Climate Change
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Q and A: Rick Potts
The Smithsonian anthropologist turned heads when he proposed that climate change was the driving force in human evolution
March 2010 |
By Beth Py-Lieberman
Barrow, Alaska: Ground Zero for Climate Change
Scientists converge on the northernmost city in the United States to study global warming's dramatic consequences
March 2010 |
By Bob Reiss
Snow and Hurricanes, the El Niño Connection
Living in a city where "snow" is the latest four-letter-word to be added to the list of obscenities, I was rather frightened to read the phrase "permanent El Niño" in today's issue of the journal Nature. That's because it's El Niño—not some kind of crazy global cooling—that's been responsible for o...
February 25, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Riled up About Geoengineering
One of the most contentious sessions at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting this past weekend in San Diego was on geoengineering, the study of ways to engineer the planet to manipulate climate. Intentional ways to do so, I should say—as many of the speakers pointed out, ...
February 23, 2010 |
By Laura Helmuth
How Will Climate Change Affect the Pika?
Could this cute little pika disappear, a victim of climate change? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says no; the agency declined to place the mammal on the Endangered Species List last Friday.The American pika (Ochotona princeps) is a cousin of the rabbit, though smaller and lacking the bunny's f...
February 10, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Another Downside to Your Classic Green Lawn
We should all know by now that lawns of green grass aren't so "green" for the environment. Keeping turf from turning brown wastes water; people use too much pesticide and herbicide, toxic chemicals that can contaminate the fish we eat and water we drink. And keeping lawns at a reasonable height bu...
January 21, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Climate Change on Exhibit
The exhibit may shock, sadden or inspire you, or perhaps all three
January 11, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Science Books for Kids
For weeks, Smithsonian editor Kathleen Burke has been sifting through piles of kids' books to put together her annual list of notable books for children, now online. I dove in behind her to pull out some of the wonderful science books that I would have loved to have read when I was young:Almost Ast...
December 21, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Eight Awful Movies for Science in the 2000s
Even a bad movie can be enjoyable under the right circumstances. Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn't bothered. Here are eight clunkers from the last decade: Erin Brockovich (2000): Julia Roberts won an Academy Award for her work in this true-life story of a woman who fought against polluters in ...
December 17, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Ten Movies We Loved From the 2000s
The last decade has been a pretty good one for science in the movies (though there are exceptions, as we'll see tomorrow). Here are 10 movies we enjoyed: A Beautiful Mind (2001): This is the nearly-true story of John Nash, the mathematician who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work i...
December 16, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Climate Change: Why We Worry
World leaders and diplomats have gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark this week to figure out what should be the next steps to address climate change. They are convinced that the world is warming in a dangerous way and something needs to be done.In the United States, though, skepticism is again on the r...
December 09, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What You Should Read -- Sesame Street and the Environment, Smart Pigs, Vaccines, the Amazon, and more...
Here's a roundup of the best of what I've been reading in the past couple of weeks:Are global warming and deforestation too scary for Sesame Street?: A couple of years ago Sesame Workshop named these as adult topics too scary for young children. Instead they focus on teaching kids to respect the Ea...
November 12, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Wednesday News Roundup — Cool Gadgets, Sperm Whales, Giant Spiders and more..
A quick smattering of science and gadget news on this Wednesday: Perhaps this is the wrong time of year to be talking about air conditioning, but when an invention this cool comes around, it's nigh impossible to ignore. Courtesy of Core77 comes news of a bladeless fan from Dyson. The company design...
October 21, 2009 |
By Brian Wolly
No Strangelove Ocean
An important finding was reported last week in the same issue of Science as the new studies of Ardipithecus, and unfortunately, overshadowed by the news of the 4-million-year-old hominid. This finding may turn out to be even more important because it relates not to the evolution of a single specie...
October 05, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
Mars Climate Change Patterns Seen in Ice Caps
Greg Laden is guest-blogging this week while Sarah is on vacation. You can find his regular blog at Scienceblogs.com and Quiche Moraine.You may know that much of the climate change on earth over the last two million years--the coming and going of ice ages--is caused by the "orbital geometry" of the...
September 29, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
Sunspots and Climate
One of the more persistent climate change myths is that any warming we've been experiencing here on Earth is because of sunspots, not increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Of course, the Sun is an important factor in climate, and changes in solar output are suspected to be behin...
September 01, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The End of the World as We Know It
Yes, I'm being a bit melodramatic in the headline, but every time that I read about the bad things that are predicted to happen—or already are happening—due to climate change, I worry. (And if you're about to leave a comment saying that climate change isn't real, please read this post about weather...
August 27, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Death from the Skies!
How will the world end? When Hollywood answers that question, the result is often terrifying but completely unrealistic. But the realms of reality can be even scarier than fiction, as astronomer Phil Plait deftly illustrates in Death from the Skies!, which comes out in paperback this week.Each chap...
August 24, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Political History of Cap and Trade
How an unlikely mix of environmentalists and free-market conservatives hammered out the strategy known as cap-and-trade
August 2009 |
By Richard Conniff
Was the Ancient Incan Empire Fueled by Warm Climate?
In 1532, when the Incas first met a European, their empire stretched from what is now northern Ecuador to central Chile. The largest empire of the Americas numbered more than eight million people. But the Incas didn’t exist until about A.D. 1100. Before than, the Wari and Tiwanauku occupied the cen...
August 05, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
