The relationship between geographic change and biodiversity is “one of the most contentious topics in evolutionary biology,” said Musher, who did the study as part of his doctoral work.

We hope that you enjoy this selection of the winning entries, with stories on everything from the love lives of bowerbirds to whitefish conservation, from glow-in-the-dark mammals to fishing in mountain hotspots full of freak invasives.

Baker named the group of deep-sea microbes collected in 2009 Helarchaeota—after the Norse goddess of the underworld.Officially speaking, Helarchaeota falls into a category called Candidatus—a designation reserved for microbes that haven’t earned a proper scientific name yet.“We are finding new kinds of life right and left,” says Karen Lloyd, a microbial ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

On the next Fishing for Science trip in February of this year, a scientific angler caught a bluefin trevally that had been tagged on February 6, 2020, at liberty for 753 days.Giant trevally caught and tagged on a Fishing for Science trip in February 2022.

“Once this purchase goes through, we’ll be stuck with more than 100,000 new gas-guzzling vehicles on neighborhood streets, serving homes across our state and across the country, for the next 30 years,” Bonta said.

A growing movement of scientists, land management agencies, conservation organizations, and Indigenous groups is working to return fire to marshes like this one and to fire-adapted forests and grasslands throughout the United States.

More than 200 longtime Wikipedia editors have requested that the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting cryptocurrency donations.Earlier this month, the Mozilla Foundation announced it would stop accepting cryptocurrencies that use the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus process.

Like a growing number of Americans, the Brazil family realized they could no longer live in a place where they faced soaring temperatures and worsening wildfires driven by climate change, and so they decided it was time to move to a less vulnerable part of the country.

In this book, he looks for what remains – the museum specimens and stories – of 11 creatures no longer on this planet.It’s illustrated with lovely prints by Jade They, making this feel like a natural history book of my youth.

“The main threat of the border wall is not the localized area of habitat loss and habitat degradation,” said Aaron Flesch, a wildlife biologist at the University of Arizona, who has studied the wall’s impacts.

But a hidden crisis is unfolding too: The carbon emitted by war machines is helping warm the planet at a critical moment in human history, when every day not spent decarbonizing adds to the compounding misery of climate change.

“Nearby that one is another one, about five miles out is another one, and that’s just one little area.” Harris (Inupiaq) was born in 1957 and spent his childhood across Kotzebue Sound in Sisualik.

Now a new discovery of the oldest African DNA is pushing back against this bias, and in the process revealing how our ancestors lived and moved around the continent tens of thousands of years ago.

The land is now so heavily grazed and degraded that the agaves are disappearing or are consumed by the cattle before they can flower, threatening another important denizen of the desert scrub, the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat.

Months later, when speaking with the founders of a small organization called Doctors for Planetary Health, Merritt shared the story of his decision to write “climate change” in the patient’s chart.

Relying on new geochemical techniques for analyzing ice core sediment to determine the dates of ancient volcanic activity down to the year or even season, the paper, published in Nature in 2015, showed that major eruptions worldwide caused precipitous, up-to-a-decade-long⁠ drops in global temperatures.

Demand is expected to more than double by 2050.But with advances in bioengineering and increasing concerns about sustainability, a number of companies like Xylome have developed microbial oils they say could offer an alternative to palm oil while avoiding its most destructive impacts.

And right now, in the year of COP26, The Green Planet hopes to do for plants what Attenborough has done for oceans and animals … create understanding and encourage us to care.

I work hard to incorporate a little bit of outdoor fun into my desk job, so recently I found myself out with the NMDGF crew surveying fish in the Mimbres River.

Ozone levels at Sequoia and the adjacent national park, King’s Canyon, are among the highest in the United States, thanks to smog that blows in from the urban areas and farming and industrial activity in the San Joaquin Valley below.

In California, where I live, climate change helped kill nearly 62 million trees in 2016 alone, and last year, 4.2 million acres of our state burned.

Scott Brodie, founder of Heart Shaped Games and lead developer on the game, told WIRED, “I look at Afrofuturism as a way to center stories around Black people and the broader diaspora and not being so Western-centric.

Kort read the book during moments of downtime over the next weeks, as he led his platoon of 15 soldiers and four tanks through the Kuwaiti desert, and later when they took up residence in a powerless, abandoned building in Baghdad.

Rosemary “leaned in,” Chambers writes in a pivotal scene, “running a smooth fingertip along the length of one of Sissix’s feathers.” When I tell Chambers that a (straight, male) colleague of mine, who read the book, doesn’t believe humans would actually want to have sex with giant lizards, she is appalled.For a long time, Chambers didn’t think “it was a real book,” she says.

Pump is a natural history of the heart and the science is fascinating.Her book is a much-needed reminder that the plastics crisis isn’t an isolated problem that can be solved with reusable shopping bags or a natural body scrub.

Destiny, the live-service sci-fi shooter from Bungie—makers of games like Halo, Myth, Marathon , and the criminally underrated Oni—is having a moment.Each of these destinations has to be fully fleshed out before they can be turned into places you can go in-game.

A former child actor, and current tech investor and notorious Burner, Pierce led a delegation of crypto entrepreneurs in June to the Central American country, following president Nayib Bukele’s announcement that El Salvador would adopt bitcoin as its legal tender, in addition to the US dollar, starting on September 7, 2021.

Now, 3 years and a pandemic later, the base game itself and the online multiplayer mode Red Dead Online (RDO) continue to capture player’s attention through the story, characters, and open world exploration that Red Dead Redemption has come to be known for.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the latest in a nearly two-decade-long video game series from American studio Insomniac Games, has done much better, commercially and critically—as is to be expected of a technologically impressive, major-publisher-backed release.

We start every game like a newborn giraffe struggling to stand; a well-designed tutorial mitigates the time wasted on unproductive stumbles.“The real story of a game is teaching how to play it,” says Désilets.