Fading Firecrown Saving endangered species is a big job shadowed by big questions. Can we preserve them all? Should we even try? Researcher Erin Hagen doesn’t have the answers. For now, she’s doing what she can to help just one: the Juan Fernandez firecrown, a showy, highly curious hummingbird that hovers on the edge of […] Read more

The Falcon Heavy consists of 27 engines with 5 million pounds of thrust – that’s as much as 18 Boeing 747s. In fact, it’s so much thrust that there’s no need to run the engines at max capacity during the launch. Instead the thrust is throttled and optimized throughout the flight. So here’s the plan […] Read more

Roundup’s active ingredient, Glyphosate, is the most popular pesticide in the United States, partially because of the persistent rumor that it is benign. Roundup is relatively safe – it’s not as bad as, say, depleted uranium – but that doesn’t mean you want to go pouring it on your pancakes. Roundup was found on lettuce […] Read more

Travelers are again coming to Fiji after the instability of the late 1980s, and for good reason. Fiji is beautiful, it has a pleasant tropical climate, the diving and snorkeling are superb and it has excellent facilities for tourists, whether they are on a tight budget or indulging in the luxuries of a plush resort […] Read more

As she lifted her lamp beside the golden door to this new world, another lamp was about to light — a new invention called a movie projector. It would illuminate a world of dreams. Dreams shared by Liberty’s anonymous millions, a few of whom would become the rulers of Hollywood’s fantasy world. In the picture […] Read more

“The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream,” Orson Welles said. It is a dream that knows no earthly border. The whole world has treasured it, storing away the image of Fred Astaire gliding across a ballroom floor … Clark Gable sweeping Vivien Leigh up in his arms on a stairway to […] Read more

In the past 150 years the tall grass prairie- the easternmost portion of the Great Plains – has been all but erased. Now, in the Flint Hills of Oklahoma, on land too rocky to plow, the nonprofit Nature Conservancy is transforming 37,000 acres of ranchland into the largest expanse of tall grass prairie yet set […] Read more

The interior attack is one of the most effective fireground tactics. But to succeed, it means getting inside the building fast. This frequently means forcing entry. In our first program, we discussed conventional forcible entry — that is, forcing entry by using a flathead axe — into a structure where access is locked, blocked, or […] Read more

The Cerro Grande fire began as a “controlled burn”… Designed to limit the power of future wildfires by burning away brush from uninhabited rocky areas. But low humidity and sustained high winds of up 60 miles per hour — fed the flames and spread the fire over more than 47,000 acres. Today, about 60 percent […] Read more