Month: April 2017

garajonay-national-park

Canary Islands Cloudforest – Garajonay National Park

The Canary Islands’ sunny skies, lunar landscape and black and white sands make it the perfect place for the family to catch some affordable winter sun, but it’s also home to Garajonay National Park, where the ancient laurel rainforests are so dense, subtropical and mist-soaked, you expect dinosaurs to appear. If you’re holidaying on the …

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turtles-cape-verde-1

Turtles on Cape Verde

This archipelago off the coast of Senegal is a fast-growing African package destination that has plentiful winter sun and unspoilt beaches, several of which are used as nesting sites by sea turtles between June and October. Thanks to the crystal-clear waters and wonderful coral, it also offers pristine snorkelling and diving, and the chance to …

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vibrisee

Safety First!

As any cyclist will know, riding the roads can leave you very twitchy. Helmets are essential, of course, but students at California State University have looked at the issue of safety from a very different angle. Noticing that rodents use their whiskers to determine if they can pass through a gap, they reversed the idea and …

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city-birds

City Birds Have Upped the Volume of Their Songs to Compete With Noise Pollution

Human music has borrowed liberally from the animal kingdom over the years, consciously and otherwise: from cuckoo-impersonating classical composers such as Beethoven; to the rainforest-sampling jungle music producers of the ’90s; to today’s dance music programmers, who use electronic instruments to replicate organically occurring sounds. Our canon is rich with nature-inspired devices, yet there’s still …

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crater-mexico

Did the Asteroid that Caused the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico Also Have a Positive Impact?

Scientists studying the Chicxulub crater in Mexico believe that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may also have created habitats for new forms of early life. The impact made rocks more porous, which provided niches in which organisms could thrive. These rocks also contained nutrients from water that had been …

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