Hundreds of scientists and volunteers combed Central Park on a recent 24-hour marathon to catalogue every living species they could find. Some climbed trees; others dove muck-filled ponds. "It's not just pigeons and rats, but a pretty good cross section of wildlife," said one participant.
Following in his father's footsteps, marine explorer Jean-Micheal Cousteau has embarked on an expedition to explore the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a remote, 1,200-mile-long (2,000-kilometer) chain of islands and coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean. Cousteau hopes a documentary on the expedition will help garner protected status for the pristine ocean ecosystem.
Seeking to boost the commercial space race, a St. Louis foundation plans to award U.S. ten million dollars to the first team to send a trio to the edge of space and back in a reusable spacecraft. This story airs tonight on our U.S. cable television program National Geographic Today.
How do you move a delicate American icon like the Liberty Bell without turning its famous crack into an infamous one? That's the dilemma National Park Service curators will face when they move the crack-prone chimer later this year.
OK, so there's no such thing as a gamma ray machine that zaps
scientists and turns them into giant green monsters. But the science
behind Hollywood movies is turning increasingly sophisticated. As
audiences grow more science savvy, filmmakers strive to make their
movies as realistic as possible.
Out on the savanna, a fresh and moist pile of fine-grained antelope dung is a nutritious treasure aggressively fought over by a melee of critters. In the race to get away with a slice of the pie, dung beetles have learned to use the moon to their advantage.
On a quest in the Madagascar rain forest to find mouse lemurs, primatologist and National Geographic Ultimate Explorer correspondent Mireya Mayor and her team discovered a new species and what may be the smallest primate in the world—a tiny lemur that could sit comfortably on the palm of a hand.
New York City's Central Park hosts concerts, rallies, weddings, and over 25 million visitors each year. It's also a hotspot of urban biodiversity. Starting tomorrow, hundreds of scientists and volunteers will swarm through the park during its first-ever, 24-hour "bioblitz" to catalog every plant and animal species they can find.
Enormous lightning-like flashes spanning huge distances between thunderclouds and the outer atmosphere have been seen and photographed for the first time. The discovery of the "giant jets" has excited atmospheric scientists, who wonder what role they play in the Earth's electric circuitry.
For decades, scientists longingly eyed the Gakkel Ridge, a mid-ocean ridge that snakes for 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) beneath the Arctic Ocean. Traveling aboard two icebreakers, researchers embarked on a rare expedition to the region in 2001. Their findings are now changing notions of how the ocean floor forms.
The deaths of 14 firefighters on Colorado's Storm King Mountain in 1994 reawakened public awareness about wildfire dangers. Now, with wildfires taking hundreds of homes, those concerns are once again front and center out West. Tom Foreman talks with author Sebastian Junger about the often uncontrollable infernos.
Traditional farming methods in the Burren, the dramatic limestone landscape in western Ireland, are in decline. The falloff in old-style agriculture has imperiled the region's remarkably diverse plant community, including many rare wildflower species.
Scorpions are known as desert-dwellers with a venomous sting, but non-desert species may outnumber their relatives. Few species are actually dangerous, and fewer have the ability to kill.
Scientists have found that New Guinea is one of the few places on Earth where agriculture developed independently. Evidence of taro and banana cultivation has been discovered at the site of Kuk, indicating the emergence of agriculture approximately 6,500 years ago.
The Inamori Foundation announced the laureates of its 19th Annual Kyoto Prizes, international awards presented to people who have contributed significantly to mankind's betterment in the categories of Advanced Technology, Basic Science, and Arts and Philosophy.
