Mozambique
lborkowski | June 30, 2011NPR's Melissa Block traveled to Mozambique, where poverty and a shortage of both healthcare providers and facilities contribute to a high maternal mortality rate, for the first segment of the "Beginnings" series that will air throughout the summer on All Things Considered. She starts off with some grim statistics:
In Mozambique in southeastern Africa, the rates of maternal and infant mortality are among the highest in the world.
In her lifetime, a Mozambican woman has a 1 in 37 chance of dying during pregnancy or within a short time after a pregnancy has ended. One in 10 children won't live…
laelaps | May 21, 2010
A Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer), photographed at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Outside of the trash-grubbing black bears I occasionally come across when driving to hikes in northern New Jersey, I never encounter large predators near my home. The imposing carnivores which once roamed the "garden state" were extirpated long ago. This is a very unusual thing. For the majority of the past six million years or so hominins have lived alongside, and have regularly been hunted by, an array of large carnivorous animals, but humans have not been entirely helpless. Rather than a one-…