The Blaschka Glass Sea Creatures: A Victorian Vision of Ocean Life

Shannon Leigh O’Neil and I recently took a long-planned road trip through New York’s Finger Lakes region to soak in some world-class art, science, nature and wine. The first stop on our ambitious itinerary was the Corning Museum of Glass, a collection spanning 35 centuries of glassmaking, from utilitarian objects to fine art. The special …

Oh, Rats: Rodents Too Smart for Exterminators on Island visited by ‘Essex’ Castaways

A study published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science described everyone’s worst nightmare: rats that appeared to be too smart to eat poison put out by exterminators on Henderson Island, a Pacific islet where survivors from the whaleship Essex landed in 1820. Researchers described a case report in which a project to eradicate invasive rats …

Op-Ed Calls for Elizabeth Hamilton on $10 Bill–but Harriet Tubman Will Grace the $20 Instead

Since last summer, many Americans have called for a woman to replace one of the men currently pictured on U.S. currency. The $10 was due for revision first, owing to the Treasury’s efforts to make bills more resistant to counterfeiting. That would have meant booting Alexander Hamilton–the first Secretary of the Treasury–off the $10 bill. Awkward. …

Southern Right Whale Recovery Could Take Decades, Study Finds

This week, whale watchers went bananas over sightings of about 250 northern right whales in the plankton-rich waters around Cape Cod. The pods represented half of the total population of these critically endangered cetaceans, one of the world’s rarest animals. Now, in the first assessment since the end of the 19th century whaling era, the British …