Nicole Misarti has gagged in the name of science. The University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist uses new and old bones of animals to determine what their lives were like. Those bones are not always clean and odor-free. Five years ago, to recover bones from walruses killed during a group-trampling event near Point Lay, Misarti […]
When an animal faces a predator or sudden danger, the heart rate goes up, breathing becomes more rapid, and fuel in the form of glucose is pumped throughout the body to prepare the animal to fight or flee. These physiological changes, which constitute the “fight or flight” response, are thought to be triggered in part […]
The turkeys we’ll be sitting down to eat on Thursday have a history that goes way back. Archaeologists have unearthed a clutch of domesticated turkey eggs used as a ritual offering 1,500 years ago in Oaxaca, Mexico—some of the earliest evidence of turkey domestication. “Our research tells us that turkeys had been domesticated by […]
About 1,000 years ago, Norse explorer Leif Ericson bumped into the New World at Newfoundland. The old world was filling up, with 300,000 people living in the Roman capital of Constantinople. Up here in Alaska, the ancestors of today’s coastal Natives were quietly having one of the more successful runs in human history. The Thule […]