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February 26, 2021 at 08:01PM Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian Ocean Islands . So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly. But the emails from Brian Fisher , an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein.

February 26, 2021 at 06:35PM The language of diplomacy rarely allows for a true sense of emotion or urgency. But reading between the lines of the latest report commissioned by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—the body representing the 197 member nations of the Paris Agreement to minimize a global average temperature rise this century—the message is clear. The world has precisely ten months to get our act together if there is to be any hope of staving off a climate catastrophe by the end of the century. If member nations are to achieve the Paris Agreement target of limiting global temperature rise above preindustrial levels by 2°C—ideally 1.5°C—by 2100, they must redouble efforts and submit stronger, more ambitious goals to reduce carbon emissions, according to the report. The document tabulates the national climate action plans [NDCs], of each member nation. The NDCs, which were due at the end of 2020, are essentially blueprints laying ou

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February 25, 2021 at 09:44AM NASA’s Perseverance rover is the gift that keeps on giving. In the wake of the rover’s awe-inspiring touchdown on Mars on Feb 18, an event that brought over 20 million people together to watch NASA’s livestream of the successful landing, there was even more to the incredible spectacle than met the eye. An intrepid computer science student and his father cracked a coded secret message hidden within the pattern of the rover’s parachute it used to descend onto the Marian surface. Allen Chen, the engineer in charge of the landing system, hinted during a Monday news conference that video footage of Perseverance’s parachute deploying contained a hidden missive. So the 23-year-old student, Maxence Abela, and his Google software engineer father, Jerome Abela, set to work solving the puzzle. By breaking down the parachute’s pattern into 10-digit sequences of binary code, the Abelas deduced that the numerical sequences within the parachute’s inner t

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February 23, 2021 at 02:32AM When the Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, NASA controllers had only the data-stream coming back from the spacecraft to confirm that the hair-raising descent was going as planned. It was only when they got the “weight on wheels” signal—the confirmation that the rover was on the ground and supporting itself—that they knew the landing was a success. Now, just four days later, NASA has released footage of the landing captured by multiple cameras on both the spacecraft itself and the “sky crane” descent stage that lowered the rover the last 21 meters (70 ft.) to the ground. A spectacular landing now seems all the more so.

February 21, 2021 at 04:19PM </span><strong><span class="s1">Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. </span></strong><span style="font-weight: 400;"> ide class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"> Well hello! I’m so glad you’re here. If you’re having trouble viewing this in email, see the TIME.com version here . —Ralph Waldo Emerson Perseverance, Awe, and Why We Need Wonder Here’s a secret: I am a recovering cynic with recurring pessimistic tendencies. It’s hereditary. On a sunny day, my Irish grandfather would look out the window and say: “We’ll pay for this.” And I won’t even get into the generations of head-spinning drama on the Russian side. Lately, for all the obvious reasons, it’s been way too easy to fall into compulsive fretting. But last Thursday, I turned on the news expecting the usual terribleness, and there was

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February 19, 2021 at 06:26PM When a Nigerian judge ruled in 2005 that Shell’s practice of gas flaring in the Niger Delta was a violation of citizens’ constitutional rights to life and dignity, Nnummo Bassey , a local environmental activist, was thrilled. Bassey’s organization, Friends of the Earth, had helped communities in the Niger Delta sue Shell for gas flaring, a highly polluting practice that caused mass disruption to communities in the region, polluting water and crops. Researchers had found that those disruptions were associated with increased rates of cancer, blood disorders, skin diseases, acid rain, and birth defects—leading to a life expectancy of 41 in the region, 13 years fewer than the national average . “For the first time, a court of competence has boldly declared that Shell, Chevron and the other oil corporations have been engaged in illegal activities here for decades,” Bassey said on Nov. 14, 2005, the day the Federal High Court of Nigeri