In the Arctic, More Rain May Mean Fewer Musk Oxen

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, January 18, 2018

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It’s hard to miss a musk ox: It looks like a buffalo decked out in a hairy fur coat. And yet this easy-to-spot giant, which lives on tundras from Siberia to Greenland, is still surprisingly mysterious.

“Here is the largest land mammal of the polar zones, but we hardly know anything about musk oxen,” said Joel Berger, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University and a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Dr. Berger has studied musk oxen in Alaska for nearly a decade, and on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, he and his colleagues reported a disturbing finding: Musk oxen are unexpectedly vulnerable to rapid climate change in the Arctic.

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Friday’s Elk January 12, 2018

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

This week I went to Minneapolis to speak about science writing at a conference at the University of Minnesota. I wanted to mention one of my favorite novels in the talk, Moby-Dick. My view of Melville’s book has evolved from my days as a college English major to my current existence as a science writer. I’ve grown increasingly fond of the “cetology” chapters, in which Melville veers away from the story of Ishmael to explore the biology of whales. In 2013, I was asked by the Los Angeles Public Library to write an essay on the subject for an online celebration of the novel. I wanted to put a link to the essay on a slide for my Minnesota talk, but I discovered that the whole site for the project had disappeared. Such is the tenuous legacy of writers in the digital age. So I fished the piece out of my hard drive and revived it on Medium. You can read it here. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk January 12, 2018” →

Climate Change Is Altering Lakes and Streams, Study Suggests

Posted on by Zimmer

The New York Times, January 11, 2018

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To scientists who study lakes and rivers, it seems humans have embarked on a huge unplanned experiment.

By burning fossil fuels, we have already raised the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent, and we’re on track to increase it by much more. Some of that gas may mix into the world’s inland waters, and recent studies hint that this may have profound effects on the species that live in them.

“We’re monkeying with the very chemical foundation of these ecosystems,” said Emily H. Stanley, a limnologist (freshwater ecologist) at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. “But right now we don’t know enough yet to know where we’re going. To me, scientifically that’s really interesting, and as a human a little bit frightening.”

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“Therefore his shipmates called him mad”: The Science of Moby-Dick

Posted on by Matt Kristoffersen

Medium, January 9, 2018

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(In 2013, the Los Angeles Public Library asked me to write an essay about the science in Moby-Dick for an online celebration of the book. At some point, its page vanished into the digital ether. So I decided to re-post it here.)

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In the Bones of a Buried Child, Signs of a Massive Human Migration to the Americas

Posted on by Zimmer

The New York Times, January 3, 2018

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The girl was just six weeks old when she died. Her body was buried on a bed of antler points and red ocher, and she lay undisturbed for 11,500 years.

Archaeologists discovered her in an ancient burial pit in Alaska in 2010, and on Wednesday an international team of scientists reported they had retrieved the child’s genome from her remains. The second-oldest human genome ever found in North America, it sheds new light on how people — among them the ancestors of living Native Americans — first arrived in the Western Hemisphere.

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