EarthDate

What Did Dinosaurs Eat?

What do Galapagos finches and dinosaurs have in common? Niche partitioning. And what exactly is that? When Charles Darwin first visited the Galapagos Islands, he notic

Secrets of Roman Scrolls

Imagine you could step into a library of ancient Rome and read the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Or Homer’s Odyssey. Perhaps the first translations of the Gospels. One day

Urban Bats

Forty years ago, bridge renovations in Austin, Texas attracted an unwelcome visitor – in fact over a million of them. Engineers had run support beams under the entire le

Importing Trash

In America, we’re number one! In many things. Some are not so good. Like garbage. Each American makes 1500 pounds of it a year. Two-thirds could be recycled, but isn’t.

Where Did I Put That Acorn?

Have you ever wondered how squirrels find the nuts they hid months before? A typical squirrel can store 3,000 of them in a fall season, in dozens of locations. It seems

Lighting More With Less

LEDs are everywhere today. But what does L. E. D. stand for anyway? Luminous Efficiency Device? Less Electricity Demanded? Not quite – though both correctly describe Li

Where Rust Shouldn't Be

Rust is common on Earth. It shouldn’t exist on the moon. But somehow, it does. Rust is just the common name for iron oxide. Iron that has bonded to oxygen. The moon, ho

Sole Survivors

Imagine there was not one species of human…but many. One stronger. One smaller. All different, but closely related. Around 40,000 years ago, that’s exactly how it was. H

Gold is Abundant

Gold is rare. Except in one place on Earth that it’s incredibly plentiful. But we’ll probably never get to it. Over the course of human civilization, people have searche

Life on Mars?

Is there life on Mars? That’s the question NASA wanted its first Mars mission to answer – in 1976. They designed their remarkable Viking rover -- well before modern comp

Warm Springs for Winter Manatees

A large manatee can top 1000 pounds and eat 15% of its weight in seagrass each day. That may sound hardy, but manatees are actually very sensitive. There are three speci

Mapping a Killer

In the mid-1800s, London’s SoHo neighborhood was a terrible smelling place to live, as raw sewage ran through the gutters into open cesspools. When a cholera epidemic br

Ocean Cleanup

Plastic has remarkable value to humans. But it’s also a major source of ocean plastic pollution. Most of it is nets and rope from fishing boats, or municipal garbage tha

The Right Kind of Sand

Sand is incredibly common. There are oceans of it – in oceans, and deserts too. But, for our purposes, that’s not the right kind of sand. We use sand in concrete, to mak

Dangerous Downbursts

In 1985, a passenger jet landing at DFW airport was forced to the ground by an unusual downward blast of wind called a downburst. The plane struck cars on the highway and

Beating the Heat

Before modern energy gave us modern air conditioning, we had sweat to keep us cool. And shade. And maybe a jump in a lake. Animals still rely on those today to beat the

Mangrove Mayhem

If you’ve been on a boat, pretty much anywhere in the tropics, you’ve seen mangrove forests. There are at least 75 species of these small trees, evolved to live in harsh

Turning Up the Urban Heat

On another episode, we told you about urban heat islands. Buildings and asphalt absorb summer heat -- from sun and air, cars and trucks, power plants and air conditioning

Urban Heat Islands

Summer in the city. It’s sweltering. The sun beats down all day. Its heat is absorbed by concrete buildings and blacktop, which hold that heat at night -- and into the ne

Urban Mining

On another episode, we talk about how mines have a large environmental footprint. Think of a giant pit, with huge machines digging out ore.  By contrast, think of your o