“Wait, what?” people would say when I told them I worked for the Global Tiger Initiative at the World Bank. “The Bank is saving tigers?” For a financial institution that strives to end world poverty, maybe it’s difficult to connect the dots to tiger conservation. The idea is that poverty cannot be eradicated without a sustainable...
“Wait, what?” people would say when I told them I worked for the Global Tiger Initiative at the World Bank. “The Bank is saving tigers?” For a financial institution that strives to end world poverty, maybe it’s difficult to connect the dots to tiger conservation. The idea is that poverty cannot be eradicated without a sustainable...
“Wait, what?” people would say when I told them I worked for the Global Tiger Initiative at the World Bank. “The Bank is saving tigers?” For a financial institution that strives to end world poverty, maybe it’s difficult to connect the dots to tiger conservation. The idea is that poverty cannot be eradicated without a sustainable...
Look what the cat dragged in. Few people knew about a British university’s cat DNA database until it helped convict a man of manslaughter. Last July, cat hairs were found on a curtain wrapped around a dismembered torso that washed up in Portsmouth, England. The Hampshire police sent the hairs to The Veterinary Genetics Laboratory...
More than half of Thailand’s elephants are in captivity. Once used for transportation, religious festivals, and war stemming back to 2000 BCE, adult elephants today work in illegal logging and tourism camps, while calves simply wander the city streets. Most of Thailand’s working elephants are considered private property. As the only source of revenue for their owners,...
In a twist on the Lion King’s “Circle of Life,” a group of researchers identified a population of genetically distinct lions—in a zoo. The finding came after an Addis Ababa zoo asked researchers in its sister city of Leipzig to help prove that their lions not only looked unusual, but were genetically unique. The finding...
By Sasha Ingber The insurance industry will be dealing with fallout from Sandy for months to come. To learn more about the storm’s impact, we spoke to Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. How much will Hurricane Sandy cost? The estimates that have been released by a disaster-modeling firm [AIR Worldwide] for...
By Sasha Ingber We’ll be interviewing various experts about the impact of Hurricane Sandy and what lies ahead. For the big picture about hurricanes, we spoke to Jim Kossin, atmospheric research scientist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. Could Hurricane Sandy be the result of climate change? It’s not fair...
By Sasha Ingber It is now official: Gangnam Style has penetrated every nook and cranny of the Planet Earth and is probably rocketing out to Neptune and beyond. “Gangnam Style” is the name of a pop song by the South Korean singer Psy. He sings about “a guy whose heart bursts when the night comes.”...