On July 8th, 1898 Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith was shot and killed in a shootout on the Juneau Wharf in Skagway. Soapy was a conman who preyed on miners, He earned the nickname “Soapy” from his notorious soap racket, where he sold bars of soap allegedly containing cash prizes—but only his gang members ever “won” […]
A new book featuring the work of multiple University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers maps the complex landscape of energy use and security in the Arctic. The “Routledge Handbook of Arctic Energy Transition” offers ways to understand the challenges and opportunities in coming Arctic energy transitions. The book notes that the Arctic is at a pivotal […]
A Cessna 185 zigzagged a tight back-and-forth pattern along Alaska’s southern coast earlier this summer, the pilot intent on his mission to measure the ocean’s response to summer glacier melt. Alaska State Climatologist Martin Stuefer gazed down from the belly of the plane via a hyperspectral imaging camera he had mounted there. Stuefer, the director […]
Fossil fragments confirm Praearcturus gigas as the largest scorpion ever discovered, perhaps one metre in length. Specimens held in the Natural History Museum collection since the 1870s have been reinterpreted using modern techniques · Giant scorpion lived tens of millions of years before other famous “giant” arthropods, reshaping ideas about how and why early arthropods grew […]