Salon.com
Even before the Disney Pixar vehicle “Finding Nemo” turned a pair of clown fish into popular ocean-dwelling protagonists, these distinctive orange and white fish were adored for their charismatic coloring and habit of turning venomous sea anemones into their apartments. These qualities have made clown fish (Amphiprion ocellaris) some of the jewels of home aquariums but these flashy bars serve a purpose beyond looking festive....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 1, 2024 | Salon.com
Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg is on trial in London this week for allegedly refusing to comply with police orders at a protest in 2023. According to prosecutors who appeared at the Westminster magistrates court on Thursday, Thunberg and four other protesters “fail[ed] to comply with a condition imposed under section 14 of the Public Order Act” when they refused to stop protesting after law enforcement told them to do so during the event last year....
Originally posted on salon.com
Feb 1, 2024 | Salon.com
What does Dr. Kush Naker, a 33-year-old doctor of infectious diseases from London, share in common with 61 protesters currently facing racketeering charges in Georgia for protesting a planned 85-acre police training facility through an Atlanta forest?
Both were upheld by climate activists as an example of “egregious” ways in which the law has come down especially hard on those protesting humanity’s self-destructive over-reliance on fossil fuels....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jan 31, 2024 | Salon.com
The Grand Canyon truly lives up to its name, being the largest canyon on Earth and one of the most popular national parks in America. But due to uranium mining in the area, some advocates are warning it could become the site of a future environmental disaster, which threatens to make one Indigenous village “extinct.”...
Originally posted on salon.com