We are curious to know more:
Imposter fish may be more sustainable
In a first of its kind study, researchers tackled the environmental and financial impacts of consumers purchasing mislabeled fish. And—as upsetting as the mislabeling of any food is—they found a surprising silver lining. Continue reading
Saola. Photo © Bill Robichaud
Still so much to learn, and sometimes it seems like there is so little time to do so:
The Largest Mammal That No Scientist Has Ever Seen in the Wild
BY MATT MILLER
The saola is the largest terrestrial mammal never seen alive in the wild by a biologist. This is not a Bigfoot story. The saola undeniably exists. It roams only in the Annamite Mountains of Laos and Vietnam. Continue reading
Sivarpanam Palace, Tamil Nadu
Source: andeanamazonexpeditions.com
Containing much of the Peruvian Amazon’s greatest flora and fauna, Manú National Park is one of the largest protected areas in the world and allows for once-in-a-lifetime sightings of rare and exotic animals. The park is Peru’s biggest and consists of three parts: the “Cultural or Buffer zone,” where native communities live and tourists can enter unaccompanied, the “Reserved zone,” an area set aside for controlled scientific research and ecotourism, and the “Intangible zone,” the largest section that is strictly for flora and fauna preservation. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Manú offers adventurous travelers lush, untouched Amazon to explore and discover the unmatched beauty of virgin environments and unrestricted wildlife.
Agricultural employees harvest cotton in a field in Benha, Egypt. Welspun India, a giant home textile manufacturer, is in trouble for falsely advertising bedding products as containing Egyptian cotton. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
We are in the business of providing comfortable bedding as responsibly as possible, and we are as vigilant on sheets as anything else. So, in the spirit of FYI:
Those luxury Egyptian cotton sheets you own may not be luxurious – or Egyptian
Target and Walmart are pulling bedding off their shelves after a falsely labeled Egyptian cotton products controversy involving manufacturer Welspun India
Alison Moodie
Egyptian cotton, which can be spun into fine, long fiber to make sheets with a high thread count, is synonymous with luxury bedding. But in the last four months, it’s been at the center of a controversy that has caused many Americans to wonder whether the Egyptian cotton sheets they rely on for a good night’s sleep actually contain any cotton from Egypt. Continue reading
Five lots of white truffles on display entice bidders in both Philadelphia and Italy. Kristen Hartke for NPR
It is that time of year again. We are reminded of those expensive mounds that come out of leafy loamy earth in Croatia, Italy, France and we few other fortunate places:
A $112,000 White Truffle?! At Auction, Philly Embraces Fungi Mania
KRISTEN HARTKE
Bowtie-bedecked auctioneer Samuel Freeman was faced with the unusual task of convincing a crowd to buy something he admits he knows nothing about: the Tartufo Bianco d’Alba, or Alba White Truffle.
“I’ve never auctioned food before,” Freeman says, “and I’d never even eaten a truffle until two days ago.” Apparently that first taste won him over. “It was unbelievable.”
At $458 per ounce once the bidding got underway, those truffles better knock your socks off. Continue reading
Bangalore, Karnataka
Seth sent a snapshot he quickly took on his phone yesterday late morning at Villa del Faro. He had already told me the day before that they were seeing whales in the same vicinity of where the boats are in this photo, but he had not had his phone handy to snap a picture. So this would have to do. It looked as though a regatta was passing by. Continue reading
Melting sea ice in the Chukchi Sea, one of the areas included in the ban. Photo: Esther Horvath
Thanks to Audubon Magazine for their coverage of this news:
U.S. Offshore Drilling Banned Along Arctic and Atlantic Coasts for Next Five Years
A new federal leasing plan released today outlines where energy companies can look for oil while protecting vital bird habitat.
by Martha Harbison
After months of deliberations, the Bureau of Ocean Management announced its final five-year plan for offshore energy-exploration leases today. In that plan, no drilling leases would be available in U.S.-held Arctic and Atlantic waters from 2017 to 2022, meaning that no new drilling could happen in those areas until at least 2022. Continue reading
Thanks to Cool Green Science:
Using Cloud Computing to Untangle How Trees Can Cool Cities
BY TIMOTHY BOUCHER
We’ve all used Google Earth — to explore remote destinations around the world or to check out our house from above. But Google Earth Engine is a valuable tool for conservationists and geographers like myself that allows us to tackle some tricky remote-sensing analysis.
