TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Pirate Economics?: Captain Hook Meets Adam Smith Will Turner : “If we can outrun her, we can take her. We should turn and fight.” Captain Jack Sparrow : “Why fight when you can negotiate?” [More] rss.sciam.com |
In 100 Heartbeats Jeff Corwin tackles causes and costs of species extinctions Conservationist Jeff Corwin is known for often bringing a goofy passion to his television projects for Animal Planet and other networks. His latest effort displays no less passion, but switches out most of the jokes for gravitas. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The Ethical Dog Every dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules--and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups--and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality.Morality, as we define it in our book Wild Justice , is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way wolves and coyotes play with one another. Canids (animals in the dog family) follow a strict code of conduct when they play, which teaches pups the rules of social engagement that allow their societies to succeed. Play also builds trusting relationships among pack members, which enables divisions of labor, dominance hierarchies and cooperation in hunting, raising young, and defending food and territory. Because this social organization closely resembles that of early humans (as anthropologists and other experts believe it existed), studying canid play may offer a glimpse of the moral code that allowed our ancestral societies to grow and flourish. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Ocean garbage patches are not growing, so where is all that plastic going? Researchers have been visiting locations in the western North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea for more than two decades to better understand the large patches of plastic that have formed there. Although the mysteries surrounding exactly how the plastic gets to these locations, where it comes from and what impact it's having on marine life remain unanswered, a team of scientists has now published perhaps the most analytical study of the patches to date based on data collected by research vessels over a 22-year period, between 1986 and 2008. [More] Atlantic Ocean - Oceanography - Marine biology - Research - Plastic rss.sciam.com |
Is salmon farming bad for the oceans? We are as close to the salmon cages as we can get, telephoto lenses out, video rolling. From our vantage point, fisherman Reid Brown's 45-foot boat the Rebecca and Shelley, we don't see any salmon but the seabirds clamoring around the raised salmon cages are excited about something here in Passamaquoddy Bay on the Bay of Fundy.This region is throne to a wealth of wild marine diversity and biomass, a bounty that is augmented (and unseated in the opinion of some) by booming salmon farms. There are 95 salmon farms in New Brunswick's waters that produce 26,000 metric tones of salmon each year. Together they stock enough smolt, roughly 12 million, to outnumber people in New Brunswick 16 to one. [More] rss.sciam.com |