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Tufted Puffins at Alaska Maritime Refuge / Photo by Steve Ebbert, USFWS |
Birds and birding
Science and nature blogging
Environment and biodiversity
- New Mexico is in the midst of a serious water crisis.
- The White House is currently getting a set of solar panels installed. Previously, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed, but those were removed during the Reagan administration and never replaced.
- Scientists found a new species of carnivore in the Andean cloud forest. The olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina in family Procyonidae) had been missed because appears very similar to another species in the same genus even though specimens of the new species had been included in museum collections since the early 20th century.
- During the epoch preceding the last ice age, the sea level suddenly rose by 17 feet in response to climate change. That sudden change suggests that there may be instability in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that result in sudden melting.
- D.C.'s Congressional Cemetery has hired goats to eat poison ivy and invasive species like kudzu.
- Chad has suspended a Chinese oil company due to oil spills. Oil spills and oil-related pollution are serious environmental and public health problems in Africa, at a scale that dwarfs most contemporary spills in North America.
- Speaking of oil pollution, there are elevated levels of toxins downstream from the Lac-Mégantic explosion. The railroad company involved in the disaster has been banned in Canada and has gone into bankruptcy.
- Earlier this week there was a story about an invasive, testicle-eating fish in Denmark, but that story was overhyped.
- Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, claims that he can build a pneumatic transportation system from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a tenth of the cost of the high-speed rail proposal, but there are reasons to be skeptical of Musk's claims.
- The Greater Newark Conservancy is an urban oasis.
- Another dead dolphin was found on the Jersey shore, part of a continuing trend this summer along the Atlantic coast.
- Barnhart, Texas, ran out of water due to drought exacerbated by overuse of water for fracking.