To the delight of the local mosquitoes, Nicholas Hasson steps through a tangle of prickly spruce branches while wearing a backpack that holds a scientific instrument. Hasson is walking as straight a line as he can through a Fairbanks subdivision built in the boreal forest. Hasson studies permafrost at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He […]
I just so happened to be stretched out on good ol’ Mother Earth the other night when an earthquake happened. On a Memorial Day overnight canoe trip, a friend and I had dragged our boats onto the gravel of a little island on the Chena River. After mosquitoes chased us into our tents and we’d […]
On a fine June day about 100 years ago, in a green mountain valley where the Aleutians stick to the rest of Alaska, the world fell apart. Earthquakes swayed the alders and spruce. A mountain shook, groaned, and collapsed in on itself, its former summit swallowing rock and dust until it became a giant, steaming […]
Wolves with adequate social distancing from humans tend to avoid nasty viruses, scientists have found. In a study of more than 2,000 gray wolves from near Mexico to northern Canada, researchers found that the farther wolves were from people, the fewer viruses and parasites they encountered. In the study, scientists used blood samples taken over […]