Currents
lborkowski | June 4, 2010As a group, scientists generally grasp the importance of good data collection systems - but federal-agency budgets rarely let scientists collect as much data as they'd like. Trimming funds for monitoring or surveillance programs may seem like the least painful budget choice when money's tight, but then sometimes it turns out that relatively small savings from such cuts have huge costs further down the line. That seems to be the case when it comes to data on currents in the Gulf of Mexico, as Paul Voosen reports for Greenwire:
For more than a decade, scientists have called for federal funding…
laelaps | January 20, 2010A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
Who doesn't love lemurs? The strepsirrhine primates, or wet-nosed cousins of ours, are favorite documentary subjects and extremely popular zoo attractions. And, in one of those bits of zoological trivia that everyone knows, lemurs only live on the island of Madagascar off Africa's southeastern coast. The question is how they got there.
Documenting the paths of animals during geological history is not an easy task. In the days before scientists understood plate tectonics, land bridges, now sunk beneath the ocean, were often used…