Social News A(I)utomation
It’s time to give a crap about crap. To save animals, we need to save their poop. If a bear shits in the woods and a scientist is there to collect it, where will it be stored? The Poop Ark!
A space of functional beauty, the Poop Ark would preserve droppings, chips, turds, pies, frass, [...]
Schoenoplectus americanus, or the chairmaker’s bulrush, is a common wetland plant in the Americas, and it has an existential problem. It has chosen to live in a place where it is always at risk of being drowned.
Like all plants, the bulrush requires oxygen to produce energy. One solution is [...]
Stewart says public interest in spiders and scorpions has exploded as people realize they are actually low-maintenance pets that don’t need walking three times a day and can be kept in apartments or small homes without a backyard. “They’re fascinating creatures, and they’re [...]
Archaeologists don’t know exactly how many Taíno survived the enslavement, massacres, and diseases that marked the following centuries—though genetic sampling reveals significant Indigenous ancestry in contemporary Puerto Rico. But Taíno stories and artifacts stress the importance [...]
By mid-afternoon, the team had seemingly painted fire onto the land, burning exactly where and what they wanted. The mature pines’ lower trunks were singed black, and the ground beneath them was charred and cleared of most of the tangled brush that had been there at the start of [...]
The team’s test plots also host some of Jordan’s rarest flora. In Marka, that includes saplings of Pistacia lentiscus, the wild pistachio tree—there are only about 50 left in the wild in Jordan—and Celtis australis, sometimes called a European hackberry, which is even more rare.
However, [...]
Around a hundred miles to the south of Chileno Valley Road, another group of volunteers—the Alma Bridge Newt Patrol—have been painstakingly documenting more than 5,000 newts a year that perish while crossing a 4-mile stretch of road in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Unlike Gale’s brigade, [...]
Fence construction is growing rapidly throughout the world. An extension of the dingo fence is underway to add another 460 miles. Stout, often impermeable, fences are going up on national borders in Eastern Europe to deter migrants, and Europe now has more miles of border fences than [...]
This story originally appeared on The Guardia and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The US Environmental Protection Agency is poised to allow the use of four of the most devastating chemicals to bees, butterflies, and other insects to continue in America for the next 15 years, [...]