Tag: natural habitats
The Quest to Build a Better Birdhouse
This article originally appeared in Undark Magazine.
In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely
Don’t Pin the Patriarchy on the Apes
One morning in January 1961, following a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, and half an egg, a male chimpanzee from Cameroon known to his handlers as Ham was strapped into a pressure-controlled capsule, loaded aboard a NASA rocket, and shot into space. No human had yet been where he was headed. At the time of Ham’s foray to the stars, physicians still feared that crucial bodily functions (including swallowing and cardiac activity) might not weather the weightlessness of