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Stories from Eric Jaffe

In the past decade or so, over 95 percent of India's vultures have died.

Soaring Hopes

The first two Asian vultures breed in captivity

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Welcome to thegist

John Coyne's New Global Theatre creates a virtual performance where the production occurs on several different stages and is broadcast via monitors to the actors and the audience.

Recasting Shakespeare’s Stage

Designing a Globe Theatre for the 21st century

Barbed Wire was designed for "preventing cattle from breaking through wire-fences," Glidden writes in his application.

Patent Pending

The Supreme Court may soon reinvent the rules for invention

The new removable inks are made from safe pigments and trapped in nano-sized, harmless polymer shells.

The Tattoo Eraser

A new type of body art ink promises freedom from forever

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Mirror Image

The first evidence that elephants can recognize themselves

The fragments now rest in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Old World, High Tech

An ancient Greek calendar was ahead of its time

The surface of Wild 2 is pockmarked with craters.

Clues from a Comet

The first mission to collect space matter from beyond the moon offers insights into the solar system’s creation

Zion's dwindling cougar population traces its roots to the late 1920s, when the park's management made efforts to increase visitation.

It All Falls Down

A plummeting cougar population alters the ecosystem at Zion National Park

A gypsy moth larva crawls along a leaf.

Unwelcome Guests

A new strategy to curb the spread of gypsy moths

Anthropologists recently found fossils of Paranthropus robustus, also called robust australopithecines, in an excavation site in South Africa. Paranthropus coexisted with human ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus as recently as 1.5 million years ago. Some anthropologists had believed that Paranthropus' limited diet caused its extinction, but new evidence from the fossils suggests that Paranthropus had a varied diet that included both hard and soft plants as well as herbivores.

Teeth Tales

Fossils tell a new story about the diversity of hominid diets

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