A delicate felt swan created more than 2,400 years ago has surfaced as an intriguing relic of a long-lost cosmology in the frozen depths of Siberia. Discovered from an old burial mound in the Altai Mountains, this soft figure is more than just a relic; according to archaeologists, it may represent the very birth of ...
A group of capuchin monkeys has evolved a terrifying new habit on a remote island off the coast of Panama: kidnapping young howler monkeys. What started as an anomaly, a single young man carrying an infant from another species has descended into a deadly “fad,” engulfing the group with no apparent benefit to the kidnappers ...
Fishers and sea turtles are unexpectedly teaming off the coast of southern Peru, where the blue waves of the Pacific meet the rocky shoreline. A sad result of industrial fishing, the mahi-mahi fishery in the area has inadvertently caught endangered turtles in its hooks for decades. Now, though, a government-led project is transforming fishermen into ...
Deep in the misty mountains of Java, Indonesia, a peaceful revolution is under way one that might decide the fate of the Javan gibbon (Hylobates moloch), a primate whose eerie songs once filled the forests but now fade into silence. With just 4,000 wild acrobatic apes left, victims of unrelenting deforestation and human development are ...
For the first time in five years, a lone African forest elephant known as the “ghost elephant” has been caught on camera in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park in a haunting yet hopeful moment. recorded by a remote trail camera, the video shows the elusive bull elephant, Ousmane, stopping under the moonlight before disappearing back into ...
A $180 million carbon credit gamble deep in the Amazon has turned into a high-stakes legal fight pitting Indigenous people against corporate giants and the Brazilian government of Pará. Called the “world’s largest” carbon credit deal, the September 2024 agreement signed by multinational companies including Amazon, Walmart, and Bayer promised to sell emissions offsets so ...
The “rainforests of the sea,” coral reefs are under crisis. Rising ocean temperatures, pollution, and acidification have driven these rich ecosystems to the brink; half of the coral cover lost since the 1950s. Conventional monitoring depends on visual polls, tracking fish numbers and coral bleaching. What if, however, the true narrative of reef health is ...
A quiet crisis is developing in the densely human-dominated landscapes of northeastern Bangladesh. Once migratory guests from India, an elephant herd finds itself caught and unable to return home because of border fencing. Declaring a new protected area to protect these stranded giants, Bangladesh is acting boldly given human-elephant conflicts are growing. However, can this ...
Once a thriving transnational criminal activity, the illegal wildlife trade has seen an unexpected and steady downturn since the COVID-19 epidemic. Based on a ground-breaking analysis by the Wildlife Justice Commission (WJC), Disruption and Disarray shows that ivory and pangolin scale trafficking has dropped and, shockingly, has stayed that way. But what set off this ...
Dreaming of turning base metals into gold, alchemists for millennia combined mysticism, chemistry, and pure ambition in their quest. Scientists have turned lead into gold today at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), surpassing what medieval alchemists could not accomplish. But this modern transmutation is not at all what we know of from mythology. It provides ...
