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In 2007, molecular biologist Ron Evans flipped a genetic switch on test mice and turned them into super-athletes. Headlines ensued, as did nervous references to human applications and "exercise in a pill." Evans is still toiling away in the lab, and guess what? The day is coming.
A week into the new year, and already plenty to see. Here's the stuff you should click on so far for 2011. Worth a Look:The Top 10 Travel Stories of 2010 (New York Times) Worth…
Haggis potato chips, psychedelic snails, drunk lorikeets, an iPhone that speaks Spanish, and a carload of snowboarders. Our journey this week through the interweb to find stuff to click on was an interesting trip. ¡Es Loco! ¡Es MUY Loco! Best…
Mark W. Moffett, a.k.a. Doctor Bugs, sent in this video of a botfly emerging from under his skin. A mosquito deposited the egg into the entomologist during a recent trip to Belize. The egg hatched and grew—dining on Moffett's flesh all the way home—before emerging in front of…
Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee has called for Sea World to release a tape of trainers masturbating the park's most infamous Killer Whale, Tilikum. “We know from SeaWorld's own director of safety (as well as…
Our weekly roundup of the quirky, bizarre, entertaining, and astounding news from the world outside. Here's the stuff you should click on this week. Now You See It, Now You Don't:Then and Now: Repeat Photography Captures Changing Landscapes (…
Is global positioning contributing to our general sense of lostness? One British navigation nerd thinks so.
Could floating in a sensory-deprivation tank for several hours be as mind-expanding as a real-life adventure? Our neurological guinea pig is about to find out.
Photo courtesy of Flickr. Researchers studying 22 male chimps in Uganda's Kibale National Park found that males with more testosterone also had more parasites living in their stomachs, ScienceNow reports. Male chimps compete aggressively for dominance, like most primates, and…
Little Nemo is looking at you. (Photo courtesy of Shek Graham on Flickr.) The next time you go fishing, you might want to take a moment to consider how the fish feels before you bop one on the head or hook it through its gills,…
Courtesy of dobak on Flickr. Wolves in the Rockies will remain on the Endangered Species List despite growing controversy over their protection, the Associated Press reports. Negotiations between the Obama administration and lawmakers in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming…
A wolf in stilettos was crossing Iceland on his way to Vegas, got stopped at a traffic light and injured his Achilles, while Dolly the Sheep was speedflying in France. Sounds like a job for Leslie Nielson. Or something like that. Here's the stuff you should click on this week.
It swims at 20 miles per hour and can carve out hunks of human flesh. It's one of eeriest beasts in the ocean—it's the Humboldt Squid.
In the early 18th century, only a few thousand species were known, the word “scientist” didn’t exist, and, according to Richard Conniff, “even educated people still inhabited a jabberwocky world in which monsters abounded.” Conniff’s ninth book, The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on…
Photo courtesy of Flickr. Engineers have developed a microchip muscle stimulator that can be implanted into the spinal canal, allowing paraplegics to exercise paralyzed muscles, ScienceDaily reports. The implant, which is the size of a child's…
Holiday gift ideas, surfing killer whales, flying versus driving, the best and worst of outdoor sports, and, of course, anti-matter. Here's what you need to click on this week. Why I Want a Wingsuit for Christmas (Don't Blink): Thanks to the…
Obsessive biologist Rick McIntyre has some peculiar ideas about America's most controversial predator.
The climate cycle known as La Niña has remained steady through October, Surfersvillage Global Surf News is reporting. Characterized by below average surface water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, La Niña typically affects the western United States…
American Bison: A bovine mammal (Bison bison) of western North America, having large forequarters, a shaggy mane, and a massive head with short curved horns; a buffalo. If you were on the internet this week you probably saw the picture of the torn-up…
If you’ve ever been glued to the television during Discovery's Shark Week, chances are you've seen the work of Andy B. Casagrande. The 33-year old cameraman was obsessed with great white sharks as a kid and turned that passion…
Photo courtesy of Flickr A new species of monkey found in Mayanmar has an upturned nose that fills with water when it rains, causing it to sneeze, Science Daily reports. The new species, named Rhinopithecus strykeri, is better known…
In an effort to bring you the best in outdoor news each day, we comb through a lot of Web content. And trust us, there's a lot out there. A good story can take a lot of clicks to find. But those clicks often lead us to content that, while…
Master all things meteorological with our expert primer on sun, wind, snow, and rain
Think Icarus in reverse. The following recently posted videos showcase extreme athletes pushing the limits of flying. The Adventure Life posted the following video of two basejumpers pulling their chutes dangerously close to the ground. Untitled from Steve Casimiro on Vimeo.
