Richard Schiffman

Rebecca Giggs’s lyrical new book, “Fathoms,” begins and ends with dead whales. The first, a beached humpback juvenile, was pushed back to the sea by concerned onlookers, only to swim again to shore, where it died, Giggs writes, crushed on land by the weight of its own bones. The second, a humpback already days dead, was washed into a tidal pool outside Sydney, where it was, by turns, gawked at and grieved by a crowd of the curious.
Whales — whether dead or alive — are a spectacle. We are draw...

Richard Schiffman for The New York Times
Deciding whether to head outdoors or to stay at home has never before felt so fraught, as many of us continue the weigh the benefits of getting some fresh air versus the risks of getting sick. For many, however, the enticements of a spring day are too powerful to resist.
“Yesterday it was raining and we felt kind of sorry for ourselves, but it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself on a sunny day like today,” said Nancy Penman, a resident of Manhattan’s Upper ...

Adrienne Grunwald for The New York Times
Nestled in the forest behind a guard house just north of the border between New York and New Jersey off Route 9W is one of the world’s greatest meccas for climate change research.
Here, perched on the lip of the Palisades, a half-hour north of Manhattan, is a sylvan 180-acre campus where researchers have helped to untangle mystery after mystery about how our planet actually works. No other geoscience lab was as influential during the second half of the...

Mary Inhea Kang for The New York Times
Set incongruously in the middle of Rikers Island’s post-apocalyptic landscape of low-slung jail blocks and razor wire is a lush garden, teeming with birds and butterflies, that seems to have been teleported down from some happier planet.
“That’s my baby,” said Mike Cruz, a stocky young man who is serving time at Rikers. He was gesturing toward a patch of flowers whose flamboyant shade of orange matched the stripes on his prison jumpsuit.
“It’s a Mexican ...

Is the vaquita’s plight linked to the US government’s failure to take advantage of one of its most powerful wildlife crime-fighting tools?

Green Chimneys, a school on a farm outside of New York City, is in the vanguard of using animals to help special-needs children learn.

Valentine’s Day is known for two things: romantic love and chocolate. Romance is famously fickle—it comes and goes. But our love affair with chocolate never seems to wane.
Americans spend more today on chocolate products than the gross national product of some of the countries where cacao is grown. The research group Euromonitor International reports that U.S. sales of chocolate went from $14.2 billion in 2007 to $18.9 billion in 2017, a period during which overall sales for candy declined, l...

Fantastic Voyage: Polynesian Seafaring Canoe Comple...

Are Pets the New Probiotic? - The New York Times

Professor Caveman - The Atlantic

Scientifically Engineered Coral Could Survive Clima...

Not Just Another Stinky Fish - The New York Times

Botanicas sell herbs and oils to customers wary of mainstream medicine

Arctic sea ice on September 13, 2013, as measured b...

Plankton can save the ocean. But who will save the ...