Recent long-term studies revealed a three-quarters reduction of insects in parts of Germany and an 80 percent decline of pollinating flies at a field site in Greenland. What’s going on with numbers of Alaska insects? Two scientists recently completed a study on the abundance and variety of insects in the spruce forests of Alaska. If […]
“You guys are the result of thousands of years of selection,” Fran Kohl said. “You haven’t scratched the surface of what you can do with those bodies and brains.” Our biologist friend gave that much-needed pep talk as she shuttled me, Bruno Grunau and Forest Wagner to Eagle Summit, an alpine high point rising above […]
Human footprints preserved in mud at White Sands National Park in New Mexico suggest that humans arrived there — possibly via Alaska — at least 21,000 years ago. No one alive today knows how people got that deep into North America from Asia so long ago. But a team of scientists has proposed winter sea […]
My backyard adjoins the thousand-acre wood that makes up the north campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Several times over the last few decades that I’ve been employed as a science writer, I have written stories set within this large chunk of mostly undisturbed boreal forest. Today, a researcher visited me here in response […]