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Decades of research into the compounds that make up snake venom has led to some startling discoveries
Bill Ulfelder, the New York director of The Nature Conservancy, sees 14,000 acres of rooftops in his city that could be used for everything from generating electricity to restoring nature
On the night of January 11, 2013, during a dive off the Kona coast to view manta rays feeding on plankton, something strange happened. After the divers went down and lit up the water, a bottlenose dolphin slowly swam around them before aproaching…
Depending on where you live, the above video might make you think twice about putting water out for the birds. On January 17, a certain non-profit posted the video on their Facebook page with the following note: “During the drought in Colorado, a…
Meet the man who runs 30 miles a day and eats nothing but fruit
Food for thought, at La Montanita Co-op. All poems courtesy of Snow Poems Project, Santa Fe. It didn’t exactly come as a shocker: 2012 was the hottest and driest year on record. But winter isn’t dead yet. Literally or metaphorically. There’s fresh stuff under the boards…
Noctilucent cloud. Photo: Courtesy of NASA When astronaut Chris Hadfield was asked last week what his favorite photo taken during the first three weeks of a stint on the International…
I just read about how two climbers died on Aconcagua from altitude sickness. I have plans to go to Everest Base Camp this year. Altitude sickness isn’t a concern there, is it?
Axie Navas takes a look at the controversy behind California's recent ban
The science of barefoot running form hit the ground somewhat simply at first. In a January, 2010, Nature article, “Foot Strike Patterns and Collision Forces in Habitually Barefoot Versus Shod Runners,” Harvard evolutionary biologist…
Katie Heaney recounts the history of the most famous Midwestern Yeti
It seems like every week I read about some scary shark sighting or attack. I love swimming in the ocean and take a tropical beach vacation every couple of years. How much should I worry about a shark attack?
A proposal to link seven mountains and 17,000 acres in one European-style network in Utah’s Wasatch Range has created a lot of controversy. While Peter Metcalf, the CEO of Black Diamond Inc., thinks it’s a terrible idea (rea
A proposal to link seven mountains and 17,000 acres in one European-style network in Utah’s Wasatch Range has created a lot of controversy. While Ski Utah’s president, Nathan Rafferty, is a big proponent (read his take here), P
Scientists previously thought that the smooth, hairless surfaces of fingers and toes wrinkled up like raisins after they got wet because water passed into the outermost layer of skin, causing it to swell. But recent studies have shown that the wrinkling is not a result of osmosis, but rather an…
January through December 2012. Photo: NOAA Last year was the hottest year on record for the contiguous United States since record-keeping began in 1895, according to a Tuesday announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Here's a breakdown…
The ultimate guide to the greatest ski adventure of your life
FalconGuides just announced the first 12 titles in a new line of interactive outdoor guides the company developed in partnership with Inkling, a platform for interactive learning. For the price of the download, readers get expert content optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Web, with…
Lightning. Photo: Shutterstock On Wednesday January 2, 42-year-old Irish adventurer Ian McKeever was leading a group of more than 20 people through the lunar landscape section of Mount Kilimanjaro when…
South Carolina surfers and other Lowcountry residents can't stop talking about two white sharks that have been spotted just off the East Coast. But these 16-foot giants may have been swimming in our waters all along.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zph835YAK7M This is what reducing chance looks like on the Australian coast: thousands of beachgoers scurrying to the water's edge of Bondi Beach in New South Wales after a siren warns of a shark sighting. The alarm was sounded on New Year's…
There are a lot of firsts nowadays, and Erden Eruc's voyage was the first thing to inspire Jonah Ogles in a while
In a place built on selective ignorance, a storm forced everyone to stop and think
Outside, inside, gravity, space, time, whatever: this thing transcended every boundary
Planting bulrush in Bayou Sauvage. Photo: Joe Spring It's been seven years since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,800 people and leaving molding shambles in its wake. New Orleans is still recovering, in some places more than others. This past May,…
Working on a tiger shark. Photo: Carl Meyer For 19 years, University of Hawaii scientist Carl Meyer has caught sharks up and down the Hawaiian archipelago, a…
Outside senior editor Abe Streep joins Team Rubicon USA, a volunteer group of former active military personnel who deploy at a moment's notice to disaster zones, during recovery efforts following a fire that swept through Belle Harbor, Queens, on the night Hurricane Sandy hit
Shark Net. Photo: Kip Evans Tagging technology now allows anyone with a computer or mobile device to follow the movements of great white sharks. Along the East Coast, people are tracking Mary Lee and Genie, two great whites. A group named…
Great white shark. Photo: Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock Most people know George Burgess as the kahuna of shark attacks. For more than 20 years, Burgess has overseen the…
Shark fins. Photo: Elira/Shutterstock In 2000, a graduate student at the Imperial College of London named Shelley Clarke began using shark fin data from the auction houses of Hong Kong and the ports of Taiwan…
The surfer was able to escape after the shark bit through his board and the side of his torso, pulling him beneath the water
Three months after protesting the clear-cutting of forest and the use of sewage-effluent snow, Klee Benally and three other activists suddenly face half a year in prison. Leslie MacMillan tries to figure out why.
