Learn how to cultivate a garden not just for plants and flowers, but for bugs and animals. Your garden can play a larger role in the scheme of preserving biodiversity.

From New York’s crown jewel, Central Park, to the nation’s first county park, take a tour of New York and the surrounding area’s noteworthy parks.

During the past century, the rhinos of Africa and Asia have been pushed out of their habitats and hunted nearly to extinction for their horns, which are believed — erroneously — to possess healing properties.

No flowering plant has captured the attention of humans, or stirred their passions, in quite the way that orchids have. In past ages, orchids — in all their 20,000 or so wild varieties — have been hunted and collected in almost every part of the world. Today, millions of people remain devoted to the plant [...]

Add another risk factor to the litany of health problems associated with fossil fuel emissions: blood clots.

For the fourth straight year, Pale Male — the renowned red-tailed hawk of Central Park — and his mate, Lola, have failed to hatch their eggs. The pair devoted the last month and a half to tending the eggs, but now it appears the incubation period has passed without success.

After a year of research and months of delays, the Interior Department finally declared the polar bear a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

In Zimbabwe, the number of endangered rhinos killed by poachers has increased dramatically over the last few years. Since 2000, an estimated 72 black rhinos have been shot in the southeastern part of the country. Compare that figure to the years between 1993 and 2000, when not one black rhino was poached in the area. [...]

In a new study released in a Royal Society journal, and reported by the BBC, researchers used a small device that monitors activity patterns in the brain that are associated with sleep. They found that wild sloths don’t quite live up to their lazy reputation.
While sloths in captivity have been known to sleep 16 hours [...]

Can earthquakes be predicted? Many seismologists would probably answer, “Not yet, but eventually.” But to date, nobody has been able to predict earthquakes reliably enough and over short enough time scales to allow the evacuation of threatened cities. Some scientists have entirely lost faith in earthquake prediction.