Originally published on Mon December 17, 2012 10:02 pm
Though we hear about them every holiday season in that famous song, chestnuts – whether roasting on an open fire or otherwise – have been noticeably absent from many American tables for decades, thanks to a deadly fungus that decimated the species near half a century ago. But a small army of determined growers have been on a seemingly quixotic quest to put chestnuts back on the American table, and they're just starting to see results.
A helicopter placed this inflatable tree raft in the forest canopy in Panama.
Credit Roger Le Guen / Panacoco
Jurgen Schmidl fogs the forest understory with insecticide to help in the collection of specimens.
Credit Courtesy of Maurice Leponce / Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
Here, researcher Maurice Leponce hangs from the "canopy bubble."
Credit Jurgen Schmidl / University of Erlangen
Here, Dawn Frame and Alexey Tishechkin in the crane's gondola net insects attracted to the flowers of Nectandra purpurascens.
Credit Courtesy of Roger Le Guen
Researchers also used a hot air balloon-style system to collect arthropods from thie top of the forest canopy.
Credit Courtesy of Maurice Leponce
A construction crane was also built in the forest to allow access to different levels of the forest.
Credit Courtesy of Maurice Leponce
Researchers used the canopy, which in some places was as much as 13 stories above the forest floor, to collect insects.
Credit Courtesy of Noui Baiben
Researchers used this inflatable tree raft that sits atop the forest canopy to help them collect almost 130,000 arthropod specimens from a section of Panamanian rainforest about the size of a football field.
Credit Courtesy of Yves Roisin
This large moth, a Thysania agrippina, sometimes called the great gray witch, is one of the more than 6,000 species identified in a multi-year census of a section of Panamanian rainforest.
There are more species of insects than pretty much anything else in the world. And scientists know there are millions they haven't even identified yet. Now, in a tropical rainforest in Panama, a multinational team of scientists has just completed the first ever insect census.
Scott Miller, an entomologist at the Smithsonian who worked on the Panama, shows off one of the species from the survey that's at the National Museum of Natural History's insect zoo in Washington, D.C.
This picture received from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday shows an orbit image of the satellite Kwangmyongsong-3, being monitored on a large screen at a satellite control center in Cholsan county, North Pyongan province in North Korea.
Originally published on Thu December 13, 2012 4:51 pm
Sputnik 1 just beeped. China's first satellite, launched more than a decade later, simply radioed a communist anthem back to Earth. So far, North Korea's first satellite appears to be less accomplished.
And that shouldn't be a surprise.
Given the history of first orbital space shots, North Korea's apparent struggle with its mission is fairly typical, says David Akin, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland.
Originally published on Fri December 14, 2012 5:50 pm
Want to be more creative? Drop that iPad and head to the great outdoors.
That's the word from David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies multitasking at the University of Utah. He knew that every time he went into the southern Utah desert, far from cellular service, he started to think more clearly.
But he wanted to know if others had the same experience.
Originally published on Thu December 13, 2012 2:17 pm
The United States is facing its worst drought since the 1950s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With little to no signs of relief on the horizon, many analysts expect conditions to worsen well into next year.
I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Coming up, those apps you've been downloading to keep the kids occupied during car rides and sports practices? It turns out, according to federal regulators, they are collecting all kinds of information that they aren't telling you about. So we will. In a few minutes.
As any cheese maker will tell you, it's not that hard to make cheese. You just take some fresh milk, warm it up a bit, and add something acidic to curdle it. Then, once it has cooled, you drain off the whey — the liquid part — and you're left with cheese.
A woman with the Army Corps of Engineers documents a destroyed home last month in a residential area of New Dorp Beach on Staten Island in New York City.
Credit Christopher Joyce / NPR
Who's Next? A boat displaced by Hurricane Sandy was dropped on Staten Island. Because of sea level rise, the storm surge was more intense than it would have been in a non-climate changed world, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco says.
It will take tens of billions of dollars to repair the damage wrought by Superstorm Sandy. But scientists who study climate change say repair is not enough. As the climate warms, ice sheets and glaciers will melt, raising the sea level. That means coastal storms will more likely cause flooding.
So New Yorkers, local politicians and scientists face a tough decision: How to spend limited funds to defend themselves from what climate experts call "the new normal."