A mining town in Australia. Photo: Microstock Man/Shutterstock In Part I of this series, Adventure Ethics interviewed Tom Butler, co-author of Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, a new coffee table book by…
Giant mining companies are tearing up some of the wildest places on earth to feed our hunger for gold. But do we even need it?
Brian Blickenstaff spent a day without his clothes on, taking baths with complete strangers
In the rough: Road 7950 out of Chaco Canyon. Photo: Katie Arnold. There’s no direct route from Chaco Canyon, in northern New Mexico, to Canyon de Chelly, across the border in Arizona. Rugged badlands, sandy washes, and vast tracts of…
If we Americans still relied on human muscles to generate all the energy we happily consume, we'd each have 150 dedicated “energy slaves” working for us, all day, every day. Instead, we've been exploiting other forms of energy—mostly non-renewable and emissions-generating fossil fuels—for the past 150 years. But it takes…
Paul Watson. Photo: Tim Watters/Sea Shepherd Over the last three decades, most of the chases involving Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson have occurred on the high seas. He’s usually the…
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q3YYwIsMHzwA cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). Over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012, it took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of…
wind turbines, Banning Pass, CA. Down on the wind farm. Photo: George Wuerthner Every therm and watt of energy we consume comes from somewhere, and those sources are finite, even if they're generally well removed from our daily lives. Energy: Overdevelopment…
James Balog has spent his career pushing the artistic and adventure boundaries of nature photography. For the past five years, he's been capturing the impact of climate change on glaciers, culminating in the powerful film Chasing Ice. What he documented was catastrophic—and should be required viewing for every policymaker on earth.
Mexico City has a very real stray dog problem. Eric Nusbaum investigates all the ways—from the humane to the horrific—it's being addressed.
Bags of oysters. Photo: Orin Zebest It's been a year of important milestones in Marin County, California. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which includes the Marin Headlands, turned 40. The Golden Gate Bridge hit 75 years. Further north, the…
https://www.youtube.com/embed/dmLYjs0kwncThe 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season in 4 minutes and 28 seconds. Video: NOAA Visualization Lab Today marks the end of the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season, one of the busiest and costliest storm seasons in U.S. history. This season…
It snowed in the Twin Cities on Thanksgiving, and Katie Heaney went to a dog park
The Southeastern Ohio Bigfoot Investigation Society is committed to the quest for Bigfoot. But instead of finding the mythical beast, they might’ve stumbled onto something else entirely.
These days, screen-addicted Americans are more stressed out and distracted than ever. And there’s no app for that. But there is a radically simple remedy: get outside. Florence Williams travels to the deep woods of Japan, where researchers are backing up the theory that nature can lower your blood pressure, fight off depression—and even prevent cancer.
