A new report has revealed that a record number of Americans are now alarmed about the climate crisis.
Thestudy, published by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, found that Americans overall are becoming increasingly worried about global heating, more engaged with the issue and more supportive of finding solutions to the issue.
The study categorized Americans into six distinct groups based on their beliefs, attitudes, policy support and behavior about climate change.
The six distinct groups are: the Alarmed, who are the most engaged and very worried about global warming; the Concerned, who think global warming is a significant threat but prioritize…
Taking a page straight out of the Trump administration’s anti-conservation playbook, late last year the Biden administration quietly pushed forward a plan that would put two of Florida’s most beloved and endangered animals on the fast-track to extinction.
Despite President Biden’s directive that all federal agencies follow the best available science, buried in the administration workplan that sets the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s priorities is a proposal to strip protections for theKey deerand theFlorida panther.
This proposal flouts the undeniable reality that these animals face an escalating loss of habitat that threatens their existence.The best-available scientific information makes clear bothspecies need more protection, not less.
With only an estimated 200 individuals left, Florida panthers are considered among the most endangered big cats on Earth. Their limited habitat in southwest Florida…
Laughter is one of the most natural impulses in humans. Most babies start to laugh out loud at around 3 to 4 months, far earlier than they are able to speak or walk. Expressing enjoyment or delight comes naturally to us, but we’re not the only creatures who communicate with giggles.
Researchers at UCLA have identified 65 species of animals who make “play vocalizations,” or what we would consider laughter. Some of those vocalizations were already well documented—we’ve known for a while that apes and rats laugh—but others may come as a surprise. Along with a long list of primate species, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, mongooses and three bird species are prone to laughter as well. (Many bird species can mimic human laughter, but that’s not the same as making their own play vocalizations.)
Primatologist and UCLA anthropology graduate student Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant shared their findings in an article in the journal Bioacoustics.
The authors explored various play vocalization sounds, recording them as noisy or tonal, loud or quiet, high- or low-pitched, short or long, a single call or rhythmic pattern.
But really, what we want to see is what animal laughter sounds like from various species, right? While the researchers said that it can be hard to document laughter in the wild, especially among animals with quieter vocalizations, we do have some examples captured on video.
Check out these foxes laughing like little kids:
Or maybe little kids on helium. How fun is that?
Ever seen a bonobo chimp laugh? Just as cute.
I’m not sure if tickling a baby bonobo is sweet or torturous, though these researchers surely know what they’re doing. It’s always delightful to see the instinctual playfulness of primates.
Laughter in some animals isn’t as audibly apparent as it is in these foxes and chimps, though. Researchers from Humboldt University of Berlin found that rats laugh when they are tickled—and appear to enjoy tickling, as they seek it out—but their vocalizations are ultrasonic, so it’s hard to hear them without special instruments.
The UCLA researchers shared that the study of laughter in animals can help us better understand our own evolutionary behavior.
“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” Bryant said, according to UCLA.
“When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join,” Winkler said. “Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.”
Raise your hand if you just want to see a cow laughing for real now.
A North Carolina man is charged with multiple hunting offenses after an accident last week in which a woman was shot in the chest with an arrow as he was handing her a bow, authorities said.
Protesters, with one wielding a Confederate battle flag that reads ‘Come and Take It,’ clash with police at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
With the country polarised and Republicans embracing authoritarianism, some experts fear a Northern Ireland-style insurgency but others say armed conflict remains improbable
Joe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finallyrecognised the full scaleof the current threat to American democracy.
“At this moment, we must decide,”Biden saidin Statuary Hall, where rioters had swarmed a year earlier. “What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?”
Mount Rainier National Park in fall, Washington state, USA
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — A Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife employee has been accused of poaching.
The Spokesman-Review reports the Ferry County prosecutor last month charged Fish and Wildlife north-central region director Brock Hoenes with unlawful hunting of big game in the second degree. If convicted, there is a maximum penalty of one year in jail, a $5,000 fine or both.
Court documents say Hoenes “on or about” Nov. 13 illegally killed an animal in Ferry County.
No further details were included in the document.
Hoenes told the newspaper this week that he reported the incident immediately after realizing he made “the mistake” and said he couldn’t comment further because of the court case.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Wyoming has asked the federal government to remove grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park from protection under the Endangered Species Act, a request which if approved could allow the animals to be hunted.
The bears’ recovery from as few as 136 animals when they were first protected as a threatened species in 1975 to more than 1,000 today is a success story, the state argued in its petition Monday.
The Yellowstone region spans Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Wyoming filed the petition with the formal support of Idaho and Montana officials.
Grizzlies in the area are “ready to join the ranks of the bald eagle, American alligator, peregrine falcon and brown pelican as receiving proper recognition as a thriving, recovered and stable species,” Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, said in a statement…
Attempts to establish breeding populations of saiga in zoos have been largely unsuccessful. However, Ukraine’s Askania-Nova Biosphere Reserve, where animals from around the world are kept in semi-wild conditions on the virgin steppe, has managed to breed a small population of saiga that now numbers around 700 animals. The saiga breeding program in Askania-Nova started in the 1970s when 70 wild animals were brought to the reserve.
In 2018, reports appeared in Ukrainian press that a Chinese company, quoted as Shizhen Tan Pharmaceutical Company (in the original Russian – Шичжень тан фармасьютикал компани) launched a venture with Askania-Nova to breed saiga commercially for their horn.
Reports claimed that the Chinese side leased almost 100 hectares of land in Kherson Region near the village of Kamysh. The lease was for 7 years and the Chinese invested over 40,000 US dollars in the infrastructure. The saiga stock for…
Ocean heating driven by human-caused climate crisis, scientists say, in sixth consecutive year record has been broken
An oil platform stands offshore as cargo shipping container ships wait in the Pacific Ocean to enter the port of Los Angeles.Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
The world’s oceans have been set to simmer, and the heat is being cranked up. Last year saw the hottest ocean temperatures in recorded history, the sixth consecutive year that this record has been broken, according to new research.
The heating up of our oceans is being primarily driven by the human-caused climate crisis, scientists say, and represents a starkly simple indicator of global heating. While the atmosphere’s temperature is also trending sharply upwards, individual years are less likely to be record-breakers compared with the warming of the oceans.
