November
3
2016
The attack came yesterday at dusk. With both Osprey parents away from their nest of three chicks, the Bald Eagle sweeps in from over the water. One of the Osprey parents suddenly enters the frame in tow and ready to defend the nest, but it can’t match the speed and power of the eagle, which manages to snag one of the chicks with its huge talons before taking off.
November
1
2016
The sight of a monogamous nesting pair of Northern Spotted Owls is a sign of a healthy forest. The highly territorial birds rarely leave the protective cover of dense northwestern forests and their nests in dead standing trees.
Today, however, many are vagabonds, soaring aimlessly without nests or homes.
October
28
2016
In life, sometimes you’re the grille, and sometimes you’re the Bald Eagle. Alright, so that’s not exactly how the saying goes, but it turned out to be true for an unlucky Bald Eagle in Florida this past weekend.
According to a Facebook post by Florida’s Clay County Sheriff’s Office on Saturday, a Bald Eagle had to be rescued from the grille of a Saturn after the bird collided with the car and got stuck in the vehicle’s lower air intake.
Were they able to save the bird? Find out here…
Birds, Captain Eagle, Eagles, Florida, News | 
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26
2016
Adélie Penguins are at home on frigid Antarctica, so it’s logical to assess their noisy breeding colonies as the loss of the continent’s massive ice shelves accelerates.
For now, the scientific poop on the krill- and fish-eating bird is good, even if a few local colonies have died out where the most sea ice has disappeared.
October
24
2016
A major taxonomic review of non-passerine birds (non-perching or non-songbirds) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recognizes 13 new extinct birds due to fossil finds or splitting species.
In total, the new list now recognizes that 140 birds have gone extinct since the year 1500 AD. This means that in the last five centuries, the world has lost more than 1 percent of its bird species, according to a Mongabay report.
October
19
2016
Bird lovers from Beethoven to ornithology legend Luis Baptista thrilled to the vocalizations of rainforest birds.
Now, scientists with high-tech listening technology are gaining a far deeper understanding of bird behavior from their songs.
September
30
2016
China has an opportunity to massively increase its use of wind power — if it properly integrates wind into its existing power system, according to a newly published MIT study.
The study forecasts that wind power could provide 26 percent of China’s projected electricity demand by 2030, up from 3 percent in 2015. Such a change would be a substantial gain in the global transition to renewable energy, since China produces the most total greenhouse gas emissions of any country in the world.
But the projection comes with a catch. China should not necessarily build more wind power in its windiest areas, the study finds. Instead, it should build more wind turbines in areas where they can be more easily integrated into the operations of its existing electricity grid.
“Wind that is built in distant, resource-rich areas benefits from more favorable physical properties but suffers from existing constraints on the operation of the power system,” states Valerie Karplus, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project, and a member of the MIT Energy Initiative. Those constraints include greater transmission costs and the cost of “curtailment,” when available wind power is not used.
September
28
2016
As scientists and policymakers around the world try to combat the increasing rate of climate change, they have focused on the chief culprit: carbon dioxide.
Produced by the burning of fossil fuels in power plants and car engines, carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, warming the planet. But trees and other plants do slowly capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, converting it to sugars that store energy.
In a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Chicago, researchers have found a similar way to convert carbon dioxide into a usable energy source using sunlight.
One of the chief challenges of sequestering carbon dioxide is that it is relatively chemically unreactive. “On its own, it is quite difficult to convert carbon dioxide into something else,” said Argonne chemist Larry Curtiss, an author of the study.