If she's approved for the job, one of Rice's first tasks will be considering—and potentially approving—the controversial Keystone XL pipeline mega-project that would expand the tar sands industry
On Saturday, November 7, a team of dive guides and guests aboard the 112-foot luxury dive vessel Solmar V went for their first dip of the day near Socorro Island, Mexico, when they spotted a whale shark tangled in a rope. On their second…
In early November, a South African court sentenced a Thai man to 40 years in prison after he pled guilty to organizing illegal rhino poaching activities. The high-profile case of Chumlong Lemtongthai will likely have…
A brief guide to the biggest environmental issue of the 2012 election
The FBI used an 18-year-old woman called “Anna” to infiltrate an alleged ecoterrorism cell. Did she stop a bomb plot before it came off? Or did she launch one?
My parents ignored the dire warnings about Hurricane Sandy and didn't evacuate. By the time they called for rescue, it was too late.
On August 1, as the 2012 Summer Olympics were taking place in London, the Cincinnati Zoo released news that an 11-year-old cheetah named Sarah had shattered the 100-meter speed record for a runner. She clocked a time of 5.95 seconds, breaking her own…
Author Dylan Tomine shares his tips on introducing kids to finding and growing their own food
Waves for Water founder Jon Rose has been on the East Coast since Hurricane Sandy struck, cutting through red tape and providing disaster relief alongside a groundswell of surfers
This week Raising Rippers is launching a new feature. It’s called Picture of the Week and every week—or as often as we’re inspired—we’ll post a particularly riveting or rad photo about adventuring with kids and give you the backstory behind the shot. What were they thinking? How'd they…
Along for the ride with the homesteaders of the Discovery Channel's Alaska: The Last Frontier
What started as a glorious powder day ended in a desperate fight for survival after three skiers were buried by a killer avalanche in the backcountry of Stevens Pass, in Washington's Cascades. Megan Michelson lived to tell about it, but she can't shake off a haunting question: How did a group of expert skiers make such a deadly mistake?
Seaside Heights. Photo: Google/NOAA After Hurricane Gloria damaged the New Jersey coast in 1985, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) asked the state’s Department of…
Ken Burns talks about his latest documentary and why a 1930s disaster means so much in the present day
Jason Diamond looks back at Courtney Letts: style inspiration, socialite, and outdoorswoman extraordinaire
Wildness is all around. Photo: Katie Arnold Last week, I was hiking with a friend on a trail in town. We’ve been doing this once a week for two years, and in that time, we’ve developed a system: On the way up, we hike in silence…
On Thursday, November 8, at 9:53 a.m., Dylan Grenier took a camera down to Collins Cove in Santa Cruz, California, and recorded discarded drug paraphenalia, a stash of supplies, trash, and a number of people hanging out and sleeping near that scene. Later in…
Three Outside readers tell us how the magazine led them to do something different
Leslie MacMillan investigates the questionable destruction of a Crow Indian religious site in Montana
Last week, the Earth Island Institute feted six young activists at its annual Brower Youth Awards ceremony in San Francisco. Each year, the organization, founded by climber and firebrand David Brower, honors the country’s next generation of environmental leaders who are using creativity…
International humanitarian-aid group Doctors Without Borders, best known for conducting emergency health care interventions in war-torn countries, set up a makeshift clinic for Hurricane Sandy victims in one of New York’s worst-hit communities to fill in the gaps in the government’s response. Matthew Power joined volunteer physicians for a day in the field duri
Sandy passing west of Hispaniola. Photo: NASA Goddard Hurricane Sandy did not hit Haiti directly. It passed to the west, crossing over Cuba. Even so, it dropped roughly 20 inches of rain on…
Hurricane Sandy after landfall. Photo: NASA Goddard A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Revkin celebrated the fifth birthday of his…
Yesterday, Vimeo selected a video called Rockaway Needs Us as a staff pick. It's just the latest video that shows the effects of Sandy, from the recreational to devastation. The shorts range from a…
https://www.youtube.com/embed/RhQktHY9aZgA video showing Sandy’s life from October 23 to October 31. It was as a nine-year-old kid in Reading, Pennsylvania, that University of Miami scientist Brian McNoldy developed a fascination with hurricanes. “I think most of us have a storm,” he…
Outside's East Coast editor takes a walking tour of Freeport, Long Island, with Steven Townsend, lifelong fisherman and Long Island native, after Hurricane Sandy