Courtesy of NASA Goddard Photo and Video on Flickr. Energia, the lead Russian contractor in the construction of the International Space Station, has designs for the first hotel in space, Reuters reports. The proposed space…
Photo courtesy of Flickr. Pulses of light may one day give fully restored muscle activity to people with cerebral palsy or paralyzed limbs, New Scientist reports. Researchers at Stanford University are using light-activated proteins from photosynthetic…
Courtesy of Edward Vielmetti on Flickr. Despite surpluses of dry grass across the West, the 2010 fire season so far has represented about a 20-percent decrease in the number of recorded fires and a 50-percent decrease in total acreage burned…
Photo courtesy of Flickr. A baby snow leopard was caught on camera high in the Himalayas of Bhutan, the BBC reports. The cub triggered a camera trap set up by a BBC Natural History film crew, walking…
Boeing announced on Wednesday that it's entering the space tourism business, the New York Times reports. The aerospace company is building a seven-person capsule that it hopes will take four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, leaving…
A team of Swedish scientists found a way to produce solar power using jellyfish goo, New Scientist reports. Green fluorescent protein produced by the jellyfish Aequorea victoria (pictured above)…
NASA launched a free iPad app on Wednesday that's full of mission information, photos, videos and factoids, CNET reports. NASA App HD, a beefed-up version of the original iPhone app, also allows users to…
Sylvia Earle on stage during Session 1 on the Mission Blue Voyage in the Galapagos. Credit: TED/James Duncan Davidson Sylvia Earle dives into all things blue. She moves equally well through conversations on ocean technology, ocean politics, ocean lifestyle, ocean science, and ocean exploration. In 1966,…
If you don't live in the Australian or Middle Eastern deserts, or spend time looking for ants in Arizona and New Mexico, chances are you haven't seen these three desert-dwelling animals, highlighted in a new slide show on Treehugger.com. …
A new study shows that physically clean people are more inclined than dirty people to judge others harshly, Wired reports. Researchers at Northwestern university invited 58 undergrads to a shiny new lab to “rate the morality of…
Listening up-tempo music during a workout will make you push harder, even if the effort hurts more, the New York Times reports. In a British study published…
UCSD graduate student Benjamin Thompson wants the process of selecting a surfboard to be a little bit more scientific. The Ph.D. candidate is researching how composite fibers in surfboards react to different users, according to wired.com. Thompson is bulding a system for measuring the flex…
Sometimes, when there's a big environmental problem that defies immediate understanding, it helps to resort to fourth grade science experiments. In June, Carl Safina pointed out during a TED talk that he believed bombarding oil with dispersants near the spill likely helped…
An Australian company has developed a new, Earth-friendly way to dispose of human corpses, New Scientist reports. Aquamation, a process where the body is placed in a steel container with potassium and water heated to about 200-degrees Fahrenheit, decomposes the body…
Courtesy of Flickr It is the mountaineering mystery: what happened to George Mallory and Andrew Irvine when they disappeared attempting to summit Mount Everest? A group of scientists from the University of Toronto claim that the pair were lost in a “perfect storm”…
(Photo courtesy stuartpilbrow on Flickr.) A Stanford University professor is working on a vaccine that would shield humans from chronic stress, Wired reports. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscience…
A giant bus that straddles two lanes of traffic, letting cars pass beneath it, will be tested in Beijing’s Mentougou District, China Hush reports. The Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co., Ltd unveiled the bus at…
Shark week is back on Discovery Channel. Last night the piscine extravaganza kicked off with a return to Seal Island in South Africa for Ultimate Air Jaws. It's the third time the Discovery Channel has returned to…
Courtesy of shaferiens on Flickr. Commercial and academic laboratories across the country are making significant investments in engineering algae to produce fuel, the New York Times reports. The goal is to develop a variety of…
He dodges sharks, fends off charging elephants, and parries David Letterman with relaxed aplomb. Meet scientist and pitchman M. Sanjayan, coming soon to a channel near you.
It's no secret NASA has giant lasers, but instead of zapping the world with them Dr. Evil style, scientists are using a few of them to map the height of the earth's forests, Mashable reports. NASA scientists used…
A unmanned solar drone, the Zephyr, stands to set records in a test flight over Arizona's Yuma Proving Ground, the New York Times reports. A representative from QinetiQ, the British company that developed the drone, says that the plan is to land the aircraft…
What does a double rainbow mean? Watch this nature video, and you won't find out. You'll just hear the question asked with a sense of awe—accompanied by healthy scoops of exclamation and crying. It's worth watching anyway. Special thanks to The…
Courtesy of NOAA. Two new species of pancake batfishes have been discovered by researchers in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Reuters. The population of one of…
The Solar Impulse completed its first night flight at 7:00 A.M. GMT, Reuters reports. Andre Borschberg, the pilot, kept the solar-powered aircraft aloft for just over 26 hours before landing at an air base in Vaud, Switzerland.