After having completed a few smaller spatial science projects in the cloud (mostly on the Google Earth Engine, or GEE, platform), I decided to give it a real workout — by analyzing more than 300 gigabytes of data across 28 United States and seven Chinese cities. Continue reading
This post from yesterday reminds me of an early morning walk I took a few days ago with Seth and Jocelyn, when these two donkeys came wandering down the road. One seemed determined to get his head and shoulders portrait in the best possible light.
So I indulged him, and both seemed happy with a bit of nose-petting. No carrots, but never mind. When we continued our walk they started to follow, but then, nope. They wandered off in the opposite direction.
Donkeys do that. A walk at dawn is the best way to know a place–at its quietest, and as per donkey logic, in the best possible light. I had arrived at Villa del Faro after a visit at Chan Chich Lodge, where dawn greets you with howler monkeys howling, and on a walk you will definitely hear a symphony of birdsong. At Villa del Faro you will hear birdsong, but different; at most it will be chamber music, more likely solos and duets. Continue reading
We were led to this by a news/feature story, but the background material is even more interesting than the feature in the news. Here is a note worth a moment of your time:
Dr. Seuss was a storyteller in the grandest sense of the word. Not only did he tell fantastical tales of far-away places but he also gave us a unique visual language that carried his stories to new heights of artistic expression. Surrealism provided the foundation from which he built his career, but like a launch pad sitting idle just before liftoff, surrealism was soon to be engulfed in the flames of ridiculous fun and its launch tower thrown to the ground with each new editorial cartoon, magazine cover, painting, or children’s book. Continue reading
Bolin Bay in the Great Bear rain forest near Klemtu, on the central coast of British Columbia. CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
There is an excellent article about old treaties and new alliances empowering indigenous people in North America, which this excerpt captures well:
…In Idaho last summer, tribal representatives from 19 states met for what organizers said was the biggest Native American workshop on climate change, and they concluded that global environmental changes transcended national boundaries.
“This is how land resource decisions are going to be made in the future — through co-management with people who have been on the land forever,” said Hadley Archer, the executive director of the Nature Conservancy Canada, which helped put together the Great Bear forest agreement. To that end, the University of Victoria law school in British Columbia will begin enrolling students next year in a degree program that will combine the traditional study of court precedents and legislation with the study of tribal law. Continue reading
Little Rann of Kutch, Gujurat
Bison trigger a camera trap set up on the prairie at The Nature Conservancy’s Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
We have posted on this topic a few times, and can predict there will be more:
9 Animal Cams You Need in Your Life
Eating healthy will do more for your immune system than megadoses of supplements. Gillian Blease/Ikon Images/Getty Images
Want To Prevent The Flu? Skip The Supplements, Eat Your Veggies
KATHERINE HOBSON
Flu season is upon us, which means it’s time for the wave of advertisements promoting $8 juices or even more expensive supplements to “boost your immunity” or “support immune function.”
But those are marketing terms, not scientific ones. And there’s no proof that those products are going to keep you from getting sick. Continue reading
male – Gallon Jug Estate, Belize
Click the image above to go to Phaidon’s website or see a couple of the book’s photographs and blurbs about the book’s intent below:
Beautiful and bizarre beasts behind Darwin’s theory
Photographer Robert Clark’s new book offers some striking supporting evidence for the theory of natural selection
Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) by Robert Clark. © Robert Clark. From Evolution: A Visual Record
Already, from the cover, we like it. Some of the sample images from inside the book seal the deal. Continue reading
The Timbisha Shoshone elder Pauline Esteves in 1999. In 1933, when Esteves was eight, her tribe’s homeland was declared Death Valley National Monument. PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA RAUCH / AP
We had already published several posts mentioning one of the earth’s more remarkable deserts. But the spectacle that desert displayed this year brought it back to our attention, for several important reasons. Click here (or on the image above) to go to Alex Ross’s update of the epic article he published on Death Valley recently, which we linked to here:
“In the desert, you see, there is everything and there is nothing,” Balzac wrote. “It is God without mankind.” The sensation of sublime emptiness, of a sacred void, explains the enduring romantic appeal of a place like Death Valley,: Continue reading
Estero San Jose del Cabo, BCS, Mexico
Organikos 