Category: 9. Environment

Cincinnati Reds’ Stuart Fairchild (57) chases a ball hit by New York Yankees’ Giancarlo Stanton for a home run during the eighth inning of a baseball game July 13, 2022, in New York. A new study released Friday, April 7, 2023, finds that climate change is making major league sluggers into even hotter hitters, sending…

An unwelcome visitor is headed for Florida and the Caribbean: huge floating mats of sargassum, or free-floating brown seaweed. Nearly every year since 2011, sargassum has inundated Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Florida coastlines in warm months, peaking in June and July. This brown tide rots on the beach, driving away tourists, harming local fishing…

Home runs are exhilarating – those lofting moments when everyone looks skyward, baseball players and fans alike, anxiously awaiting the outcome: run or out, win or loss, elation or despair. Over the past several Major League Baseball seasons, home run numbers have climbed dramatically, including Aaron Judge’s record-breaking 62 homers for the New York Yankees…

Baseball is the best sport in the world for numberphiles. There are so many stats collected that the analysis of them even has its own name: sabermetrics. Like in Moneyball, team managers, coaches and players use these statistics in game strategy, but the mountain of available data can also be put to other uses. Researchers…

For years, studying the reproductive biology of sharks has depended on capturing the animals and dissecting them. Scientists recently developed the Birth Alert Tag, an egg-shaped satellite transmitter that can be implanted in the uterus of pregnant sharks to document the location and timing of births. In another development, scientists took ultrasound readings of whale…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Sea ice covered 5.64 million square miles of the Arctic Ocean at the ice’s peak extent this year in early March. That’s almost 400,000 square miles less than the median coverage level at other March peaks between 1981 and 2010, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center at the…

A study in a farming community on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island shows that women and younger farmers can be more influential than older men in persuading peers to adopt new technologies and practices. The findings could have significant implications for conservation organizations trying to implement sustainable agriculture programs within communities. The study looked at two groups…

The deliberate burning of grasslands in Nepal to maintain tiger habitat poses a threat to another endangered species: the elusive and little-known hispid hare. The burning is meant to promote the growth of fresh grass shoots for tiger prey, and to prevent grasslands from turning into forests. However, intact grasslands are important habitat for hispid…

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley leads the Bridgetown Initiative to boost investments to cut carbon pollution. While conflict and inflation will dominate World Bank spring meetings next week, campaigners are pushing for a redesign of global financial architecture to help countries cope with climate change. Experts say developing nations are struggling to find the funds…