In a packed university conference room, biologist Randy Brown spoke of chinook, the fatty king of far-north salmon. “It’s more than just a fish, it’s a culture,” Brown said to the Fairbanks crowd, many of them Alaska Natives. Brown is the lead author on a paper in which he documented all the known Yukon River […]
What’s this? Another aftershock? That’s hundreds now, each fainter than the last. Sorry, I guess I’ve moved on. I should pay more attention, given that you — a 7.9 deep in the seafloor not far from Kodiak — are the most powerful earthquake on the planet since the one off Mexico last August. It’s just that […]
Two things happened on top of the world this week. In Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), on Jan. 22 the sun topped the horizon for the first time since mid-November. The day before that, Jan. 21, was the first time since Halloween the town’s thermometers recorded a below-normal daily average air temperature. The returning daylight for the […]
Sprouting from your head at the rate of more than three inches a year, hair is a recorder of the things you eat and drink and where you ate and drank them. An Ottawa-based researcher once assembled a countrywide database of Canadians’ hair designed to help the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. With a likable partner […]