“Research on chimpanzees is contentious, expensive, and of increasingly limited necessity,” wrote medical researchers in a piece titled “Guiding limited use of chimpanzees in research” published last week in the journal Science. This same sentence could have introduced an article published in this week’s Nature – with the word ‘Whaling’ replacing the...

It’s not true that aesthetics must be be compromised for meaning. I visited the excellent Infinite Balance: Artists and the Environment show at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts earlier this week, which features the shortlist for the Prix Pictet contest, the world’s top (and only? I ask myself) prize for photography and sustainability. The show...

One in every six species related to characters in the movie Finding Nemo is threatened by extinction, according to a new study out today. The authors examined the extinction risk of 1,568 species within 16 families of well-known marine animals represented in the 2003 Academy Award-winning animated film. All species of marine turtles (“Squirt” and “Crush”)...

We cannot ignore the past, and to remind us of this, the present has yielded a refreshing and essential perspective on marine science in the new book Shifting Baselines: The Past and Future of Ocean Fisheries. Looking at today’s data is simply not good enough, especially when the abundance of reef fish has declined 90-95% in the last 50 years, and...

Today the New York Times put out their list of the top ten books of 2011. Among them, Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, which is a remarkable read about how the human mind works and necessary material for anyone, anywhere, period. To go with the piece, the Times constructed a blazer out of book covers. Someone...