In 1922, the U.S. Navy identified the naturally occurring asbestos mineral as the most efficient and cost-effective insulation, gaskets, and shipbuilding material. During World War II, asbestos was critical to the U.S. military, especially the Navy and the Air Force. Shipping and shipbuilding...

One halcyon spring day in 1903, the 69-year-old anatomist and naturalist Dr. James Bell Pettigrew sat at the top of a sloping street on the outskirts of St. Andrews, Scotland, perched inside a petrol-powered airplane of his own design. Over the course of 40 years,...

The Serengeti ecosystem is regarded as one of our planet’s greatest natural treasures, where one can witness“the largest remaining unaltered animal migration in the world,” according to UNESCO. ...

Editor’s note: This article was originally published as “Gottfried Mind, The Raphael of Cats,” on The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it, please see https://publicdomainreview.org/reusing-material/. ...

I saw macaques for the first time along the river’s edge on the island of Borneo in 1983. I was in a boat with scientist and conservationist Dr. Biruté Galdikas on our way to the orangutan rehabilitation and research site she established on the island....

The sight and sound of a bumblebee or a honey bee buzzing from flower to flower in an alpine meadow or a roadside planting is calming to many, yet it invokes outright panic in others. This happens frequently in Western cultures, where we usually reach...

Camp Lejeune, a military base in Jacksonville, North Carolina, was established in 1942 to train future marines for World War II. While it is known as the home of the “Expeditionary Forces in Readiness,” the facility also has a long history of contamination...

While in Delhi late one evening, on the drive back to the hotel after a terrific meal in a Kashmiri restaurant, our taxi stopped at a traffic light in the middle of a congested and major intersection. The air is less than salubrious, thick with...

All organisms in an ecosystem are interconnected, and any imbalance in this complex relationship can have irreversible consequences for both humans and nonhumans. Numerous examples illustrate how the destruction of one species can lead to unforeseen and devastating impacts on others. ...

Birdsongs have inspired poets and lovers, becoming one of the philosophical focal points in ancient Greece and Rome. They have also led to several long-ago debates about the relationship between birdsong and human language. ...