natural history

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• 6/18/2023
  

  Can Canada Contain Conflagration?

  by Steve Pyne

  Fire is a part of the long natural history of Canada, but this month's wildfires show the insufficiency of the nation's plans to live with fire at the opening of a Pyrocene era. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  4/5/2023
  

  Racist Interpretations of Human Evolution Remain Prevalent in Popular Culture, Museums, and Textbooks

  by Rui Diogo

  Science has never been immune from the prejudices and assumptions of the society around it. Much of the received wisdom about human origins and evolution rests on flawed assumptions about group hierarchies. 

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• SOURCE: Seattle Times
  6/26/2022
  

  Seattle's Audubon Chapter to Rename, Distance from Namesake's Racist Views

  “The shameful legacy of the real John James Audubon, not the mythologized version, is antithetical to the mission of this organization and its values,” said Claire Catania, executive director of the Seattle chapter, in a statement.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/8/2022
  

  The Paradox of Sourness

  Of all the major taste categories, the relationship between human thriving and sensing sourness is the least understood. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/3/2022
  

  Richard Leakey, Finder of Fossils Key to Story of Human Origins, Dies at 77

  Leakey's discoveries were foundational both to the study of human origins and the model of scientific investigation. 

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• SOURCE: Contingent
  12/8/2021
  

  The Second Skeleton

  by Mabel Rosenheck

  "Museums construct knowledge. As a historian of museums this is what I study. But museums don’t just construct knowledge through architecture, collecting, arrangement, or labeling. They construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally."

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  12/9/2021
  

  This Paleoanthropologist is Unraveling the Mystery of How Humans Started Eating Meat

  "Every time I got to pull a bone out of the ground it literally felt like reaching through time. I was touching a bone that hadn’t been touched for a million and a half years — it was magical" – Briana Pobiner.

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• SOURCE: Scientific American
  11/30/2021
  

  Humans Are Doomed to Extinction

  by Henry Gee

  From the perspective of a natural historian, humanity has had a good run, but "I suspect that the human population is set not just for shrinkage but collapse—and soon."

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  11/3/2021
  

  We Are Still Feeling the Ecological Impact of Whaling

  In one century, whalers killed at least 2 million baleen whales, which together weighed twice as much as all the wild mammals on Earth today. New research suggests this has impacted the ecology of the oceans significantly.

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• 10/10/2021
  

  The Horseshoe Crab is the Unsung, and Threatened, Hero of the Pandemic

  by William Sargent

  With due regard to Anthony Fauci, horseshoe crabs are truly the unsung heroes of the pandemic.

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• SOURCE: Atlas Obscura
  9/22/2021
  

  The Curious Task of Preserving Darwin's Beans and Butterflies

  Although his voyage to the Galapagos is famous, much of Darwin's work on natural selection was based on correspondence with horticulturalists and naturalists who sent him samples from around the world. Cambridge University's libraries are at work to preserve that correspondence.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/7/2021
  

  Our Greatest Libraries are Melting Away

  by David Farrier

  Ice core samples from the Greenland shelf are a physical archive of the long sweep of human history, and demonstrate the connections of humanity's past and future. 

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• SOURCE: NPR
  4/7/2021
  

  Your Weather Forecast Update: Warmer Climate Will Be The New 'Normal'

  The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its ten-year updates to its "normal" temperature standards. Based on 30 years of data, higher temperatures are indeed "the new normal."

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• SOURCE: CNN
  4/27/2020
  

  Big Chunks of History (and Rock) are Missing in North America, Study Says

  Geologist Rebecca Flowers has recently published a paper that suggests cataclysimic events that separated eras in natural history may have taken place at different times globally.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2/19/20
  

  Animals large and small once covered North America’s prairies – and in some places, they could again

  by Joel Berger and Jon Beckmann

  Today most of our nation’s prairies are covered with the amber waves of grain that Katharine Lee Bates lauded in “America the Beautiful,” written in 1895. But scientists know surprisingly little about today’s remnant biodiversity in the grasslands.