Hello lovely people!I’m sipping tea, looking out the window at the snow covering the world in white and putting on my third pullover. The snow makes it beautiful but winter still gives me the blues. I blame the few hours of daylight and most of all, the lack of colour in the food. I miss…
Image source: envirobuild.com There is an endless number of species on this planet and we are nowhere close to having discovered them all. But scientists and “amateur” specialists are working hard every day to discover more. There is major motivation to do this often difficult work: Besides the fact that you will be the first…
Many things that are wrong with the world right now can be traced back to our consumerism-single-use-throw-away culture. Cheap overproduction drains our resources, destroys forests and other habitats, exploits people, poisons our waters and the ground and covers us in items that are shitty quality, thus immediately broken and dumped. We got air pollution and…
Back in the 1700’s there lived a man called Carl von Linné, aka Carl Linnaeus. He was a biologist among other things and he is the one who standardized binominal nomenclature: Every known species has a name that is international. The science that sorts species into groups by how they are related, is called taxonomy….
Sexual selection is the term that defines the fact that in nature, often fit and sexy men are more likely to become fathers. This is shown in many different ways. The most well known example would be how two males fight, and the winner, being stronger or faster, or simply fitter, gets to mate with…
We see them more and more, those pie charts that display the different ways we are causing climate change or otherwise messing with the planet, and by how much percent we do this in each category. Turns out, what we eat makes out a big slice of that pie: Agricultural production makes up 19 to…
Birds don’t have hair, they have feathers. Mostly. Usually. (Recent studies show it is probable that many dinosaurs were feathered too!) Like us, in their skin they have follicles from which the feather grows. The main hard bit, the “spine” of the feather is called the shaft or rachis. The part of the shaft that…
As a German, I have always taken good, tasty, wholesome, filling bread for granted. In the last few years, I’ve lived in quite a few different places. One stereotype about Germans that is definitely true, is that they come home from vacation and tell you “it was AMAZING! …but the bread was shit”. Here I…
A few months ago, I was staggering through a leftover fragment of Amazon rainforest, with a backpack full of camera traps, when out of the corner of my eye I saw a magnificent bird. As I turned my head to look at it, it disappeared and all I had to go on as I leafed…
Hi guys, what’s plotting? I’m super excited, because I saw a pair of black woodpeckers today! In my rather outdoorsy life, this is only the second time ever that I’ve seen them in the flesh. These birds are beautiful! All black, with cream coloured beak and eyes and a striking red mark on the top…