In 1945, there were 4.5 million hives of bees in the United States. Today, there are just about 2 million. It’s been a subtle decline over time, but one that has dramatically accelerated over the past seven years. And this should be extremely alarming, given that bees pollinate one-third of the world’s crops. In today’s […]
Our supermarket produce aisles would look very, very bare without bees. As MacArthur Fellow Marla Spivak explains on the TEDGlobal stage, this is something we should all be extremely concerned about: the dramatic drop in bee populations that’s been taking place over the past seven years. (Read The New York Times’ take on the especially scary drop in […]
Some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week: First: Dragonflies are beautiful, deadly and have weird sex. [NY Times] While you’re at it, check out our playlist Insects are awesome!, above. The clap-o-meter was yesterday’s Big Data. [The Atlantic] Scientists now estimate the number of Earth-like, habitable planets in […]
[ted id=1641 width=560 height=315]The world’s most dangerous animal isn’t the lion, tiger or bear. It’s actually the mosquito. “Mosquitos have killed more humans than any other creature in human history,” says Haydn Parry in today’s talk. “The mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague.” Every year, about a million and a half people […]
Marcus Byrne begins today’s talk with the words: “What I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you.” But before you delve into a Freudian analysis, you should probably know that Byrne is an entomologist who studies dung beetles, of which there are about 6,000 species across the planet. As Byrne […]