Smithsonian.com

Canadian officials announced yesterday that the harp seal hunt will go on, albeit with a lowered quota of 270,000. Animal activists say that the hunt is not only cruel, it imperils a species already in decline due to melting sea ice. Seal pups are particularly vulnerable to global warming-thinned ice sheets, as they are not strong enough to swim. Additionally, mother seals require sea ice to give birth and nurse.

Mike Hammill, a Canadian Fisheries Department spokesman, said that 90 to 100% of seal pups in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, where 20 percent of the hunt takes place, may die this year because of melting ice conditions. The Humane Society’s Rebecca Aldworth agrees. “The entire seal population has been essentially swept out into the Atlantic,” she told the AP. “We looked for those hundreds of thousands of pups and we found just three surviving.” The hunt has no official starting date yet, though it has begun later and later every year because of melting ice and delayed pup births.  (more…)

Monkey business has taken on a whole new meaning. Sex between marmosets, small South American monkeys, is more mischievous and deceitful than either of the “parents” are aware.

If you read the science sections in the paper you’ll know why. A study released in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academyof Sciences tells the story. Marmosets often give birth to fraternal twins. Fraternal twins develop from two eggs and have different DNA. When marmoset twins are in the womb they exchange cells–an occurrence that is rare in the animal kingdom, but common in marmosets. The monkeys trade cells for everything from hair to sperm. Which means that a male marmoset, unbeknownst to him, may be spreading the seed of his brother.  (more…)

First, a former Canadian defense minister said that world governments should come clean about their knowledge of UFOs and alien technology, so that we could use that technology in our alternative-fuel fight against global warming. “Some of us suspect they know quite a lot,” he said.

Then, France declassifies 50 years of UFO files and puts them online for public consumption. Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, about a quarter are “type D,” which means that “despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can’t explain.”  (more…)

Every year, droves of high school biology teachers pop Jurassic Park into a DVD player and let their students watch it, ostensibly to draw out fact from fiction (ie. “they do move in herds!”). These are the “cool” teachers, but mostly the lazy ones — one step up from that particular hybrid of pre-algebra-slash-coach.

But now it seems those teachers might have to actually teach some things that even the talented Jeff Goldblum and Steven Spielberg are unable to convey to America’s youth. Namely, some folks at Montana State University, in a paper appearing in Proceedings of Royal Society B (which is better than Royal Society C but not quite as glorious as Royal Society A), wrote about the discovery of dinosaurs underground.  (more…)

About 38,000 square miles of Arctic sea ice melts every year, and it’s not going to stop. So says a new study by Mark Serreze of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Arctic temperatures have risen 2º to 7º Fahrenheit since the 1970s. By 2040, ice-free Arctic summers will allow ships to sail directly from one side of the world to the other.

The Arctic may seem far away, but the effects of its ice loss will be felt close to home. (Particularly if home is Venice.) Serreze says that the loss of ice up north will mean less precipitation in the Western United States. California could get drier and the force of Arctic cold fronts sweeping in from Canada will be blunted, meaning less powder for slopes in Aspen and Vail.  (more…)