Author: Hannah
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Confronting the biodiversity crisis
In 2002, the world’s governments agreed to significantly slow the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Time is almost up, and by most accounts they’ve failed. Now that climate change is emerging as one of biodiversity’s greatest threats, scientists are proposing new ways to tackle the crisis. Hannah Hoag reports. Barcoding life In July 2009,…
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Q&A with Earth director Alastair Fothergill
Green Living Polar bears and prophecies from the director of Earth. Earth, the hotly anticipated new film from Disneynature—in theatres on Earth Day (April 22)—follows three families of mammals. It captures the spectacle of the animal kingdom on the Arctic sea ice, in the tropics and Kalahari Desert, and at the Antarctic’s Southern Ocean. Green…
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Muslim students weigh in on evolution
In Indonesia and Pakistan, questions about how science and faith can be reconciled. In the first large study of its kind, a survey of 3,800 high-school students in Indonesia and Pakistan has found that teachers are delivering conflicting messages about evolution. The Can$250,000 Islam and Evolution research project is the first large study of students,…
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Canadian science minister under fire
Comments on evolution spark fierce criticism. It’s been a rough month for Canada’s minister of science and technology. Gary Goodyear, who was appointed to the new position in October 2008, has been roundly criticized in the media for an outburst during a meeting with a university teachers’ group and for his comments on evolution. Some…
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Climate change may alter malaria patterns
Malaria has long been endemic in Kenya’s humid lowlands and its tropical coast. But in recent decades there has been a spike in the number of malaria epidemics in the East African Highlands—an area where the people living there have little experience with the disease. The East African Highlands are high above sea level. Traditionally,…