A Solar Impulse model HB-SIA airplane took off from Switzerland Wednesday morning in an attempt to be the first solar-powered plane to fly for 24 hours, according to CNET news. The plane is designed to fly at night with solar power stored…
tedxoilspill on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free TEDx dedicated a special conference to the oil spill. They sent videographers, photographers, and specialists to the Gulf of Mexico for a week to document the disaster, so they…
Courtesy of NOAA. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will coordinate the collection of 70,000 turtle eggs from 800 nests on Alabama and Florida beaches within the next two weeks, according to the Associated Press. If left in place, hatchlings from the eggs…
New research suggests that the flight pattern of a starling flock reaches beyond the usual rules of biology, Wired News reports. Mathematical analysis of starling flocks show that it does not matter how far away one…
Photo Courtesy of Flickr Humpback whales are the first baleen whales found to form lasting friendships, Treehugger reports. Using photographic identification techniques, scientists have discovered that females reunite each summer to swim and feed alongside one another in the…
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is on the move, the Environmental News Network reports. Currently caught in the Loopt, a clockwise current that originates in the Caribbean and travels along the Yucatan, the oil spill will likely travel up to the tip of Florida…
Twenty-one years ago Bernd Heinrich, a cold-hardened University of Vermont biology professor, burst upon the literary scene with Ravens in Winter, which did for corvids what Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf did…
MountainFilm in Telluride, a 32-year-old festival, is a little meeting of big minds in a beautiful place. Granted, I'm not being particularly objective. Outside sponsors the festival and a group of editors from the magazine and producers from our new television channel spoke on a panel Sunday.
A gray whale has been spotted in the Atlantic ocean–a location where gray whales have been extinct for over 200 years, according to discoverynews.com. The whale, who drifted through the atlantic and was spotted off the coast of Israel, has generated quite the buzz, leaving scientists and…
Outside has a history of covering big environmental disasters. To understand the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it helps to have an understanding of where it stands in the history of oil spills. That's not to say…
The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20 has ballooned into an environmental and economic issue of extreme importance. What was at first reported as one of the worst oil drilling accidents of the last 50 years has evolved into an economic…
An agricultural revolution is in the works in Cuba, aided in part by the scientist and biodiversity researcher Humberto Ríos Labrada. The standard sugarcane monoculture has proven unsustainable, and Labrada saw an alternative: local farms thriving via pre-industrial farming techniques, such as crop…
There are lots of good news podcasts, but we're ranking something different here. Great podcasts should be entertaining and teach you something. Podcasts that do both are few and far between, but they are out there. The ones below are culled from the masses, and range from travel advice, to…
Over at The Cleanest Line, Patagonia's do-good blog, you can track the progress of team Rios Libres, a pack of writers (including Greg Childs), photographers, guides and general adventure types who are have traveled to South America in an effort…
Shrimp have been discovered under a sheet of glacial ice, according to enn.com. The crustacean (technically a distant relative of the shrimp) and a piece of jellyfish were found 600 feet below the ice by probe and camera. This not only raises questions about…
The Australian town of Lajamanu reported two days worth of live fish falling from the sky (really). Backcountry.com reports that the remote desert town experienced two separate showers of hundreds of healthy, if not stunned, spangled perch. Theories range from tornadoes (though none were…
The Epicocity Project crew is in Laos researching how the proposed Don Sahong Dam may effect the Mekong river for a documentary to air on the National Geographic Channel this fall, according to Epicocity.Wordpress.com. The crew has…
Gene manipulation to enhance athletic performance is now scientifically possible, and it may become the next doping trend, CNN reports. Researchers point to “Marathon Mouse,” who gained the ability to run twice as far as normal mice with a modified protein gene. While gene…
The case for barefoot running seems to have gone mainstream in the past week. Last Thursday, Daniel E. Lieberman, a prominent biological anthropologist at Harvard (he researches how humans, and especially athletes, have evolved), published a study in Nature showing that runners with heavily padded shoes tend…
The videos and pictures showed everything. Search and rescue teams digging through rubble. Haitians praying, then hushing, in hopes of the sound…
Courtesy of Wikimedia E. coli's been the culprit for many a food poisoning, but it turns out the microbe's got some good uses, too. The company LS9, which bills itself as a “renewable petroleum company,” has just made a major breakthrough…
Courtesy of Flickr The West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core drilling project, whose goal is to improve scientists understanding of climate change, has just finished pulling up about 75 percent…
As we mentioned in our November issue, Yosemite National Park is a great place to play in winter. But not this weekend: Thanks to El Nino's weeklong onslaught, all roads leading into the park are temporarily closed. Check the park's homepage…
Mountaintop removal mining is bad, right? Stephen Colbert doesn't think so. Listen to him argue with Dr. Margaret Palmer, the leading author of an article on the harmful effects of mountaintop removal that appeared in the latest issue of Science.
You don't normally think of ice as something that increases safety, but SKI magazine explains how it does just that for alpine racers. The ruts caused by snowcats clearing the course can be dangerous for skiers, launching them off-course, so water is actually injected into the…
Bad news for us office bums who spend most of the day in a chair: Some new research from the Journal of Sports Medicine suggests that prolonged periods of sitting are detrimental to your health, regardless of whether or not…
A good piece of gear for off-piste skiers is an avalanche airbag system (ABS), but it seems that a lot of skiers who carry one aren't deploying them in the case of an actual avalanche. New Scientist writes about a new…